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I have just spent 5 hours on the cellphone/remote with a colleague trying to help out her friend who is in charge of their org's WordPress site. The last hour and a half were spent trying to find/fix an issue on my colleague's computer where the strangest thing happened whilst adding a new page/report.
When she tried to browse to any page for the site, html tags/code was displaying on the screen instead of being rendered. It also happened w/Edge. At the time, her friend was still able to access the same site, as was I. After her friend logged off and back on, she also started getting the same thing. Meanwhile, I'm still able to browse the site, login to wp, etc. but neither of them can. 
No matter what page she goes to, the same code is coming back which leads me to believe that a wp plugin or maybe even something upstream on the host is blocking the request and stupidly spitting out malformed html/headers. The intended page is some sort of self-submitting form with elemets using the name wsidchk that seems possibly to be related to cloudflare.
What I've tried:
0: Being as annoying as possible since I really didn't want to help in the first place, and I despise long phone calls.
1: Verifying that a cloudflare plugin is not active on their site.
2: Temporarily turning off the only security related plugin. (meant to prevent login abuse)
3: Deleting her browser cache and trying Edge. Edge also displayed the html code.
4: Tried on my 2 systems with multiple browsers. It works on my machines!  Not just the site, but the things that they needed help before they were unable to access the site. Everything works as it should, I've done what you needed me to do. Is it really now my problem that you are having problems accessing your website?
The real problem is that my colleague's friend has contracted with a 'webmaster' who seems to be inept when it comes to anything dynamic such as a report involving php script and mysql.
At any rate, I have been provided with credentials to manage their WP, and as of now, I'm the only one who can actually access the site.  I've got a good mind to start billing by the hour! My day is shot! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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kmoorevs wrote: I have been provided with credentials to manage their WP,
Congratulations on becoming sorry, you're now their web site admin.
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Did I mention that I despise WP/PHP/MySQL? They couldn't pay me enough!...well everything's negotiable but I would have to insist on a proper web application, not wordpress.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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I'll admit I have a lot of reading to catch up with to reach the level of understanding about networks that I'd like to have. Well, specifically, subnetting.
After some going back and forth with ChatGPT for about half an hour (trying to get it to rephrase its answers to try to show it that previous answers were clearly wrong), I've only managed to become less certain about many things, but I'm hoping I've at least come to one correct conclusion:
I want the valid IP range on my home network to be restricted to 192.168.X.Y, where X ranges from 1 through 31, and Y ranges from 1 through 254 (with the understanding that, for all intents and purposes, you never directly assign [whatever].0 or [whatever].255 to a device).
So, the subnet I should be using is 255.255.224.0 (so for the third octet I could use everything between 1 through 31).
What I haven't been able to get out of ChatGPT is whether a machine configured with an IP between 192.168.32.1 and 192.168.255.254 would fail to reach the rest of the systems on 192.168.[1-31].[1-254]. It sounds right to me, but until I try, I'm just guessing.
Generally, I configure all of my systems with a static IPv4 address. And I want all systems within my network to be able to see each other, just to keep things simple.
Am I right at least so far, with that subnet of 255.255.224.0?
Further discussion:
The idea is - for the third octet - the 255 devices under "1" would be my physical machines. My laptops would be under "2". Printers under "3". My first VM host would be at 10 (192.168.10.1). VMs it hosts would be 192.168.10.2 through .254. My second VM host would be 192.168.11.1; its VMs would range from 192.168.11.2 through 254, etc.
Of course that leaves some big gaps within each range, but it does keep things organized (at least in my mind it does). I'm no network admin; do people segregate things this way?
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dandy72 wrote: do people segregate things this way?
No, it is overkill. If the number of hosts is under 255, and I suspect for a home network this is the case, You can just use a traditional netmask like 255.255.255.0. If you want to "organize" hosts you can still do something like 1 to 30 computers; 40 to 100 VMs; printers, something else.
If you set a netmask like you want 255.255.224.0, that is also, ok but it's not going to exclude the hosts with 0 and 255. So a host like 192.168.2.0 is perfectly acceptable Only the end for the range is going to be treated differently: the 192.168.31.255 is going to be the broadcast address for your network.
Sub-netting is usually done for the exact opposite of your reason: when you want hosts not to be visible outside their own sub-nets.
More thoughts:
- set up a DHCP server for random things that land on your network (phones, friends, etc.). Give it a range distinct from your fixed hosts.
- set up a DNS server and give meaningful names to your devices instead of relying on IP addresses.
I'm using a RPi for both the DNS and DHCP server. It is more than enough for my needs.
Mircea
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Not dissing Chris, but the stupidity of Microsoft never ceases to enrage and mystify me. Most companies are started from enraged employees/customers that know they can do it better, and they do... anyway...
So, let's talk Windows 11 and the bs that MS blows our way for UI improvements. Rounded icons, ads in the startup bar, ever invasive AI, yada yada. Well I work on a laptop 99% of the time. I'm not that mobile, I just like the size. I have Windows 10 and 11 on multiple machines. Today all I wanted to do on my Windows 11 laptop was to turn off the touchpad when a mouse was connected. It's a fairly common thing users want to do.
So, where do I find it? The setting is hidden under a drop down bar where you just have to be intuitive/desperate enough to keep clicking. Help is useless, and most of the doc on Windows 11 trails the ui... what a steaming pile of debris.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Windows 11 needs a massive, massive cleanout. The full Marie Kondo treatment.
The update UI that wraps the older UI that wraps the win 10 UI which wraps the Win7 UI which wraps the Win95 has, I feel, reached the tipping point of collapse. Just right click on the desktop and then select "Show more options" as Exhibit A that the UX Product Manager just gave up. Removing quick tasks from the contect menu of taskbar icons was their way of saying "I hate the World".
cheers
Chris Maunder
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charlieg wrote: ads in the startup bar
The worse the economy gets the more prevalent this will become. The big wigs know something the average person refuses to believe as they get brainwashed by TV.
But, you know... happy hump day. 
Jeremy Falcon
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"happy hump day"
that used to mean some nsfw different to me, but then I got older.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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charlieg wrote: ads in the startup bar
I haven't made the jump to 11, but I know it'll happen. Has nobody yet figured out what IP(s) can be safely blocked to prevent those from being downloaded in the first place, without breaking the rest of the OS?
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I've been using Windows 10 on an iMac for years with a secondary monitor. This year I've switched to macOS as my main dev system on the iMac, and the other screen is used for my win11, Ubuntu, Debian or mac mini machine. Lots of juggling.
I'm working on the iMac on one file, and on the mac mini on the same file, but a different version. I was wishing I could just copy from one to the other, but they are on different machines. Then, without thinking, I copied some text, dragged the cursor from one screen to the other, and then pasted.
I totally forgot about macOS Universal control. It was so intuitive I wasn't even aware of what I was doing: it just worked the way I expected it to (but had I thought about it, I would have not expected it to work).
I love UI/UX like that. It's like the perfect butler: they are there before you even realise you need them, and then step back once the job is done. But without the whole moral issues thing and all that.
I wish we all had the time and resources and mental space to write software that worked like this.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: I wish we all had the time and resources and mental space to write software that worked like this.
It's been my experience that companies will spend hundreds of thousands so people can argue over a text box for months and call that innovation.
Jeremy Falcon
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Chris Maunder wrote: I was wishing I could just copy from one to the other, but they are on different machines. Then, without thinking, I copied some text, dragged the cursor from one screen to the other, and then pasted.
It came with the Logitech mouse drivers, maybe four or five years ago. I never worked with "i" stuff, but if I remember the documentation right, it worked across OSes.
I never saw a standard protocol for cut & paste across internet - maybe it exists, maybe it even existed then. Most likely, Logitech devised its proprietary cut & paste protocol between its drivers. They are just talking to themselves, need not relate to other mice or OSes (except that the mouse driver will have to know how to do both copy and paste on the local system - but if you write a driver for an OS, you are likely to know that!), so there really isn't that much need for a world standard protocol.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Sort of like Synergy? Synergy - Share one mouse & keyboard across computers Although that's sort of the other way around, perhaps being best described as a software KVM switch, that allowed you to cut & paste between systems. Maybe drag-and-drop, too. It's been a long time since I used it, but your description of rang a bell for me. So, if you're looking for something to do this, and you have windows/mac/linux systems, it might be a solution for you.
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"
Chuckles the clown
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I would love to have something like this, Microsoft supports this, but you have to login to the Microsoft ID. I refuse to do so. i have an app in the works...
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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This is exactly my type of passive-aggressive.
Sadly this one won't ship to Canada.
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I'd never heard of it, but according to the sparse information I can find it's a sort private e-mail network that predates e-mail.
Apparently it's "popular" for EDI exchange and not much else (although the military and NATO use it, among others, because it's more secure than e-mail).
I just got a question from a client if I can deliver an EDI message via ATLAS400 instead of regular e-mail.
Seriously, as soon as someone mentions EDI I get shivers down my spine.
How can something be so ridiculously obscure and complicated and yet so popular!? 
A simple OpenAPI specification would've done the trick! (I know, EDI predates REST, JSON, SOAP and even XML...)
Anyway, it seems I need some subscription to an X.400 service and even then, there are 0 code examples on the entire internet...
So much for "industry standard" 
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Oh man now I feel old. I think we used that on AIX machines in the early 90's.
Good luck! You've got this! 
cheers
Chris Maunder
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It rings a bell. Maybe bank networks, like ATM machines use it? IDK. I just think it sounds familiar.
NVM, I'm thinking of something else.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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X.4nn are ISO standards that describe mail systems at various levels. I assume ATLAS 400 is a product/service that supports X.400 messaging and then the question becomes how do you interface with it.
Back in the day the X.400 systems I worked with (ISOCOR, Exchange) had file gateways, you simply prepared a valid X.400 binary object and that was picked up by the mail server. ATLAS 400 may have other options, their website is in French so I can't tell.
If you need to generate X.400 objects then you'll see the standard is complicated, like all international standards, but since you're presumably only sending, and fairly simple e-mails at that, you only need to cover a limited subset. If you can't find any libraries that you can use I may be able to dig up some old code (25 years+, plain C) that might be of help. Writing it from scratch isn't terrible if you're used to reading standards, BNF etc.
I assume the EDI part is a solved problem. You probably don't want to write your own code for that.
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Certainly not "private" email! One of the reasons why it was rejected by the internet community around 1990 was that is assumed a public infrastructure comparable to the paper mail system, with post offices run by recognized authorities, strict tests for conformance before you were recognized by the post office, etc.
X.400 was standardized in 1984, with a revision in 1988 that still holds up today. (There are a few updates since, but they are rather insignificant.) From the first (1984) version, it fully handled binary body parts. All attribute strings use 8 bit character sets, transmitted in a Tag-Length-Value format, so there is never any need for quoting or escaping.
Encrypted mail was included from the very first version, and with that: Authentication.
As the mail transfer is done through a network of publicly recognized agents, you cannot fake mail: The transfer network knows where it was submitted, and verifies that the sender identification corresponds to the identity of the submitter (you must present an ID when submitting mail), so tracing/curbing a spammer would be quite simple.
The message transfer service can provide a delivery report (for non-repudiation purposes), both when the message is delivered from the transfer service to the recipient's mailbox and when the user fetches it from the mailbox into his reader.
A related service: You can submit a message for delivery at a specific time: The message transfer service holds it back at the target "post office" until the specified time, when it is delivered to the recipient's mailbox. If you change your mind before the delivery time is up, you can recall the message, and it is not delivered. (In the old days, the postal system had this service for paper mail as well: You could request a given delivery time, as well as recall mail not yet delivered.)
Chances are that you have used X.400! The major change from the 1984 to the 1988 version was not much on the functional side, but a complete reorganization of the standard content. So the directory service, developed for the address format of X.400 email, and first a part of the X.400 standard, was split off as X.500 in the 1988 version. The internet community didn't have any directory system comparable to X.500 (or if you like: X.400-and-something; I don't have that version available, but X.421 rings a bell; that may be wrong), so they developed an IP-based protocol based on X.500, leaving out the parts too complex to be implemented by sophomore or junior IT students, and called it LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. Maybe you haven't coded the LDAP protocol yourself, but you must have been using applications that accesses LDAP directories.
Another X.400-X.500 thing you most certainly have used (maybe without knowing it): Certificates for e.g. TLS authentication/encryption are called "X.509 certificates". This was just a framework, not fully developed, in 1984, when the directory service was part of X.400. So you could argue that you are using X.500, not X.400 - but X.509 has its roots in X.400.
Baseline: X.400 was a fully matured, fully functional E-mail protocol since 1988 - almost all of it in place in 1984. In spite of threescore (or thereabouts) extensions to SMTP, it still doesn't provide the full capabilities of X.400 forty years ago.
Now, X.400 (as well as X.500) is an element in a large infrastructure, built on some rather fancy building blocks. The standard spec is based on a set of lower protocols, which are probably completely unknown to a pure internet guy. You do not sit down tonight with a beer in your hand, intending to flip through the standard so you can start coding it tomorrow morning. Learning the inner workings of X.400 and all the standards it is based on is a huge task if you know nothing of it in advance!
Your only hope is to find some implementation that you can use, and learn its interface. That will probably be some sort of "P7" protocol implementation - how to access your mailbox. The protocol between the mailbox and the transfer service is the "P3" protocol, and is significantly more complex. That is not a place to start!
Note that X.400 (like all other X.*** protocols) defines all the details of what goes across the line. It also defines how you submit and receive data, but there is not a one-to-one relationship between your calls and the network transfers. Sometimes, the connection between the two is rather vague (at least until you learn the inner workings).
If you are going to use X.400, rather than implement it, you can forget about the line protocol, and rather study the service interface (a.k.a "API). The standard defines the services (calls), and the parameters in an abstract sense: Details of what kind of values, in which structures, but nothing about how these are realized in a specific language or on a specific machine - that is all "a local matter". You have the freedom to do it just the way you like, as long as it comes down to the standard line protocol elements.
When you find yourself a P7 implementation for your OS and machine, that implementation has made some decisions about how the abstract data objects are implemented as concrete ones, and you must dance to that fiddle.
If you decide to jump into this vast ocean  , X.413 is the document where you find the P7 service definitions. X.419 documents the line protocol. But you can't just read these two alone - most of the stuff from X.400 to X.420 is "required basic knowledge" for any sort of implementation, even if you are just implementing the message store (mailbox) with P3 in one end, P7 in the other. You find them all at https://www.itu.int/itu-t/recommendations/index.aspx?ser=X[^]; click "X.400-X.499: Message Handling Systems" and navigate from there.
But you are not done with that! You will need to learn ASN.1 (in the X.68x series) and ROSE (in the X.88x series) just to understand the X.400 standards. Then comes ACSE (X.217) and Reliable Transfer (X.218/X.228), and most likely a few more.
* * *
One thing that is not clear to me: You can develop an EDI application, and feed it through your mailbox to the X.400 network. But: Is there an X.400 network you can mail it to? I am not familiar with ATLAS400, it seems to be an X.400 network of sorts, but how can you access it? How can the customer access it? Does it provide an X.400 MTA (Message Transfer Agent, a "post office")? Do they offer a message store to be run centrally? Or to be run locally at your PC? Do they provide documentation of their P7 API? (I really should say "message store API", you don't have an API to the protocol).
Seems like there are lots of open ends here!
* * *
While OSI protocols are really tough get under your skin: If the tools are in place, as well as good implementations of all lower layers, and you know the formalism, the definition languages, and you have proper tools: Adding an application such as P3 or P7 (or the X.500 directory protocol) is just the frosting on the cake. The final touch. Almost no work at all, compared to implementing it all the way to the bottom.
You are not in that situation.
Bottom line: Even if you find some suitable message store implementation (P7 protocol) I think your task will be formidable, if you have no background in OSI protocols. To be frank: I do not expect you to succeed. (But kudos to you if you do succeed!)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Well, that's a little disturbing. A human driver would not stop for a person wearing a "STOP" T-Shirt. Imagine what might happen if a self driving vehicle encountered a person wearing a "Speed Limit 100" T-Shirt! Clearly the Traffic sign detection algorithms need improving.
One has to wonder how they might deal with some of these: The 20 Most Confusing Road Signs Ever
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"
Chuckles the clown
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Brings up a serious question.
What about flagman/person who are controlling the traffic flow when a construction crew is occupying one lane of a two lane road. They often have hand held stop signs, but it is not a stop and go situation. You have to wait for the flagman to flip the sign around to the "Slow" sign to safely cross over into the other lane of traffic to get by the work crew.
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