Age Calculator is a Wordpress plugin that provides a quicktag that will calculate the current age of a person/animal/whatever based on it’s birthdate. Supports changing the verbiage for year(s) and month(s) plus has a multiplier for animals (such as “in dog years”).

Using the quicktag [agecalc birthdate="1978-01-30] will display “31 years” using the default settings. Well, as long as it’s still 2009…

Visit the Age Calculator page at the WordPress Plugin Directory for more information.

Dashboard Links is a dashboard widget that displays links from a user-defined link category on the WordPress dashboard.

Visit the Dashboard Links page at the WordPress Plugin Directory for more information.

I’ll keep this one short. It seems that sending a NO-OP signal to help keep your SSH connection active within SecureCRT interferes with the TFTP process on a Cisco ASA. My download continued to fail due to a timeout error until I disabled the “Send Protocol NO-OP” setting.

Woohoo.

A simple, yet very powerful script that will backup all of the databases on your Microsoft SQL Server to flat file for easy backup and restore. Additional features, such as limiting the number of archive files to keep and copying the latest file to a different directory, are also available.

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Today I was a client’s corporate office configuring a new Cisco PIX 506 firewall with VPN support. While the PIX supports IPSEC, we decided to use PPTP because client side configuration on Windows 2000/XP is very straight forward and rather simple for a non-technical employee to configure.

After configuring PPTP on the PIX (which is a snap), I configured and tested a Windows XP workstation using a dialup connection. While the test was a success (the tunnel was established and the secure network could be accessed), internet access failed because the PIX won’t/can’t redirect traffic that isn’t on it’s local network (Plug: the Cisco VPN Concentrator can perform this task with ease). A simple fix for this problem would appear to be to modify the Windows VPN connection and disable the use default gateway on remote network option, but now no traffic is getting though the VPN tunnel to the secure network.

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Downstall – download & install – is a quick utility I wrote using AutoIT that downloads and installs a program in one step.

It’s usage is rather easy, from the command line run Downstall with three command-line options and it will do all the work: download the program and run the executable with options that you define. In addition, status of each step along the way will be outputted to a log file for examining upon failure.

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Some say that the third time is a charm, hopefully that’s the case. I guess we’ll see…

Many internet hardware products offer a read-only access mode, which I’m guessing is to keep Mr. Slacky from screwing up the config – ahem, no router bgp 6078 – on your live core router. But that’s the problem, Cisco doesn’t offer an elegant solution for read-only access to their routers. You can modify the exec level for show running-config, although the output ends up being completely useless because you didn’t supply a new exec level for all of the associated commands that are necessary to gather the configuration.

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A quick and simple way to limit the amount of files in a certain directory. Maybe I shouldn’t use the word limit – how about manage. A quick and simple way to manage the number of files of a certain file type in a directory.

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It’s when the simple things don’t work that I get mad. I’ve been working on one of our servers all day using Windows Terminal Services in remote administration mode. Somewhere between Thanksgiving dinner #1 and #2, my connection decided to drop causing it to continue to run on the server. While this typically wouldn’t be a problem, it appears that someone else has done the same thing (probably not today) which now makes it impossible to log into my server remotely.

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