blog.plee.me About software, technology and random things

2Nov/140

Viewing Hidden Devices in Windows Device Manager

Hi!

If you are trying to find a device that has been hidden in your Windows Device Manager, for example because you don't have it plugged in at the moment, you might find this little guide handy.

  1. Open the command prompt ("Start" => "cmd")
  2. Enter
    set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
  3. Then start the Device Manager from the command prompt via
    devmgmt.msc
  4. In the Device Manager, click "View" => "Show hidden devices"

I hope this helped 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Source: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/241257

1Dec/130

Installing the Logitech F710 Wireless Gamepad on Windows 7 x64 (XInput Driver)

Update from 2015-10-18: Windows 10 Pro (x64) does not appear to require this workaround. It automatically installed the correct driver and allowed me to use the controller right away.

Hi!

In order to be able to benefit from using the XInput mode for the Logitech F710 Wireless Gamepad, of course you need to install the correct driver. This is made a little hard for Windows 7 x64 seeing as there is no driver that comes with the device itself.

I found a guide on how you can manage it by using Microsoft's official Xbox 360 Controller driver.

Be careful though, you're messing with driver files. Use this guide at your own risk.

  1. Go to the Microsoft Hardware downloads page: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/downloads
  2. Click on the category "Gaming"
  3. Click on the link "Xbox 360 Wireless Controller for Windows"
  4. Download the correct version of the file (Windows 7 64-bit only) and install it
  5. Open the Device Manager (e.g. [Windows]+[Break] => Device Manager)
  6. Right-click on the entry with "Logitech F710" in its name and the yellow triangle icon in front of it
  7. Open its properties
  8. Switch to the "Details" tab
  9. Choose the property "Hardware Ids"
  10. Right-click on the one without the "&REV_<Number>" at the end of the name and copy it. It should look something like this: USB\VID_046D&PID_C21F
  11. Go to the directory in which you installed the Xbox 360 Accessories Software a minute ago: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Xbox 360 Accessories
  12. Open the file Xusb21.inf with a plain text editor like Notepad
  13. At the top in the commented section you can see the line containing "Wireless Common Controller USB\Vid_045E&Pid_0719". Search for "USB\Vid_045E&Pid_0719" and replace each occurence with the hardware ID you copied earlier. Afterwards, save it to the file. You might need to have your editor program in elevated privilege mode in order to do so.
  14. Go back to the Device Manager with the open F710 properties window
  15. Switch to the "Driver" tab
  16. Click on the "Update Driver..." button
  17. In the assistant, choose "Browse my computer for driver software"
  18. Choose the path "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Xbox 360 Accessories"
  19. Confirm the driver warning and you're good to go

To check if it really worked, you can just press the Logitech button on the game controller and it should cause a little frame with the Xbox logo, the text "Click for Help" and a down-pointing arrow button and an X button to pop up in the lower center of your screen.

I do not usually recommend modifying driver files like that, but I have used this method before and it worked for me, so I stopped looking for a better way, as there doesn't seem to be any official solution provided by Logitech themselves (which is a shame).

Original post and the ones who can be credited with this solution: post by breakfastmonkey on the official Logitech forums (referencing a couple of previous posts in the same thread).

Thanks for reading.

2Jul/130

Access Control via Hybrid .htaccess for Both Apache HTTPd 2.2 and 2.4

Hi!

If you're running the Apache HTTPd in the versions 2.2 and 2.4 in different environments but would like to control access to certain directories (include, lib, ...) via Apache, chances are that you don't want to use one 2.2 specific file and a different one for 2.4, especially if you keep transferring and synchronizing the files between those different setups.

Between versions 2.2 and 2.4 a couple of things have changed. The perhaps most prominent change would be the one that comes with the new mod_authz_host module and deals with authorization / access control. Instead of using Order, Allow, Deny and/or Satisfy you are now advised to use the new Require directive.

So what do you do if you cannot switch every .htaccess over to the new format for reasons like the one mentioned in the beginning?

You could in fact enable the mod_access_compat module and keep rolling with the old configuration. But that would only mean procrastinating until you would finally have to deal with it anyway.

The better solution is to use configurations that are not even necessarily dependent on your Apache version (remember, you could just load the legacy compatibility module in 2.4), but in fact check for the correct module to work with. The key element to work with here is the IfModule directive.

# Apache 2.4
<IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
    Require all denied
</IfModule>

# Apache 2.2
<IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
    Order Allow,Deny
    Deny from all
</IfModule>

As you can see, there are two checks that basically work as an "if ... else" selection. The rest should be self-explanatory.

For more information about the new way of handling access with the Apache HTTPd 2.4, please refer to the official documentation.

I hope this was of any help to you.

Thanks for reading.

20May/120

Making Traceroutes Work with a Firewall (Windows)

Hi!

Even though I've had software firewalls in action for years now, I haven't really come across too many instances where I'd need traceroutes. The few times I did, however, I noticed that I only got output like the following:

>tracert example.com

Tracing route to example.com [123.123.123.123]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  6     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  7     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  9     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 10     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 11    50 ms    50 ms    50 ms  example.com [123.123.123.123]

Trace complete.

