OK, so you wanna connect to your MsSQL Database from your CentOS box. Most of these steps should be easily replicated on your CentOS version of choice, but in my case I'm using CentOS 4.4 and the latest version of PHP

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 4.4 (Final)
$ rpm -q php
php-4.3.9-3.22.4

This particular aspect of networking/computer affects everyone with a network. It's so unbelievably necessary for anyone who deals with networks (at any level) to understand. I cannot stress this enough! :) That said, so many people have serious problems with it and I can kind of understand why. Every single site I've seen goes into the detail straight away with binary arithmetic. Yes, binary arithmetic is how you work these things out, but are these people doing this binary arithmetic in their head when they know a /26 has a subnet mask of 255.255.255.192?

JQuery is a great little Javascript library which simplifies lots of Javascript.

So this weekend, I decided it'd be nice to have some AJAX based updates on some pages I'm doing for work. As a developer what does this mean? Well from what I've seen before, a lot of effort.

The scenario - CentOS 4.3 with standard Apache setup. Do a 'yum install httpd' to install Apache and a 'yum install mod_authz_ldap' to install the LDAP authentication module we'll be using.

For any other platforms, it shouldn't be much different.

The next thing we need to do is setup some things on AD. Active Directory works on the basis that you need to bind to it to authenticate. OpenLDAP allows anonymous binded users to authenticate ... unfortunately Active Directory does not AFAIK (at least this is what it took to get it to work for me)

Logon to the AD server and:

You'll begin to notice around here that e-mail and Postfix are two of my favourite subjects. Postfix is simply the best MTA out there at the moment, for a number of reasons, not least of which is the postfix-users mailing list.

I wrote a piece previously regarding some geolocation theory.

Now the theory is all well and good, but it can get a little bit messy. Different RIR's display whois information differently and you have to parse human addresses out.

The good people at webhosting.info have provided everyone (yeh, even you!) with a list of every single netblock and where they think (read: educated guess) an IP is located.

This is a small introduction into a few small ways that Geo-location works. Places like 'Google' use geo-location to track down IP addresses and probably maintain internal databases. How do they get this information? How accurate is it? I'll try to answer these questions.