Technical ConfusionBecause Technology Is Confusing

Port Forwarding

Yesterday I went on a mission. I wanted to find out how I can block World of Warcraft on my network.

Sometimes babyboy shows signs of addiction to the game, and I feel the need to be a mean parental unit, and I want to block it. I use the parental controls on the game, but he can see his restrictions. There are times when I don’t necessarily need him to know he’s being restricted, allowing me to play my “I don’t have a clue” card.

So I went on a quest to block it. I have not found a way to block World of Warcraft, instead I found a way to allow the stupid game.

When a patch for the game is downloaded, it sucks up all the bandwidth. I mean, it makes the loading of a simple text webpage impossible. And in my research I discovered that World of Warcraft behaves better when you enable port forwarding.

I have no problems with port forwarding on Linux. You do it manually, and I have snippets of the commands on my hard drive. But my router gives me a GUI and thus I’m not always sure what to put where, and my guess last night was incorrect.

I found a site to help me with all that. It has pictures and everything! It will tell you everything you never wanted to know about firewalls, routers, port forwarding, and port triggering – and explains what those things are. It has lists to guides for most any router or firewall out there, and is written in easy to understand manner.

http://www.portforward.com/guides.htm
http://www.portforward.com/

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Changing Your Wordpress Password

You may find that changing your Wordpress password works better if you change it directly in the database.

Most hosts offer PHPmyadmin, which is a free application that lets you manipulate your database directly, you do need to know how to use it, and you need to be careful. Don’t click any red X’s!

On Cpanel hosts, you can access the PHPmyadmin utility by logging into Cpanel, go to mysql databases, and at the very bottom of the mysql page, there is a link to PHPmyadmin. If you don’t have PHPmyadmin, you can install it on your website and access your databases for that site.

Once you’re in PHPmyadmin, you need to find the correct database. I usually have at least 3, and since I don’t name everything the same, I have to search. But usually, the database will have a table number like (21) next to the database name. You click on that link. Wordpress databases install tables that are prefixed with wp_. So look for the wp_. It will look like wp_tablename or wpname_tablename.

Then, you’ll need to look for a table with users in it (not usermeta) - wp_users:

Then you need to select the users table:

Next, you need to select the user, which is usually admin as default, but you can select any user name you wish.

You’ll then come to a screen where you can change variables:

The one we’re focusing on is user_pass.

For the password, you’ll see a long string of characters that make absolutely no sense. This is your current password in encrypted form. Delete the characters.

Next, type your password as you normally would, and then in the function drop down box, choose MD5. This is what encrypts your password:

Don’t forget to click the Go button. You’re done. If you look at this screen, you’ll see your new password in it’s encrypted form.

Close the browser, open it up again and log into Wordpress with your new password.