I'm looking into giving my readers a Christmas present, an album or something similar. Just finalising the talks with the distributor at the moment so stay tuned (Christmas present was uploaded and later removed to comply with copywrite regulations, those of you who managed to download it, which there were many, hope you enjoyed, cheers). On a more technical note, I'd like to detail how to configure a watchguard firewall for PPTP pass through in under 60 seconds. We assume you have a Microsoft RRAS server doing the PPTP authentication behind the firewall. Let's do it (click 'View Page' for instructions on how).

Yesterday I was working on an SQL cluster and part of the job was to change the IP address. Doing so caused the application dependent on the cluster to fail. I was required to make a registry changes so the SQL server would listen on the new IP address. What helped me determine the issues and resolve it quickly was running 'netstat -a -n' from the command prompt and looking at what IP address the SQL server was listening on. 'netstat -a -n' is a handy command worth running on secure servers as part of a schedule so you can view what ports/services your server is open to.

Cheers
Ryan Partington