Caffeinated Wisdom

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I ran into a challenge last week. I had to write a script or program that creates an RSS file and upload it to a IIS server. The program would be be scheduled to run every so often. The IIS server did not supported DAV, but it supported Front Page Extensions 2002. I looked everywhere in the web for sample code on how to upload files to such servers. I found out that MS Internet Publishing is the technology used by Front Page Extensions. I also found out that there was an OLE provider for it and that I could connect to it using classic ADO 2.5. I tried the example provided in Microsoft site, but the code crashed when the ADODB.Stream object opened the stream from the record. The error said something about “Interface not supported” and “InvalidCast”. My old ASP 3.0 book has a sample of writing directly to the ADODB.Stream, so I tried that and it worked but it kept prompting a dialog asking for the username and password even though I had passed those in the Stream’s open method. To ...

I have a Linux virtual machine that serves as an FTP server. My problem was that the computers in the network were able to connect to its FTP service only if the computer was part of the Windows Domain. I could not figure out what was going on, since those machines could PING but not FTP the Linux server. After some troubleshooting, I found out that I had enabled the Windows Firewall for the VMware connections and therefore firewalling the traffic to the Virtual Machines hosted in the Windows computer. To solve the problem I cleared the check boxes for the firewall for the VM connections like this: