You know you have had them. Simple projects that turn out to be not so simple, and then you discover that it was your ignorance getting in the way. I had a few of them these last few days.
1. Default Gateway
While setting up alternative porst on security cameras I had three cameras that just would not behave. I tried over and over to get them to be visible from outside the LAN but unlike their dozens of siblings they jsut wouldn’t work. The problem (after a couple hours of tracking down phantom issues): I had not set the default gateway to the firewall’s IP so they would accept incoming from the WAN.
2. cURL
Building a basic php proxy for managing security videos through one server I decided cURL would be the best option. It just would not work nomatter what I tried. Then I discovered that cURL did not handle blank spaces well for the target address, but several target directories had them. The solution may be to just rename all directories so that none have spaces or trick it so that it sends out with a substitute character in place of the blank then have the script it is grabbing turn the replacement character back to a space.
3. Cookies don’t like ports.
One of my projects includes accepting incoming http calls via different ports. I was using $_SERVER[’HTTP_HOST’] to set the cookie domain and could not figure out why the cookies would not set. HTTP_HOST includes the port. THat meant either setting the domain by hand (not preferred), scripting to cut the “:” and everything after that off (the port number), or using $_SERVER[’SERVER_NAME’]. I may regret this in the future, but I jsut used SERVER_NAME.
4. The Administrator password.
One of the laptops I work with was having booting troubles so I grabbed the Win XP Pro disc and went into the recovery console. It requested the administrator password so I entered the password of the regular user (with admin rights) and no go. I entered the password used for Administrator on the network, no go. I entered in the Administrator password as it was when the computer was commissioned (we do change the password), and still no go. 3 strikes and you are out, hit enter to restart. I figured I would need to be near the network to log on as admin, so since I was doing this at home I figured I would wait. Just on a whim I restarted it and hit enter without a password. I was in.
So, now I am just a little bit smarter, but not much further along.
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