The number of hops would of course vary for the specific host / IP address.

Today I had to use traceroute in order to analyze a couple of networking problems. That was the incentive I needed to look up why it didn't work.

The fact that not even my router was showing up was a big indicator that something was wrong with my local firewall settings.

After searching the web for a couple of minutes, I found out what I was looking for at this page: http://www.phildev.net/ipf/IPFques.html#ques34

Traceroute is using ICMP packets (plus UDP on Linux systems, but that's outside the scope of this blog entry. You can read more about it on the page I linked above). But even for an outgoing traceroute you need to accept incoming ICMP packets.

Which ones? These:

  • ICMP TTL Expired (Type 11, Code 0)
  • ICMP Port Unreachable (Type 3, Code 3)

Once you've enabled these types of packets for incoming traffic in your firewall(s), you'll see that your traceroute will now function as it should.

If your firewall does not allow you to configure accepting specific types of ICMP packets, try allowing incoming ICMP packets altogether (if that's not too much of a compromise for you).

Anyway, long-ish story short: It's working now 🙂

Thanks to the webmaster of the page I linked above! And thanks to you for reading.

8Apr/120

Hiding the Closing Button (X) on the Firefox Add-on Bar

Hey!

Since the introduction of Firefox 3 or 4 (I don't quite remember) and the removal of the status bar I have liked to use the Add-on bar instead. In the newer versions of Firefox, however, that Add-on bar comes with a closing button, an X on the very left.

Unfortunately, there is no built-in option to disable that particular button. Right-clicking and "Customize ..." doesn't allow moving or removing that button either.

After searching the web for a while, I stumbled upon a Google Groups thread: https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.support.firefox/browse_thread/thread/d4a77426b84fe2b0

In that thread, Chris Ilias gave a simple solution (thank you!):

  1. Go to your Firefox profile directory. For that, just enter about:support in your URL bar (or click on Firefox => Help => Troubleshooting) and click on the "Open Containing Folder" button next to "Profile Directory".
  2. Close Firefox. (So maybe it would be better to continue reading these instructions beforehand and/or copy them into a text editor. 🙂 )
  3. Enter the subfolder "chrome" in the profile directory.
  4. Open the file "userChrome.css". If it does not exist, copy "userChrome-example.css" and rename the copy to "userChrome.css".
    If you are using Notepad, you won't be able to see line breaks / new lines. Therefore I recommend using a program that can interpret these kinds of line breaks, for example TextPad, Notepad++ or even WordPad, which comes with Windows itself.
  5. Add the following line to the file:
    #addonbar-closebutton { display: none }
  6. That's it! Save the file, start up Firefox again and enjoy the Add-on bar without a closing button!

These instructions were written for Firefox 11, but they should stay viable for the next couple of versions as well.

I hope this was of any help to you.

Thanks for reading!

10Mar/120

Restoring Syntax Highlighting to Vim

Hi!

After doing a couple of updates on my servers today, I noticed that one of them had syntax highlighting in vim disabled. I double-checked to see that it was still vim that was installed, and not vi. Indeed it was, so I tried entering a couple of vim commands in order to re-enable syntax highlighting.

A couple of minutes of trying and searching the Internet went by till I got the idea to directly compare the vim version info both on one of my servers that had it working properly and the one that didn't. It turned out that even though it was the same version number and build with the same compile time it had a certain difference: one line said "Tiny version without GUI." vs. "Huge version without GUI.". The tiny version was the one that wasn't highlighting correctly.

So I checked out what the package manager thought of this:

# yum list *vim*
[...]
Installed Packages
vim-common.i386                                   2:7.0.109-7.el5                                  installed
vim-enhanced.i386                                 2:7.0.109-7.el5                                  installed
vim-minimal.i386                                  2:7.0.109-7.el5                                  installed
Available Packages
vim-X11.i386                                      2:7.0.109-7.el5                                  base

Somehow during updating it had apparently decided to install the vim-minimal package as well. And of course it wasn't installed on the server on which vim worked as it should.

Fair enough. I thought to myself that removing should fix it, but when I tried to it said the following:

# yum remove vim-minimal
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Setting up Remove Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package vim-minimal.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 set to be erased
--> Processing Dependency: vim-minimal for package: sudo
--> Running transaction check
---> Package sudo.i386 0:1.7.2p1-13.el5 set to be erased
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

============================================================================================================
 Package                   Arch               Version                         Repository               Size
============================================================================================================
Removing:
 vim-minimal               i386               2:7.0.109-7.el5                 installed               581 k
Removing for dependencies:
 sudo                      i386               1.7.2p1-13.el5                  installed               861 k

Transaction Summary
============================================================================================================
Remove        2 Package(s)
Reinstall     0 Package(s)
Downgrade     0 Package(s)

Is this ok [y/N]:

That was weird. It felt the need to remove sudo along with it. Of course that was not okay for me, so I tried looking for a parameter for vim in order to ignore the dependencies, but apparently there are none (any more).

