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Showing posts from October, 2011

Windows 7: restoring old-style logon screen tutorial

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I've found a lot of information on the subject on various blogs and forums, strangely everyone seems to come to the conclusion that it is impossible to get back to the old style logon screen that appeared like this under Windows XP: Why would anyone do this? Why would you go back to something like this? There could be thousands of reasons. The default logon screen of Windows 7 looks like this: If, like me, you work in a computer-unfriendly environment such as a school, you'll find that a lot of people are unable to locate the "Switch user" button or simply wouldn't just dare to click it. All they were told is to enter their username and password and they never expected to have to do anything else. So how do you restore the good old logon screen with a simple text box for the user name, and a simple text box for the password? It's actually a lot simpler than some people would think. Local security policy management console Press Windows+R to get the

Nginx market share soon to hit 10% mark

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According to multiple sources such as: NetCraft's July 2011 Web Server survey W3tech's Web server usage statistics as of October 25 the amazing and lightning-fast web server known as nginx is just about to hit the 10% market share mark in the next couple of months. This is a fantastic milestone for the author, Igor Sysoev , who probably didn't imagine that the application (which he originally developed on his own) would meet such fame. Diagram courtesy of W3Techs.com (article linked above). Its market share went from a little over 5% to almost 10% over the last year as you can see.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that the release of my Nginx HTTP Server book  (released Summer 2010) was one of the factors that contributed to the popularity of the Russian web server. It is my belief that the sole quality and efficiency of the software is what made its success. The book was and is being translated into three languages: In Japanese In Chinese (t

PPTP server fix for iOS problems (pptpd/PopTop)

Ever since I was offered an iPod touch 4th gen I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to connect to PPTP based VPN servers from iOS . Apparently this is a well known issue since iOS 4.3.3 or earlier, that did not get fixed in the iOS 5 update. Having set up my own PPTP-based VPN servers using Poptop (also known as pptpd ) under CentOS, I always found it strange that my servers would function perfectly fine under all versions of Windows, but completely refuse to work under iOS and reportedly MacOS X as well. Symptoms were the following: Initially, the connection to the server starts ("Connecting... Starting... Authenticating... ") and appears successful for a second but then immediately drops, with a vague error message. After a few tweaks that I read on DD-WRT's PPTP server configuration page (pertinent given that DD-WRT uses poptop as well) the situation changed but still failed to solve all of my problems: I was able to connect normally, without any error mess