Archive for January, 2009

Random xampp crashes on Windows

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

One of my clients requires that all work be done on their computers, in office, running XP. Development environment is pretty standard. Eclipse with PDT, xampp for a local environment.

Today I ran into a problem where Apache was crashing constantly, and at first glance randomly. Dug into the Apache logs and saw this:

Parent: child process exited with status 3221225477

Huh?

Turned up the verbosity to debug for Apache logging and got the same error without any extra information related to it. After googling around a bit, found this: http://www.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=32617

Looks like the problem has to do with pdo mysql in xampp. To fix, download the latest php and replace libmysql.dll in xampp\apache\bin and xampp\php. So easy, yet such a frustrating error! I’m just curious as to whether it was a packaging error or???

Anyway, just wanted to write about both as a reminder for me, and maybe someone will find it useful if they run into the same problem.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Programming, System Administration | 1 Comment »

Scanning for active hosts in a given range

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

This is more of a reminder in case I need to do this again and forget how.

While setting up a VPN for a client, I neded a list of IPs on the internal network which I could use to test connectivity. Easiest way I found to find one was to scan the local network using nmap like so:

nmap -sP 10.12.34.0/24

That will scan the 256 addresses available under 10.12.34.NN and shoot back a list with which hosts responded to the ping and some other (possibly) helpful info. Here’s what the output looks like:

Starting Nmap 4.11 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2009-01-19 15:39 PST
Host 10.12.34.2 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:1E:2A:BF:54:4B (Unknown)
Host 10.12.34.70 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:14:51:0D:26:5E (Apple Computer)
Host 10.12.34.76 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:1E:0B:06:A2:DB (Unknown)
Host 10.12.34.100 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:0A:9D:06:28:49 (King Young Technology Co.)
Host 10.12.34.102 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:0A:E4:86:81:1C (Wistron)
Host 10.12.34.134 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:04:4B:06:F0:15 (Nvidia)
Host 10.12.34.138 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:04:F2:14:21:7A (Polycom)
Host 10.12.34.139 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:30:48:63:81:80 (Supermicro Computer)
Host 10.12.34.142 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:1C:C0:64:CE:8F (Unknown)
Host 10.12.34.254 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:04:F2:01:C8:5D (Polycom)
Nmap finished: 256 IP addresses (34 hosts up) scanned in 23.182 seconds

Tags: ,
Posted in System Administration | No Comments »