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Category: Life: Work and Techy

Jobs ahoy!

I know of quite a few companies currently recruiting – so if you are job hunting and think any of the following are of interest to you, please get in contact:

Leicester based
Senior Magento Developer
Senior Digital Designer
WordPress Developer
Account Manager

London based
Account Manager
Big Data Engineer
DevOps Engineer / Big Data SysAdmin
Machine Learning Specialist
Partnership Development Manager?

Guidford based
Sales Executive
DevOps Engineer
Python Software Developer
Systems Administrator

Brighton based
Java Developer
Head of User Experience and Design (UI / UX)
Senior Designer/UI Developer
Accountant
Senior Accountant
Trainee Account Manager (Finance Industry)
Outbound Sales Advisor

UK (contract/remote work)
WordPress Developer (up to £30/per hour)
Senior WordPress Developer (up to £45/per hour)
Symfony Developer

Clearing DNS caches

Just moved your site to a new provider/host and want to try and clear various DNS caches? Well, using http://www.opendns.com/support/cache/ will clear OpenDNS and https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/cache will clear Google’s: so that should get quite a few people sorted (if you are running Chrome copying chrome://net-internals/#dns into the address bar will clear your local cache).

Any body know any other DNS cache clearing snippets?

Linux: Setting up a VPN to only route specific IP addresses

This post will detail how to setup a Linux Mint 14 (based on Ubuntu) desktop machine (so using the GUI) to connect to a PPTP/L2TP VPN account (from SafeVPN.Net) and only route accesses to certain/set specified IP addresses.

In this scenario, I’m working on the fact that you’ve only just up for a PPTP/L2TP VPN account from SafeVPN.Net (or another VPN provider) and have been given details such as:

Destination: Major Town(Country)
VPN Server IP: 198.51.100.1
Your IP: 192.0.2.2
L2TP/PPTP VPN Username: vpn12345
Password: pa55w0rd

And you’ve informed “XYZ Inc” that your new “static IP address” is 192.0.2.2 (the Your IP section above) and that they’ve let you know you should now be able to connection from 192.0.2.2 to their “XYZ Server” on 203.0.113.3

1. First of all, open “Network Connections” (click Menu->Search and search for “Network Connections”) and then click the “VPN” tab.
2. Click “Add” and under the “Choose a VPN Connection Type”, select “Point-to-point Tunnelling Protocol (PPTP)” and click “Create”
3. In the Connection name box, enter a name for you to refer to the connection to (such as “SafeVPN – Major Town(Country)”)
4. In the “VPN” tab, for the “Gateway” enter the VPN Server IP (such as 198.51.100.1)
5. In the “VPN” tab, enter the L2TP/PPTN VPN Username and password.
6. In the “VPN” tab, click “Advanced” and ensure that for Authentication, ONLY MSCHAP and MSCHAPv2 are enabled (so disable PAP, CHAP and EAP). Enable “Use Point-To-Point encryption (MPPE)” with a security level of “All Available (DEfault) and enable “Allow BSD data compression”, “Allow Deflate Compression”, and “Use TCP header compression”.
7. Click “OK” on the “PPTP Advanced Options” box
8. Ensure “Available to all users” is set

If you were to save and connect at this point, all your internet traffic would be filtered over the VPN (if this is what you want, jump to step 13), but we only want traffic to “XYZ Server” on 203.0.113.3 to go over the VPN, so let’s continue setting things up.

9. Now click on the “IPv4 Settings” tab and click “Routes…”
10. Click “Add” and in the “Address” box, enter the IP address of the machine you which to access. For our XYZ server, this is “203.0.113.3”. In the “Netmask” box enter “255.255.255.255” (to indicate we only want this single IP address). Leave the Gateway and Metric boxes empty.
11. Select “Use this connection only for resources on its network”
12. Click “Ok” on the “Editing IPv4 routes” box

13. Click “Save…”
14. On your task bar, left-click the “Network Connections” icon (usually your wireless symbol or network cables joining icon). There should now be an option labelled “VPN Connections”, just select that and then your connection (“SafeVPN – Major Town(Country)” in our example)

You should now have access to the remote system over the VPN connection with all your other traffic using your normal connection!

(All IP addresses used in this example are from the “reserved for documentation” ranges as detailed in RFC 5737 and should not be publicly routable)

Android: Fix: Google Play Store site reporting “No devices”

If you have a problem with the Google Play store web site saying “No devices recognised”, “You have no devices” or just “No devices”, then try the following:

1) Load the App “Google Settings”
2) Google Settings->Go to “Android Device Manager”
3) Google Settings->”Android Device Manager”->Deselect “Allow remote factory reset”
4) Open “Settings”
5) Settings->Go to “Apps”
6) Settings->”Apps”->Slide across to “All Apps”
7) Select “Google Play Store”, wait for the “Calculating” sections to disappear, and then select “Clear Data”
8) Select “Google Services Framework”, wait for the “Calculating” sections to disappear, and then select “Clear Data”
9) Open “Google Play Store”
10) Wait between 1 minute and 24 hours for the Google Play website to update

And you should now be able to install applications on your phone or table via the Google Play website.

Extract referers from Apache logs

This quick awk one-liner (tested on Linux) will extract all referer (referrer) entries from a combined Apache log file (called LOGFILE) excluding entries such as “”, “-“, (empty) and ones containing DOMAIN. Useful if you want to check where external referers are coming from
awk '($11 !~ /^"?-?"?$/ && $11 !~ /DOMAIN/) {print $11}' LOGFILE