vBulletin To IP.Board – A Short Journey

Cheyne Wallace is a Sydney based Monitoring / Platform Engineer and Availability Manager – http://www.cheynewallace.com
http://www.soundpunk.com is the SMF site mentioned in this article to be converted to IPB

A long time SMF user , iv been growing a community based on an Simple Machines Forum for many years, and I have to say, its been great.
SMF has never given me troubles, I had complete control over my styles and templates, wrote several mods my self without ever really needing to understand the core system.

Upgrading the platform was dead simple, login to your panel one day and it tells you a new update is available, click update, it pulls the files down, checks that it wont break anything and prompts you to continue, all in all about a 1 minute procedure. Simple, (No pun intended)

SMF is great, although like many, the time has come for my community to expand, we often have people writing full length articles and posting in the forum, only to have them be bumped back into oblivion and never seen again, either that or end up with 400 sticky posts which is just messy.

I need a CMS, I need blogging, I need to post articles, and host downloads properly not as attachments. Im not interested in messy Wordpress and Joomla bridges , despite the fact a Wordpress blog is exactly what I want, iv been down that path before and it always turned out messy.

Fast forward to about December 2009, im looking around for a new solution, iv been a fairly big forum user over the years and I was very aware of vBulletin and its standing in the web community.

I begin investigating vBulletin licensing, my eyes widen as I see a new product is being launched over at vBulletin.com – vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite
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Rotating URL Script – Dashboard Display

Iv been looking for a tool that will display web pages for a period of time and then cycle through to the next page,  performing a loop for usage on large LCD TV screen at work,  this is to be used to display IT Service performance information and status reports.

I was unable to find one that did what I wanted,  bar 1, although it suffered from a problem where after a few hours Internet Explorer would start to die, and it had to be restarted.

I decided to write my own script, and so here it is.
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Taskkill – Kill All Process’s Of A Certain Name

So you may have run something thats spawned a whole bunch of processes,  iexplore.exe  or cscript.exe ,  you need to kill them all and fast.   Heres how

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taskkill /F /IM iexplore.exe

Useful Windows Run Commands

A whole bunch of very useful Windows commands
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Task Scheduler – The following error was reported: 2147944309.

This common task scheduler message is cryptic, and means nothing without some digging,  you can see below how we find the true answer to what it means,  but the short answer is:

Account Is Locked Out

Why?
0n2147944309 = 0x80070775
Facility: 8007 = Win32 (it’s a “Win32″ status code)
Status: 0x775 = 0n1909
Q:\>net helpmsg 1909
The referenced account is currently locked out and may not be logged on to.

T-SQL Setting Date Format

Occasionally you need to run a DATEDIFF or DATEADD against some dates that are in a reverse format, ie Day:Month:Year instead of Month:Day:Year, theres a simple way to set this in your query without having to string handle it all, using the SET DATEFORMAT parameter.

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SET DATEFORMAT dmy
SELECT DATEDIFF(MINUTE,'29-01-2010 09:13:18','29-01-2010 09:18:18')

Windows Task Scheduler – Corrupt Image Error Fix

For some reason now with Vista and Windows Server 2008 when ever you seem to create a scheduled task, but close it before saving it, you get a “Corrupt Image” error that will not go away unless you remove the “Corrupt Image” from the registry.

Heres how to fix it

1. Open The Registry (Start > Run > regedit)
2. Browse to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Schedule\TaskCache
3. Under the “Tree” folder, find the scheduled tasks that you are having the error with and delete their folder.

Thats it, now re-open task scheduler and the error should be gone.

Copy your servers PHP.INI

Occasionally you may need to override your hosts or servers PHP.INI config file.  If you do, you’ll want a copy of the original PHP.INI as a basis for your modifications.
You can make a copy of it to your new directory by running a PHP script with the following

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< ?php system("cp /usr/local/php5/lib/php.ini /home/your-new-path/php.ini"); ?>

Piracy and R18+ Games

So another game has been banned from Australia (Aliens vs Predator), and this time the developers are refusing to censor the content.

And I don’t blame them.

Why spend years developing and testing a game, finally deeming it ready for production only to have some narrow minded Government on the opposite side of the world tell you It needs to be re-edited so a 14 year old can buy it. I know what id tell them.
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Ping Host From VB.Net

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' --- ping the ip adress in the string s_ipaddr, and get
'     the response time in the int32 n_response

 
Imports system.net.networkinformation
Dim ping As New System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping
Dim reply As System.Net.NetworkInformation.PingReply
reply = ping.Send(s_ipaddr)
If reply.Status = IPStatus.Success Then
' --- handle reachable here
MsgBox("ping time " & reply.RoundtripTime)
Else
' --- handle non reachable here
End If