Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 October 25

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October 25

MediaWiki admin.

I have a MediaWiki on my system at home for passing documents and photos around the family and such - but I'm suffering vandalism and (unlike Wikipedia) the number of vandals (hundreds) vastly exceeds the number of editors (four) - which means that the usual 'revert within short time' mechanism isn't working.

• Step one is to lock out all edits from not-logged in users,
• Step two is to control who gets user-id's.

Can anyone give me a 30 second HowTo on setting those two things? Thanks! SteveBaker 00:03, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

You can change the privileges of the anonymous user group to not be able to edit.. never done this myself but it should be straightforward? I don't know about controlling ids.. maybe just disable registration and register user names for people from the admin interface, and email them their passwords --ffroth 00:07, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

It is in the LocalSettings.php file. Just read the comments. You'll see one that says "This snippet prevents new registration from anonymous users" and another that says "This snippet prevents editing from anonymous users". Uncomment the snippet the comments are referring to. I'd also suggest turning off anonymous read ability so only registered users can read the site. -- kainaw™ 01:28, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Nope - it's not there. Perhaps I have a different version of MediaWiki - but there is no sign of anything like that in any of the .php files. I've read every line of the LocalSettings.php - for sure there is nothing like that in there. The versions I have are:

• MediaWiki: 1.11.0
• PHP: 5.2.3 (cgi-fcgi)
• MySQL: 5.0.24a-standard-log

Sadly, these are the versions provided by my hosting service - I can't easily upgrade.

FWIW, I can't find anything like that in the system we have at work either:

• MediaWiki: 1.6.7
• PHP: 4.3.10 (apache2handler)
• MySQL: 4.1.10a

SteveBaker 02:05, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

OK - nevermind! I found the settings for '$wgGroupPermissions' in 'wiki/include/DefaultSettings.php' - I think I have things nailed down the way I want! Thanks guys! SteveBaker 02:25, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Moving two IDE hdds in RAID 0 to external enclosures.

Alright, the long story is that I have two IDE drives in RAID 0 in a computer that now refuses to boot, I have replaced the PSU 2 times and...to be honest, I am not sure what is wrong and not keen on spending too much time figuring out how to get the machine running again. It is rather old now and I was going to scrap it in 2 months anyhow. But, I have a bunch of data on the RAID drives that I didn`t get to backup before it died.

Short: Is there any way I can get 2 USB(or whatever, really) HDD enclosures, put one disk in each, and then run them in RAID 0 like before, so I can access the data?

I know there are enclosures that allow you to do RAID, but what I am not sure of is if these allow you to continue, so to speak, a RAID set up initially as an internal one. Like, will the controller sense that "Oh, these were in a RAID before, let's continue that one"?

Alternatively, can I take the two drives out and run them in RAID on another computer without losing the data?

Thanks anyone.

123.100.136.74 00:26, 25 October 2007 (UTC) (mrkall)

Can you boot off something else like a floppy rescue disk or CD drive or USB? You will still need to load your raid controller software, then maybe you could access your disks. However if it is one of the disks that stuffed you will not be able to get much back! Graeme Bartlett 01:34, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

No, not really - my old power supply, another old one, and a brand new one died - so it seems I can`t boot up at all. I was hoping I could access the two disks from somewhere else (another computer, either by putting them in or by having them external) rather than spending time figuring out "why" the psu died (and died again)...Not that I really am lazy, just don`t have the time atm. So that isn`t possible?

Plug and play HDD safety measures!

Hi everybody,I have a doubt in plug and play features of HDD.Are all IDE\SATA HDD, plug&play devices?.I use to connect my SATA 160GB harddisk to my PC with WIN XP OS loaded onto an IDE 40GB HDD by plugging in the power card from SMPS and the SATA cable from main board,whilst the windows has loaded to desktop.Sometimes it detects itself and indicates in taskbar,or I go scanning for new devices in device manager,windows detects it and I am able to access data from my computer usually.Similarly I simply disconnect it by removing the power card when my pc is on with windows desktop loaded.My fear is,Will this approach of connecting SATA HDD device while windows has loaded,may damage my HDD physically? and\or corrupt my data?.My OS is loaded in another Master IDE HDD device.If this approach is unharmful, then can I follow the same plug&play approach for any IDE type HDDs too?.Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balan rajan (talk • contribs) 05:32, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

SATA can be hotswapped. Dunno about IDE, would assume it's a bad idea. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 07:25, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, IDE devices cannot be hot swapped.GaryReggae 07:58, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

