Awhile back I noticed that the Amazon Machine Tags plugin I use on various sites stopped working and wasn’t sure why since it had not been updated in quite awhile. When initially investigating I was hoping that there was an update I had missed that would resolve the issue with Amazon Machine Tags however that was not the case. Luckily the fix was easy and is documented below.
I upgraded to Nmap 5.51 early this afternoon because a friend asked me to take a look at creating a topology image of a network scan of around 3,000 hosts. After upgrading I opened his scan in Zenmap and attempted to export the topology of the scan as a PNG but I received an error which I at first assumed was an issue on my computer or an issue with the fact that the export to PNG image was taking place on a 64-bit Windows 7 computer however both of those turned out to be incorrect. Below I describe the error in more detail as well as the current newest Nmap version that will allow PNG export, a workaround for the issue, and notes about the response from the Nmap development team that already pushed a fix to SVN only a couple hours after the issue was reported (+1 Nmap devs!).
While doing some testing of Oracle on a Windows 7 computer I stopped the TNS Listener service also known as OracleOraDb11g_home1TNSListener. The problem is when I attempted to restart the service it would not start. While testing various other things I had made numerous changes so I started looking into what might cause the issue and was pretty confident that the $ORACLE_HOME variable I set within the Windows Environment Variables was probably the culprit. Below I describe more details about the error as well as how I resolved the TNS Listener not being able to start.
Again I am fairly new to Oracle so it has been quite a learning process and typically I have been running into errors that are easy to resolve but being able to locate the answers easy has been challenging. While attempting to use sqlplus.exe from the Windows 7 command line I continued to receive a TNS protocol adapter error and it turns out it was simply from using the incorrect syntax. Below I describe the error in more detail as well as the correct syntax to use for sqlplus on Windows 7.
Earlier while troubleshooting an issue for a client of mine I ran into an issue when testing HylaFAX’s sendfax via the CLI. The error complained of some font files that appear to have been previously upgraded by someone else on the server which is running a fairly old version of Ubuntu Linux. Anyhow the error along with the quick resolution to the issue are noted below.