recursively search a certain file for certain text

July 1st, 2009 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in Hosting

Have you ever tried to do a recursive linux search for a text string inside a particular file? For example
grep -r "mail" *.php
and then it fails because the current folder doesn’t have any php files in it?

Here is how you can achieve a search inside all .htaccess files for the text php_flag

find -iname .htaccess | while read line; do grep --with-filename "php_flag.*" $line; done

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Advanced File Deletion in Linux

June 13th, 2009 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in Hosting

Here is a cool way to delete files according to some complex rules without knowing complicated bash commands.

First, create a file as follows that contains your deletion rules.

+ public_html/
+ public_html/*
- access-logs
- etc/
- logs/
- mail/
- .cpanel/
- .cpaddons/
- .spamassassin/
- .ssh/
- public_ftp/
- cpmove.psql/
- tmp/
- cpeasyapache/
- MySQL-install/

Then, run rsync with the source and destination folder being the same
rsync -avz --include-from:rulesFile.txt . . --delete-excluded

You can add –dry-run if you want to see what will be deleted:

rsync -avz --include-from:rulesFile.txt . . --delete-excluded --dry-run

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ASP.NET 4.0 Features

May 27th, 2009 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in Uncategorized

Here is a list of new features in ASP.NET 4.0.

Very interesting. Auto start feature, new ways to choose where data is cached, built in option for compression session (via gzip), and more!

LINQ to Entities Create Function Import Scalar Value Missing

April 9th, 2009 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in .NET articles

LINQ to Entities seems really great. It can save you a lot of time in writing unnecessary db connection code, improve the performance many fold, only connect to the db when required (lazy loading), and easy concurrency handling for you.

However there is a missing feature which I found out the hard way. If you try to do a ‘Create Function Import’ and it returns a scalar, the code will not be automatically generated, due to ‘lack of time’ from the MS Team:

MSDN Forums - See the post by Noam.

So basically, you are handicapped! Either write the code yourself or just do it the old fashioned way

Write .NET 3.5 in a .NET 2.0 World

April 2nd, 2009 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in Uncategorized

Wow, sweet. Use .NET 3.5 features in .NET 2.0.

A quick overview how to do it.
1. Edit your .CSPROJ file and manually add another reference to System.Core
Add a True

This will make the compiler copy it to the BIN folder.

Thats it. You can now use .NET 3.5 features

Copy Data from One SQL Instance to Another

February 3rd, 2009 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in Uncategorized

When using SQL Server Management Studio you might want to copy data from one DB to another (using just a SELECT and INSERT statement)

It’s so easy you won’t believe it

sp_addlinkedserver @server='192.168.123.456', @provider='SQLNCLI',    @srvproduct='',@provstr='User Id=sa; Password=are-you-crazy-to-use-sa'

insert into [192.168.123.456].MYDB.dbo.tblRecords

select * from MYDB.dbo.tblRecords

and when you are done

sp_dropserver  [192.168.123.456]

References:
sp_addlinkedserver on MSDN

sp_dropserver on MSDN

What is hnc.cgi ?

December 13th, 2008 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in Uncategorized

hnc.cgi is a spam script. Its also known as dm.cgi.

If you have this script running, chances are your server has been exploited.

Here is the actual dm.cgi script if you want to see it.

Changes in __doPostback in .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0

November 27th, 2008 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in Uncategorized

Before and After

If you manually want to simulate a postback, Here is how you would stick together a string manually calling __doPostBack in .NET 1.1
In this case its making a link in a particular linkbutton control inside a datagrid.

__doPostBack in .NET 1.0

string link = "<a href=\"javascript:__doPostBack('dataGridCart$_ctl" + i + "$linkButton','');\"";

__doPostBack in .NET 2.0

string link = "<a href=\"javascript:__doPostBack('dataGridCart$ctl0" + i + "$linkButton','');\"";

Dont use this function any more.  Use Page.GetPostBackClientHyperlink from .NET 2.0+.  This is because they might change __doPostBack yet again and your code will be broken.

Look at the comment thread on this codeproject article for more details

Further reading: Do Postback Hijacking

Tracking Influenza (flu) with Google Trends

November 13th, 2008 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in Uncategorized

This is quite an astonishing use of Google Trends.  Google realized that when people get sick they (obviously) search for flu related keywords and they managed to find a correlation to actual published flu infection statistics.  Quite amazing and this is definately a unique and interesting application of technology.

How we track flu trends (Google blog)
Here is an explanation of how it works

What other ideas can we apply this to?

Read Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# free

November 11th, 2008 by Sameer | No Comments | Filed in .NET articles

Due to a recent agreement between Google and some book publishers, they are going to publish a large number of books online (limited content depending on each publishers agreement).

So you can now read Pro ASP.NET 2.0 C# for free online (a large chunk of it)!  Click the link for more.  This book is jam packed (1000 pages+) with well-written details on everything under the sun in .NET 2.0.  I was in particular looking for SQL Cache Dependency information which I found in there.

Apparently in SQL Server 2000, Cache Dependency is done on a table basis, you cannot have it dependent on a certain condition (for example select * from CONTACTS where location=’canada’).  If any data at all changes inside CONTACTS then the cache is considered invalidated and you will need fresh data.   Lots of improvements in SQL Server 2005 boys….

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