There are special external hard drive enclosures that you can install your IDE hard drive into and and plug in the USB/Firewire cable. The small ones use power provided by the USB port while the big ones come with a separate power supply. Use a high-quality casing and cable if possible; cheap ones might have all sorts of problems like the drive clicking but won't spin up (because of insufficient power due to cable/contact resistance), to reduced hard disk life due to unstable power to outright catastrophic failure (as the external SMPS malfunctions or the power gets cut off while the drive is writing to the FAT/MFT). --Bruin_rrss23 (talk) 15:37, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

I guess that too right..I yet didn't try out for IDE, but SATA seemed to adapt well for plug and play.Anyhow while copying some data to that HDD, what happens if I remove the HDD?.Will it corrupt the data or will it restart the system? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.164.51.192 (talk) 08:37, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I can't say for sure but unplugging any storage device while it's being written to is a bad idea, this goes back to the days of floppy disks "never take the disk out when the light is on!" I've known USB sticks to become corrupted by pulling them out while writing although formatting them usually fixes this. I doubt it would cause the system to restart. GaryReggae 12:09, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

It would just cause data corruption (and an "Unsafe Removal" notification for earlier versions of Windows) at the very least, with the effects most pronounced when you're defragmenting the drive. If it does happen, you'll have to recopy over the data if you were doing that or hope that the files affected aren't corrupted. --Bruin_rrss23 (talk) 15:37, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Free Website Hosting and Building (not Subdomain)

Could you pro's tell me any website or host that can help me create a website with the subdomain. I just want a clean "this-is-me.com" website. You see Im not very gopod good with html and haven;t got the money for $1 per month hosting.

So Im asking for any websites or hosts that can help me -create a domain for me, no subdomains!!! -help me build a website using that domain

This may not be possible, so just tell me if I am wrong

Thank you to Reference Desk PPL!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pro2GHz (talk • contribs) 10:09, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

You'll still have to pay for the DNS registration of your domain, regardless of the hosting costs. -- JSBillings 10:54, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

.co.nr may be the closest to a domain you can get. See our Wikipedia page on .co.nr . Guroadrunner 11:01, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Once you purchase your TLD, you can go to a number of free hosting sites. See here for some (ex. http://freehostia.com/free_hosting.html or http://www.awardspace.com/web_hosting.html). --Justanother 19:36, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Padding files in uTorrent

Hi everyone! I've another utorrent question: in the "files" tab, where the available downloads are listed in utorrent, the are about 30 files that say "_____Padding_file_x_if you see this file, please update to BitComet 0.85 or above_____". What does this mean? Is it advertising? Will downloading this torrent be corupted? Thanks again for all you wonderful help! xxx Hyper Girl 14:30, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

What do you mean "available downloads"? Bittorrent is not like limewire or kazaa- it's not centralized --ffroth 17:13, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Hyper Girl means the files that are available to download inside the torrent. The short answer is, you don't need to download these files; you can safely deselect them, and if you do download them you can delete them because they're no use to you.

It seems to be to do with a new feature of BitComet. A quick google search turned up this little article on it: http://torrentfreak.com/bitcomet-pollutes-bittorrent-with-junk-data/

-- DatRoot 17:44, 27 October 2007 (UTC

This is an option when the torrent is authored. When you make your torrents, you can turn off the option to align file/piece boundary. However, this will make the "search for mirrors" option unable to help the downloaders of your torrent.

Software Project Ideas

Hello,

I am currently taking a university course in Software Engineering. We are asked to make a software project in the form of a web application using ASP.NET and C# and linking the thing to some database (SQL)... My only problem is that i ran out of ideas for a software project

Can you plz propose ideas of what could i do (or refer me to a link?). Please, note that the project should showcase my knowledge in web forms and user interface...

I only need an idea....

Thanks in advance 213.175.169.250 14:47, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Does it have to be an original idea? Because doing something like creating a simple Wiki would be a pretty good project for that and would be sufficiently hip. Dealing with multiple simultaneous edits, versioning, etc. would be a nice web/database programming exercise. --24.147.86.187 15:17, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

If it does have to be original, you could always do specialized wiki, like a wiki for music documents, or a wiki for images. risk 02:45, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

My web development course provided the following project options: An online calendar application, where the privileged users could add and edit events, and the general public would see the calendar (this could be used for something like an online concert agenda), a web shop (without the rather complicated payment system, just the product listing), a course management system for a university (possible features include subscription for students, adding/editing/removing courses by administrators, and a personal schedule based on the courses you're subscribed to) or a simple content management system for a website (with a host of extra features to choose from). We decided to implement our own idea of an online questionnaire system, where users could define their own questionnaire, and then people could fill it out. All projects were finished (more or less) within a month by groups of first year students with very little experience overall. I would suggest you start with a simple idea that's easy to implement, so you can spend some time adding features, making it look nice, and refining security. risk 02:45, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Help to create a table with MS Word

