http://elizamagno.blogspot.com

I’ve been doing blog templates again… Wee!

Beautiful…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77X6xa453gM]

Chasing Pavements and Make You Feel My Love are my current faves.

This is Strong Bad.

Extremely funny,

super cute,

and very bad ass.

(wiki)

I just finished playing the 2nd game which is named :

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People

…

Intrigued yet?

At the I.T. conference:

“That is one sexy command prompt!”

All the painful troubleshooting all day led me to discover that my desktop’s firewall couldn’t be turned on/off, i thought that it was rather odd.  I read in an article that certain viruses can tamper with your firewall which really made me feel a little guilty since I have been turning my Avast Antivirus on-access protection off sometimes, and I think that in those times I was carelessly downloading torrents and so that semi-solves the mystery.

After moments of more head scratching I also noticed that Windows Firewall had this heading : For security some settings are controlled by Group Policy

After sifting through numerous Google search results, I discovered that this issue can be resolved by going into the Registry Editor and fixing it manually.  Here are the steps:

1. Run > regedit

2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SOFTWARE Policies Microsoft WindowsFirewall

3. Delete Windows Firewall

4. Restart computer

5. Run > gpedit.msc

6. Go to:

Computer Configuration
Administrative Templates
Network
Network Connections
Windows Firewall
Standard Profile

7. Select all options to Not Configured

8. Exit

Voila! Your Windows Firewall should be working fine, it worked well on my computer.
Thanks to this page : http://portal.aguk.net/2006/12/windows-firewall-options-are-greyed-out/

And nope, this didn’t fix my web host problems. GAH!

I’ve never had serious problems with Servobox up until yesterday as I was updating the channel’s program grid I found this error:

Issue # 1 : FTP

- Failed to retrieve directory listing (using FileZilla)

Which means that my FTP client got through the log-in process okay, but it couldn’t load all the site’s files and folders.  I didn’t think much of it.  I thought that my site was undergoing maintenance (by the web host) and that the problem would eventually go away like it usually does. But lo’ and behold — this morning when I was trying to access the site’s blog which uses phpmyadmin and a mySQL server  threw back the following error (Issue # 2) : Error establishing a database connection — this didn’t make any sense since I am the only one with the access to the Cpanel, who could have manipulated the files/settings?  So I immediately tried connecting to my FTP using my FTP client but it delivered the same error message as in Issue # 1.  I then went back to my cpanel and tried to access the File Manager tool but it said: FATAL :: unable to connect to localhost.  I checked my domain settings and my web settings and everything seems to be in order.  I can even access the site itself (it doesn’t use CMS for now) just not the pages connected to a database (i.e: forum, blog).

I think I am seriously failing at troubleshooting this on my own.  As I trace my steps, i really can’t see anything I have done in the past that may have caused this to happen plus I last accessed the site a month ago! So i am thinking these could be the possible reasons for this:

- web host has changed localhost in some way 
- web host is undergoing maintenance (i usually don’t notified which is a pain)
- site was hacked into (please God no)

The web host doesn’t have online customer care support either so I guess I have to call them up to see what is really going on.  

Another thing: Can’t access webmail

Sigh.