Here are some links

• Nice PayPal Button Lite
  • I would upgrade to Nice PayPal Button for $15US (it says $19) you get MANY more options like your own image instead of buy now, you can add text to the boxes before you get to Paypal etc.
  • see docs for Lite and options available vs. the docs for the full thing.
• WordPress Easy Paypal Payment or Donation Accept Plugin –
  • up and running in seconds
  • you have to put your paypal email address in the box – which is not great
• Quick Paypal Payments
• FoxyCart Plug in – had an error when I added a product – so I never tested it not even a little. Sad because it had a 4.5/5 rating

Tired of Paypal not showing the credit card option as the only option? Want to present you customers with a credit card screen and not a paypal one so they don’t have to sign up? Here are some reasons, explainations and … at the bottom a solution – Payments Pro – which is not free.

https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Business-Archive/PayPal-forces-visitors-to-my-site-to-create-a-PayPal-account/td-p/696827

Other options are (unresearched)

• lightspeed
• squareup.com

Lots of work has been done reading and writing to excel. Here are the links that were used to figure it out various parts.

To make things easy when possible, uploading and downloading csv files with an Excel header.

I wish I had the code from another project – but back to Google to re-figure it all out again – this is the old style Excel, not the new .xlsx xml version so using the Excel api is important to (re)understand

Continue reading →

In an attempt to get 2 customers VPN’ed both being non-Profits, I had the privilege of buying a Mac-Mini to replace the Mac G5 they had that already had L2TP/iPSec working already. You turn it on set a password or two, allow the traffic through the firewall and … well it is done (its a Mac- that is why people are obsessed with them) .

The other customer likes Macs now too but their server is a Windows Based one – so now we can start from anywhere. So after a few consultations – it seems PPTP is the easiest to set up and use by everyone, but even MS does not recommend and favours iPSec – it now provides it as a client option natively.

Other questions I had were – do I install it on the server? As an endpoint through a router? As the router? PfSense is a clear winner as a router or endpoint for the price (just buy it preinstalled on an appliance was geek inc’s advice. But I have another close associate that LOVES OpenVPN and has had clients on it for years running successfully. Here is my journey and some GREAT links (remember – that is what this blog is all about – links for you and I to refer to and use)

Continue reading →

General

• Setup server DNS if you have to – tools below to check
• Turn on VPN (L2TP and PPTP is what i did)
• Make Open Directory Users …
  • and group if you are using sharing and assign these users to the group
• PPTP?
  • Setup different NON local users in Open Directory
  • then set the services they have access to.
  • Great video here.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG8HcsQuyjI
• L2TP – local users can access using this protocol
• unblock ports and port forward ports router
  • PPTP TCP 1723 with Protocol 47 or “GRE”
  • L2TP UDP 500
  • http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1629
  • http://blogs.technet.com/b/rrasblog/archive/2006/06/14/which-ports-to-unblock-for-vpn-traffic-to-pass-through.aspx
  • use ipchicken.com to get your ip address

  Set up your client – this is SUPER article with the tweaks and pitfalls to watch out for – scroll down to the client setup part

Here is the nitty gritty. Continue reading →

An SBS server for one of my clients is constantly filling up with IIS logs and now 20GB Sharepoint logs (they don’t use IIS but it was running), update WWUS files for the client computers and share point files (I just found out) and no one uses that either. The drive recommendation at one point in time was 60GB and a good friend of mine who sets up servers recommended this size, set up the server and it has been running for some time now. The is annoyingly the 3rd time I have done drastic steps to reduce the size. Lets see if this one lasts.

Reduce size by:

• installing apps on another drive (Program Files) upon install
• turn off IIS logs
• move your WSUS data to another drive (lots of links for that one on google)
• move your sharepoint dB files!!!
• don’t recommend windows without a yearly service agreement if your a consultant or don’t work for non-profits as an IT person if you have a bleeding heart

How I found large files the upshot is the linked article below helped get rid of a 20GB sharepoint log file … Continue reading →

Error received:

please run sandisk secureaccess from a sandisk external device

just unplug, plug into a diff port and try again. Seems to work. I learned it from the last post here.

So the code in theory is super slick – just use a StringWriter and HtmlWriter and in 2-5 commands it is downloaded to the client (see this link and the caveats that people use to get things working!). NO SUCH LUCK HERE. The main reason is that I have 2 columns with buttons in them at the front – the whole grid is DYNAMICALLY created by myself in the code (that is not included below). The c# code is included below.

So using some other researching I found a couple of concepts that worked together. I am sure there are some other optimizations but this worked.

First, I converted the GridView contents to a DataTable and for all columns 3 or more columns over I filled the datatable. Thanks to this fellow. Because the Gridview has all the source info including column headers etc. it works out great. Continue reading →