Hi!, I really need help to create a table with MS Word XP (2002) that is wider than 22" (or with Adobe Acrobat Professional 6.0, but it has to be wider than 22"[and not with MS Excel]). It will not be for printing. I have searched for help on the web for hours, without being able to find anything useful. I feel very frustrated and am under a lot of stress. I will greatly appreciate any good help that I can receive. Thank you very, very much. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.70.65.132 (talk) 15:46, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

If you're not using it for printing, why is it important that Word thinks the table is more than 22" wide? Can you just use the max. allowed custom paper size with tiny fonts? You can adjust the zoom level to make the small fonts comfortable to read on a computer screen. --64.236.170.228 18:48, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

If you want even bigger tables you can go for Microsoft Excel or a web page. Graeme Bartlett 00:11, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Just tried on Word 2003 and max page width is 22" so you may be out of luck? --Justanother 19:30, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Google news

When I pull up the news at Google, it gives me a bunch of recommended stories. Somehow, the saga of Ellen DeGeneres' dog got into the rotation of articles that are recommended to me. I really don't care about E.D. or her dog but these articles are recommended for some reason. Probably because I read an entertainment article or two and this is a big story in the entertainment field (for whatever silly reason). So does anyone know how to say that I'm not interested in this story in a way that Google will understand me, cause cursing at the screen doesn't help.  :-) I think I can filter out stories by keyword but I don't want to miss something that might contain the words "Ellen DeGeneres" or "dog" which I might actually be interested in. Afterall, I like dogs and there is the possibility that E.D. may appear in something that I would be interested in (however remote). Dismas|^(talk) 19:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

But what is the action you want to happen ? Guroadrunner 22:59, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I want there to be an "Ignore" link next to stories that I don't care about. Or some similar mechanism. Dismas|^(talk) 23:08, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Please consider reporting your issues to Google. I am sure the honest, hard-working people at Google will appreciate your ideas and your effort. They might even pay you for it! --Kushal^t 03:04, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

This reminds me of the King of Queens episode where TiVo decided the character Spence was gay and only recommended gay-themed shows. He watched sports to try to convince it he was straight, but then TiVo decided he was gay and butch, and started recommending movies named "Leather Boys", etc. StuRat 16:01, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Registering a domain name & nameservers

If I were to register a domain name with an internet DNS registrar, what information do I need to provide them? Is it the IP address of my site's nameservers? What exactly is the point of a single site's name server- is it just to resolve subdomains or what? Is there free name server software? Since I'm not interested in subdomains, would it work if I just gave the registrar the IP address of my one web hosting box? --ffroth 20:52, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Wait, this page seems to suggest that I need 3 nameservers! Why on earth do I need 3 separate nameservers for a single DNS record?! Why should you have to have at least 3 external IP addresses to connect a single box into DNS? And LOL what good does it do to give them ns1.something.com? That's what you're registering! How are you supposed to set up a nameserver at ns1.something.com so that you can register, if your something.com doesn't even exist? --ffroth 21:03, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

The reason for multiple nameservers is redundancy: If one box is down or under attack, others could still serve up your info. The idea is that the nameserver gives some place to go to get the actual IP of any named domain. And yes, you can run your own nameserver (usually using bind which is free). The definitive book on the subject is DNS and Bind from O'Reilly. Donald Hosek 21:36, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

For regular folks like us, your domain registry company generally sells a package that includes hosting the nameserver(s) entries for your domain. The reason there are multiple entries supported is for fallback in the event of one failing (so they can all be the same if you want). Typically your domain host (who needn't, obviously, be your web host) just stores a single lookup (which you set by means of their web interface); so when someone in the internet asks for www.something.com it just returns that IP you gave them. Depending on the domain hoster they can set their server up so that any subdomain request will all return your one IP address. Now things are different for a bigger concern; they have their own publicly visible nameservers, so the DNS entries point to those, and in turn those provide info for the subdomains that company implements. Now you could do this yourself; set the public nameservers to be your own actual box, and then you run your own nameserver. But that's one more service you have to install and maintain and keep up to date and secure, so a lot of people don't think it's worth the bother. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:41, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

The advantage for the bigger company in having their own nameservers is that they can do clever stuff, and not just serve the same stuff all the time to everyone. So they can do loadbalancing at the DNS level, and failover, and they can give a different reply based on the network or (guestimated) physical location of the query (and thus supply you with content that's served from "nearer" to you, for example). If all you want to do is to server a single static address then that's irrelevant for you, and running bind might well be overkill. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:50, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

