Archive for the ‘Applications’ Category

GQLPlus: Oracle SQLPlus on Crack.

29 Jul 2011 at 08:52

Terry Moore

Oracle

No Comment

It has always bugged me that the Oracle SQLPlus prompt on Windows allowed you to use the up arrow to repeat (and most often used to fix) the previous command but for some reason this functionality is lost with the Linux version.  That is until now.

I started to Google around to see how to turn this functionality on and that when I found the Holy Grail of SQL prompts; GQLPLus.  ”The difference between gqlplus and sqlplus is command-line editing and history, plus table-name and column-name completion.”

After downloading the gzip you can either compile the code your self, which didn’t work for me or just take the easy route and use the pre-complied binary located int he Linux folder of the gzip file.  I copied this binary to the /usr/local/bin folder for easy access.

You can download the source and binaries from the GQLPlus sourceforge page

Gif Stopper :: Chrome Extension

12 Jul 2011 at 19:20

Terry Moore

Applications, Chrome Exensions, Programming

1 Comment

I love a good animated gif and most the time I just view them and move on. But now that I have joined Google Plus, animated gif have turned into an eye sore.  Okay, they’re only annoying when you are trying to read something and there is elephant that keeps bouncing up and down on a trampoline.  So I decided to do something about it.

Introducing my latest Google Chrome extension:  The Gif Stopper.  This will stop an animated gif in its tracks by just pressing the escape key.

Okay, I can’t take total credit for it.  The bread and butter of the extension what written by Johan Sundström and he posted it on userscripts.org.  I just turned it into a Chrome Extension.  The code for the extension including Johan’s code is posted on my github page.

Enjoy.

How To: Speed Up OpenOffice in Linux and Windows

28 Jul 2010 at 13:18

Terry Moore

Applications, Linux, OpenOffice.org, Windows

No Comment

Have you made the switch from Microsoft Office to Openoffice but are really annoyed with how long it takes to open even the smallest of documents?  Well here is a quick hack that you can do to decrease the time that it takes for OpenOffice to launch.

Step 1:
Launch any Open Office application.  In this example I will be using Writer

Step 2:
Click On Tools. Then click Options

Step 3:
Under OpenOffice.org; click on Java
Then Uncheck Use Java runtime environment
And then Click OK


pfSense Firewall

21 Jul 2010 at 20:59

Terry Moore

BSD, Firewall, pfSense, pfSense

1 Comment

Over the past few months my company has been testing out a different firewall products to protect us from all you h4x0rs out there. Our old Watchguard Firebox is no longer supported so we needed to look elsewhere.  We started by looking at a couple of commercial products and despite having a $5000 budget for a new firewall we decided to give pfSense a try.   pfSense is a open-source customized FreeBSD installation that is designed from the ground up to be a solid, secure firewall.

Last night I found myself at work late so I decided that after two months of testing it was time to move the pfSense installation onto a production server.  I re-purposed an older 1U Pentium 4 4GB of RAM server that was a decomissioned FreeNAS box. Now I releze that this is overkill but it was the only rack mountable server that I had available.

The server has two internal gigabit NICs and 2 dual port NICs for a total of six network interfaces and we are using all but one.  Currently we have LAN, WAN, VPN, Training Network, and finally the Guest Wireless  all hanging off this box.  We are running the Captive portal on the Guest Wireless and currently I am testing the OpenVPN that is built into pfSense to replace our old MS PPTP VPN.

pfSense has a package repository that is contains community created packages.  We have installed the Arping, Cron, and Snort.  After running the Snort package for a few weeks on the test server (but in production) I determined that China is a pain in the ass due to constant hacking attacks to our FTP server so I found the package Country Block which allow for you to drop packets coming from specific countries.  Lucky we are not an international company so I was able to block China, Korea, Russia, and a few others.  (Sorry if you are from those countries but a few bad apples ruin it for everyone.)

All and all this is an excellent firewall product that I would recommend for any SMB.  They have an excellent community to help you if you have any issues and if your company is worried about relying on strangers they also have commercial support.  I have barely descriped a tenth of the features that this awesome product contains so head over to their website for more indepth information. www.pfSense.com

WordPress Upgrade

18 Jun 2010 at 08:48

Terry Moore

Applications

No Comment

Last night I upgraded this blogs WordPress version to 3.0.  I have to say that it was the easiest and fasted software upgrade that I have do in a long time.  Kudos WordPress!!

Howto: Change Oracle sysman Password and Reconfigure Enterprise Manager

07 May 2010 at 10:12

Terry Moore

Oracle

No Comment

Note:
This guide was written for Oracle 10g running on a Windows server but the process is identical with the exception of how you stop and start the Enterprise Manager service.

When changing the sysman account password, which run the Oracle Enterprise Manager Application, you will need to stop the OracleDBConsole<SID> service from the Services Control Panel applet.  This will keep the sysman account from getting locked out.

Log into sqlplus as the user sys then type:

 ALTER USER sysman identified BY <new password>

Navigate in Windows Explorer to:

<ORACLE_HOME>\<localhost.domain_SID>\sysman\config
(Where localhost.domain_SID is specific to your installation environment.)

Open the file named emoms.properties in Wordpad

Located the value:
oracle.sysman.eml.mntr.emdRepPwd=<encrypted value>
(Where <encrypted value> is a random string of numbers and letters)
Change this to encrypted password to your new sysman password

Locate the Value:
oracle.sysman.eml.mntr.emdRepPwdEncrypted=TRUE

Change it to:
oracle.sysman.eml.mntr.emdRepPwdEncrypted=FALSE

Note:
Once you start the OracleDBConsole<SID> service it will change this cleartext password to its encrypted value.

Now start OracleDBConsole<SID> services that you stop before.

Note:
If the sysman or any other account becomes locked, you can unlock it with this command.

ALTER USER  account unlock;
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