So, I recovered a system a while back and was running updates on it. After the video card update, I got this strange notice:

According to Microsoft on February 22nd Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008r2 will be released on Windows Update as well as the Microsoft Download Center. Those of you with access to MSDN or TechNet as well as Volume License Key (VLK) customers will get access to it early, on February 16th. Which of course will be followed almost immediately with dozens of torrents on the 16th about 5 minutes after.

The service pack includes, two new desktop virtualization features (RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory) as well as collecting all of the updates and fixes for the operating systems in one update rather than dozens of others.

I've been running a beta version of it for a little while now without any problems, so this should be a nice update for one of my more liked Microsoft Operating Systems. If it wasn't, Linux would have totally taken over my systems by now :)

So while adding another user to my hosting setup, I encountered this annoying bug:

Write failed: Broken pipe
Couldn't read packet: Connection reset by peer

After some hunting and trying of various things, I realized that Ubuntu's ssh is more picky than Debian 5's was.

I knew that you had to set the users home directory as owned by root, but each directory up the line has to be owned by root as well under Ubuntu, which I didn't realize. Wondering why no other users noticed they couldn't login, must have been because it's holiday season and none tried to do updates.

This error drove me nuts last night and tonight, trying to sort out what the issue was. Specifically in my case, it was with phpmyadmin running on a secure (HTTPS) site.

The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port

If you get this error, you are missing the following line from your fastcgi setup for your ssl vhost:

fastcgi_param HTTPS on;

To show that in context, you want something similar to:

location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/securehost$fastcgi_script_name;
include /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params;
}

LookInMyPC is a small (and portable) freeware tool designed to generate a comprehensive report of a system and export it to a HTML page. It will display antivirus, battery, bios, browser, installed applications, networking info, sound device and much more.

You can also see a sample report here