An also (sorry if this is telling you something that's really obvious) to host your own server (for anything) you need a real (or at least virtualised) server of your own, and not just a virtual web host. The latter resolves to an IP shared by many (unrelated) domains and are distinguished (generally by Apache) by means of the http "host" header. If you've got the latter (which is much cheaper) then you'll have to rely on someone else's name server. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:59, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I've finally figured all this stuff out --ffroth 04:03, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

you don't need more than 1 nameserver although most registrars make you specify two at least. DJB says that it is silly to replicate your dns servers more than the services they answer for, I use djbdns, more specifically, tinydns which is very simple. What Finlay McWalter says isn't necessarily true, there is no reason you couldn't run your own DNS to point to someone elses virtual web hosting. -- Diletante 16:45, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Internet DNS part 2

Is it possible to register an internet domain name (something.com) with an internal IP address? So when the client requests DNS information from something.com, it gets an internal IP address? What about registering it with an internal DNS name, so the client gets "not here, resolve something.inyournetwork.com and see if that gives you the IP address" and then the internal network DNS servers will be able to give the client the internal IP? It sounds like this should work fine, but the question above about what the heck a nameserver has to do with registering a domain name casts doubt --ffroth 20:55, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Yep, that's all possible. For example, it's not uncommon to discover that localhost.foo.com resolves to 127.0.0.1. DNS doesn't care what class IP you resolve to. There's also no reason why having a DNS alias from foo.com to foo.local or some other locally resolved IP address. I've used that for development purposes on occasion. Donald Hosek 21:30, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes. There are a couple of ways to do this, though the specifics vary from operating system to operating system and the details of your internal network setup. On Linux, there is a file on each machine called /etc/hosts, which is the first port of call for the operating system to check when it wants to look up an IP address. It's been a while since I administered another operating system, but I'm sure that Windows and Mac OSX have similar abilities.

The second is to run a DNS server for your home network that is configured to point something.com to some internal IP address, and just looks up all other addresses from your ISP's DNS server and passes the results along. Many of the DSL modem/routers people use to connect to the internet have such a cacheing DNS server built-in and configure systems that connect to them to use it by default with DHCP; unfortunately, they often don't support configuring local addresses. However, there is alternate, free firmware for many of these routers which will let you do this and much, much more. OpenWRT is the best-known; it's very powerful, but it requires a bit of network administration savvy to configure. --Robert Merkel 21:37, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Locations of the hosts file on other OSes are detailed in Hosts file. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I've finally figured all this stuff out --ffroth 04:04, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

It is possible to override the address of any domain name through the hosts file. I was asked to write a program a long time ago (I refused). The program was to auto-install on everyone's computer (ie: virus). It would redirect any and all traffic to amazon.com to this company's server. Then they wanted their server to mangle the URL, forcing the user to be using their associate ID with Amazon so they would get a cut of every Amazon sale. This is very possible and it is likely that it is happening right now. I just didn't want any part of it. -- kainaw™ 17:06, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

transfering files to new pc

i recently brought a new pc which had a a 80 gig sata drive in and began transfering files accross from my old pc which had two hDD a 40 gig and a 250 gig IDE. the 40 gig had the windows files and other settings from my old pc and it transfered fine using windows files and settings transfer wizard. however when i plugged the 250gig one in the new pc recongises it but says it needs formatting and when i put it in my old pc it also says it needs formating. anyway round this? 250 gig of info is a lot to lose if i have to format the drive, i;m using windows xp sp2 home edition on both pcs--86.20.169.136 23:10, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm. At this point I'd try booting your computer up with something like Knoppix and have a poke around to see what it says about what's on the 250 gig drive. Yoj might be able to use it to copy the data somewhere else (for instance, a USB hard drive). --Robert Merkel 00:13, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Try Testdisk and see if it finds anything useful. If Testdisk finds a lost partition, it is very good at restoring it, as your partition table could have been corrupted. Alternatively you can boot with XP, go into the repair console, and try things like fixmbr if all else fails. Do NOT allow XP to try and repair your drive data and indexes itself, it will only make it worse. Sandman30s 13:02, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

You might want to try some data recovery software, but they don't come cheap plus the free ones need extensive knowledge to operate them and a mistake (such as forgetting to set your drive you want to recover on read-only) can ruin your already lost data on it. The best option if you don't know how to do it is to send your hard drive to data recovery companies like Ontrack. They're usually very expensive, but it's the only way to go if the data on your damaged drive is precious to you. --Bruin_rrss23 (talk) 14:58, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

sorry for the repated posts wikipedia kept telling me it was experincing an error at this time try again latter--86.20.169.136 16:35, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

yah knoppix works i've gotten all the files off thanks:P--86.20.169.136 23:39, 27 October 2007 (UTC)