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/

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.

Several domains were registered with Yahoo. I got these domains for $2.95, which I thought was an outstanding deal, especially for a domain name addict like myself. I was also aware that these domains would go up in price, to $8.95 or $9.95, which they did. I had no problem with this.

This year, the domain names went up again. Way up. The price to renew each domain name was $34.95. This is part of an email that I received:

Thanks for using Yahoo! Domains. We’re writing to remind you that it’s time for the annual autorenewal of your service.

Your Domains plan, associated with the domain XXXXXX, will renew on 10/01/2008. If your billing information is up-to-date, there’s no need to do a thing (except keep enjoying your service).

**** IMPORTANT NOTE: Beginning on July 1, 2008, Yahoo!’s annual domain renewal price increases to $34.95 per year. ****

$34.95. This didn’t include web hosting, folks. No privacy features, nothing. Just the domain name.

This is insane. I wound up cancelling 8 of my domains, and I transferred 2 - one that isn’t officially mine, and another domain that I simply wasn’t ready to part with, to Godaddy.

If you’re looking to purchase a domain name, your best bet is Godaddy. They’ve never raised their prices so high in all the time I’ve been with them. Heck, I also use Domainmonger, and while I do consider them high at $17.95 - they’ve never raised their prices.

$34.95! I’m still not over it!

I decided to use the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade and see how it worked on multiple blogs.

The Wordpress upgrades went well. All except one. One site seemed to upgrade ok, except that the plug-in didn’t automatically re-activate. No problem. Turned the plug-in back on, a couple threw errors on me, upgrading the plug-in solved the problem.

To look at the site, everything was all hunky dory. My tags weren’t working, and I was trying to figure out a way to import them and use them on the updated blog, but the site wasn’t showing visible errors.

I decided to upload another plug-in, and couldn’t because I was out of space. The site had plenty of space the day before. Hmm. A quick FTP session revealed several rather large core dumps taking up all the space. I downloaded one to look at to determine the problem, which was all tag software related.

Luckily, I’m obsessive about keeping backups. Before I proceed on any project for any site, I back up. Sometimes it will be the whole site, sometimes just the folder. I deleted every file on the site, deleted the database and re-uploaded the old files. Everything works fine.

Always back up. The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does a backup for you if you choose, but I found it does not back up your theme folder and plug-in folder. I would rather manually back my sites up, just for my own peace of mind.

Sometimes we need to find information about a domain name or website. Maybe it’s an address, a phone number, or where a domain is hosted. You can search a domain name in a whois database and you’ll find information.

A Whois search allows us to do this - it’s a public database that contains all kinds of information, about every domain name registered on the internet. To find this kind of information, you need to search a special database. You can search Google for the phrase whois search or you can use one of the sites listed here:

http://betterwhois.com
http://allwhois.com

My favorite whois search on the web is BetterWhois. All you do is type the domain name in the text box - make sure to include the .com or .net.

We’re looking for information about the domain notarealdomain.com which just happens to be a registered domain. The registrant has decided to use the registrar’s privacy features, so you won’t see any addresses or names that apply directly to the registrant:

Domain Name: NOTAREALDOMAIN.COM
Registrar: NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC
Whois Server: whois.dreamhost.com
Referral URL: http://www.dreamhost.com
Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM
Status: ok
Updated Date: 19-mar-2008
Creation Date: 19-mar-2008
Expiration Date: 19-mar-2009

So, what are you looking at?

You’ll also see this:

Registrant Contact - This is who owns the domain.
Administrative Contact - This is who is in charge of the domain.
Technical Contact - This is who you contact if there’s a problem.
Billing Contact - This is who pays for the domain.

All of the contact info can be the same, or it can be different. In this particular case, the information is all the same - it’s under the Registrar’s contact info, because the registrant wants privacy so the contact information is hidden. Privacy registrations look like this:

notarealdomain.com Private Registrant
notarealdomain.com@proxy.dreamhost.com
A Happy DreamHost Customer
417 Associated Rd #324
Brea, CA 92821
US
+1.2139471032

If you want to find where a domain is hosted, you can read through the whois - once in a while the info is there. Usually you’ll need to take the nameserver domain name (without the ns1. before the domain name) and do a whois on that. This can go on endlessly, depending on how the host is set up.

Nikkole of 7gens and I are discussing green web hosting, and how to research if a company is really green, or just claiming to be. It’s a long discussion, and you can read it here.

Since it is a long discussion, I’ve decided to write how I research domain names in a couple of new posts.

I’m skeptical of any company that claims to be green and doesn’t put their money where their mouth is. Truth of the matter is, very few can claim to be truly green: simply because the datacenters where they house their servers are not green, and not even close to it. Because of this, folks can be duped into thinking a hosting company is something it’s not.

Tools needed to help in domain research

Open a copy of Notepad, Word or your favorite text editor. Remember to save it. You’ll need a place to take notes (or you’ll find yourself constantly backtracking.)

Use a browser that has tabbed windows - like Firefox.

Online Tools

These tools will tell you all kinds of information like IP addresses, where a domain is hosted, abuse addresses.

http://dns-tools.domaintools.com/ - (Some free services, some paid)
http://www.4dnstools.com/ - This one is pretty comprehensive
http://www.iptools.com/ - Also comprehensive
http://network-tools.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/590 - If you use Firefox, this is a nifty little addon. It displays the ip address of the current page in your status bar. It enables you to copy the ip to the clipboard. This is not mandatory.

http://www.myipneighbors.com/ - This is a cool standalone dns tool that is good to have in your arsenal. You plug in a domain name or IP, and it will tell you how many sites are being hosted on a server.

Of any of the tools you choose above, these are the primary three utilities you will use:

WHOIS Lookup
The whois lookup or search is a database of all top level domains currently registered on the internet, and contains public information. Some people - and companies - will hide this info by using privacy services offered thru the domain registrar.

IP WHOIS Lookup
This is also a whois database search, only you’re looking for the owner of an IP address. This is usually a big company like Verio, or ATT. It also gives you names, addresses and contact info of the company who lease the IP addresses.

Reverse DNS lookup
This tool will tell you where a domain name or address should resolve. Not all domains and IP addresses resolve properly - they should if set up correctly. If not set up correctly, it can result in email issues. I use it because once in a while you’ll find an IP address doesn’t resolve to say your hosting company, but the people who host your hosting company.

I don’t want to overwhelm you with this stuff, so I’ll end the post on domain research tools here.

I’ve seen alot of hosting companies trying to capitalize on the green movement. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being green and doing your part, we all need to. I try to do my part as an individual, but I can’t claim to be green by any stretch of the imagination, because I’m not.

But, can web hosting really be green? Really and truly?

I seriously question this. I mean, when I think of hosting, and green, the first thing that comes to my mind is power, like solar power (which I think is a really neat idea) or wind power.

So, say for example, you have a really mission critical website, you absolutely cannot afford to be down, you’ll lose
millions of dollars - per minute! if the site does go down.

Imagine this scenario. Your website goes down, so you call your hosting company, which is a green web hosting company, and they use solar power. You call support. If you’re lucky the hosting company uses old fashioned phones that don’t need electricity to work. You know the kind I mean. The conversation goes something like this:

Customer: Hi, my website is down
Support: Yea there’s no sun today. Everybody’s down.
Customer: When will it be up?
Support: Dunno. When the sun comes out.
Customer: When will that be?
Support: Dunno. That’s up to God I guess.
Customer: (Getting angry now) Well then, can I talk to God?

See what I’m getting at here?

A web hosting company really can’t claim to be green.

They can, however, take steps to do their part for the environment:

By cutting down on paper usage
Cutting back on support hours (use less electricity that way)
Recycling old server parts wherever possible and keep them out of landfills

But until technology progresses further, web hosting companies are limited. Just because they say they are green, it doesn’t mean they are.

Not only does the bill protect from internet harrassment, but

The Missouri measure also requires school officials to tell police about harassment and stalking on school grounds and expands state laws against stalking to cover “credible threats” not only against the victim but against family and household members and animals. It also creates stronger penalties for stalking.

Cyberbullying outlawed in Missouri

Windows home server

It is a 120 day trial, shipped to you free of charge.

I’ve installed Apache, PHP and Mysql separately before, but never XAMPP. I thought it was going to be a huge job, boy was I wrong.

The install took all of five minutes. This application installs the Apache webserver, PHP, Perl and Mysql. All at once. I haven’t tested the Perl yet, but PHP is working just fine. This post has been written in a copy of Wordpress that I installed.

XAMPP Install

The XAMPP install goes like any Windows program, just make sure you download the installer (the zip file should have the word installer right in the filename.) Double click the .exe file, it will ask you where you want to install it, choose the default. My copy is installed on XP Pro.

Make sure you have easy access to the XAMPP Control Panel. This is important.

Once you have XAMPP installed, go to the XAMPP Control Panel.

Click Service.

Click Run XAMPP Control Panel as service.

Check at the very least Apache and Mysql. The other 2 are the Filezilla FTP server and a mail server. You really don’t need them.

Go to the browser of your choice and type in: http://localhost/ This will bring up some of the documentation.

That’s it. It’s so easy a caveman can do it! Seriously!

Any files you are going to use, or want to view in a browser, should go in the C:\xampp\htdocs folder. This can be changed, if you want to tackle the Apache configuration file: httpd.conf.