The solution I found after a couple of more minutes of searching the Internet was to remove the package via the actual rpm program. But don't you need the original rpm file for vim-minimal? No, you don't!

First you have to find out the complete package name, however. That can be done like this:

# rpm -qa | grep vim-minimal
vim-minimal-7.0.109-7.el5.i386

And finally just use the following command:

# rpm -e --nodeps vim-minimal-7.0.109-7.el5.i386

whereas the last parameter is of course the proper name of the package in question. --nodeps, as you might have figured already, stands for "no dependencies" and removes the package without any questions asked.

In the end, these simple steps restored the syntax highlighting functionality for my vim.

Let's hope that after the next update it doesn't decide to go monochrome again.

Thanks for reading!

1Jan/120

Using Different Color Schemes with Vim

Hey!

If you have been using the Linux console text editor vim (or: Vi IMproved), you have probably noticed already that at times - especially in files with a large amount of comments - the default color scheme on a black background is less than ideal. Dark blue on black is pretty hard to read and can strain the eyes a lot.

So today I went out to see if somebody had come up with a solution for this particular problem. I saw people who changed console colors by exporting and overwriting certain system variables, and others who edited the default color scheme.

The simplest solution I have found to this problem is just switching the color scheme. You can do that by typing the following in the already open vim session:

:colorscheme desert

where desert is just an example for the scheme of choice. Desert - for me - has just the right color for comments: aquamarine / light blue.

If you are satisfied with the scheme and would like it to be applied each time you launch vim, you can just edit /etc/vim/vimrc (or in my case with CentOS: /etc/vimrc) and add the following line:

colorscheme desert

with desert again, of course, being the chosen color scheme. This would apply this setting automatically for each vim instance that is launched system-wide. If you do not have access to the system-wide preferences or prefer just using it for your own user account, edit the ~/.vimrc instead.

The blog entry I got this tip from (Asher's space) has further instructions on how to edit existing color schemes and even a link to a blog post that explains how to edit the dark blue color for directories in ls listings with color, but I did not feel the need to go that far. If you are interested in that topic I can only encourage you to visit the original post.

Thanks for reading!

Update (2012-01-04):
Okay, looks like pingback isn't working, so here's a direct link to the original blog post:
vi code highlighting: change the default comments color from dark blue to light blue (https://asher2003.wordpress.com/)

1Jan/120

New Old Blog URL

Hello and a Happy New Year 2012!

Yesterday evening and early today I decided to implement something that has been flying around in my head for quite some while. I enabled SSL for my website - including this blog! - and at the same time moved the blog back to its original URL: http://blog.plee.me/

Now, as some of you might know, that subdomain URL has always continued to work even though I switched the URL to the subdirectory one for a while. However, instead of invalidating one or the other, both will still work. If you visit a link pointing to http://www.plee.me/blog/... you will be redirected to the new subdomain one.

So, with SSL being enabled as well, you can also reach this blog via https://blog.plee.me/, which I would strongly advise you to use over the unencrypted one. It's quite unlikely that I will post highly sensitive content on here to justify SSL encryption, but hey, it's fancy, and who doesn't like fancy stuff, right? 🙂

In order to not get any warning due to untrusted certificates, however, I recommend (not only for my site's sake but for a number of other privately or non-commercially run websites throughout the whole web) you visit http://www.cacert.org/ and get the root certificates for your browser so that CAcert will be trusted as a Certificate Authority.

Alright, that's it for now. I think I will have some relevant stuff to write about in 2012, so stay tuned.
Don't hold your breath though 😛

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, I have actually been active on Twitter again for the last half year or so, and I'm intending on keeping that trend. So swing by there if you like 🙂 The link/info is on my main website.

Thanks for reading and sorry for any inconvenience.

Tagged as: , , , , , No Comments
2Jun/110

Detecting the Linux Distribution / Version

Hi!

Just a quick method to (roughly) detect your linux distribution and version:

$ cat /etc/issue
or
$ cat /etc/*release

Cheers 🙂

24May/110

Blocking the Facebook Like Button via Adblock Plus

Hi!

This particular tip was written over at http://www.ohnekontur.de/2011/05/13/adblock-facebook-like-button-blockieren/. Any credit goes to the original author. I am merely posting this on my blog to have a reference for myself in the long run.

You might have heard about the fact that even without clicking on Facebook's Like buttons you might be tracked by Facebook (technically it is absolutely possible for them to see which site it is you visited and had the Like button on it).

So if you are using Firefox and have the Adblock Plus addon installed (which I strongly recommend in the times of annoying flash advertisements) you can just add the following lines under the Adblock Plus preferences => "My Ad Blocking Rules":

||facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

These rules disable any Facebook scripts that are not used from the Facebook domains (facebook.com, facebook.net, fbcdn.com, fbcdn.net) themselves, including the Like buttons or any other webpage widgets they offer.

Of course, if you are using a different browser or a different kind of ad blocking / script blocking script, the idea is the same: forbid Facebook's scripts to run anywhere but their own website.

As always, I hope to have been of any help to you.

Thanks for reading.

%d bloggers like this: