Feb 24
A new article has been published a few minutes ago regarding Social Networking and how it can affect your career.
It available via RSS : http://feeds.feedburner.com/psarticles
Feb 14
40% off Languard effective now 14th Feb
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UK Clients:
LanGuard for 4 IP’s with the first years SMA fee: Buy it here
LanGuard for 8 IP’s with the first years SMA fee:
EuroZone Clients:
LanGuard for 4 IP’s with the first years SMA fee: Buy it here
LanGuard for 8 IP’s with the first years SMA fee:
USA Clients:
LanGuard for 4 IP’s with the first years SMA fee:
All the above include:
One years free Software Maintence Agreement (SMA)
The report pack is included free by default (previously this was around £59 per year)
For more pricing please contact Protocol Solutions or use the contact form
Feb 13
I had to reconfigure the .htaccess for the APACHE server we run a few days ago.
A few system administrators still dont know how to correctly modify the .htaccess and apply it.
I am including a working template that anybody can use, and it is commented too.
For people who want to download get it from here (view it with notepad) : http://www.mediafire.com/?49lxrdqk542
The .htaccess is also posted below for anyone to read also, and perhaps see some ideas that might be useful for their servers, or even see there are a few things that can be done without cluttering up the robots.txt. I for one perfer to put most things into the .htaccess because nobody else can see it, where with the robots.txt, anyone can see it and also because spammers and spam bots / spammer user-agents usally ignore the robots.txt file
## DISABLE HOTLINKING
RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?PUTyourDomainHERE/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|js|css)$ - [F]
## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} info\.biyad\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
## USER IP BANNING
<Limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
deny from 74.54.131.194
allow from all
</Limit>
## AN EXAMPLE OF A REDIRECT
Options +Indexes
IndexOptions -FancyIndexing
Redirect permanent /www.PUTyourDomainHERE/oldPAGE.html http://www.PUTyourDomainHERE/newPage.html
Redirect permanent /www.PUTyourDomainHERE/OLDPage.html http://www.PUTyourDomainHERE/someNEWdirectory/NewPage.html
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP:IGNORE_INCON846393} !^Yes$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(GET|POST)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}
!.*\.(css|jpg|ai|doc|bin|ogg|mp3|pdf|rtf|ps|ppt|jpeg|png|gif|rar|zip|bz|bz2|gz|tar|iso|chm|z|cue|deb|rpm|ac3|au|snd|mid|midi|wav|bmp|jpe|psd|avi|mpg|mpeg|mpe|mp4|ico|rdf)$ [NC]
## AN EXAMPLE OF A REDIRECT OF DYNAMIC PAGES TO STATIC PAGES
RewriteCond %{query_string} ^option=com_content&task=view&id=23$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ /page1? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{query_string} ^option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=36$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ /page2? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{query_string} ^option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=30$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ /page3? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{query_string} ^option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=34$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ /page4? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{query_string} ^option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=29$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ /page5? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{query_string} ^option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=38$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ /page6? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{query_string} ^option=com_sefservicemap&Itemid=37$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ /sitemap.html? [R=301,L]
## AN EXAMPLE OF A PERMANENT REDIRECTs AKA 301
redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yourDOMAIN/newpage.html
redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.yourDOMAIN/newpage2.html
redirect 301 /oldpage3.html http://www.yourDOMAIN/newpage3.html
redirect 301 /oldpage4.html http://www.yourDOMAIN/newpage4.html
## A WORKING EXAMPLE OF BLOCKING BAD BOTS OR USER AGENTS KNOWN TO BE RELATED TO SPAM
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^EmailSiphon” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^EmailWolf” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^ExtractorPro” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^CherryPicker” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^NICErsPRO” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^Teleport” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^EmailCollector” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^LinkWalker” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^Zeus” bad_bot
<Limit GET POST>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>
Feb 13
I had to do some testing that required a proxy in Ireland. Bascially our IP at the time was not recogised as being Irish based, even though it was…
Anyway it took ages to find a working list of proxies in Ireland.
So the list is here : free Irish based proxies
Some reasons you might want to use a proxy would be: when for example your ip is not recognised by Eircom.net and you want to login to their webmail. Sure there are other reasons but I am not gonna list them here:-)
Feb 11
After much consideration, in light of the fact that small and medium business may not be able to afford GFI Lanuguard NSS, Protocol Solutions is going to offer GFI Languard at a 40% discount to companies with less than 150 employees.
Prices will be active from 14th February at this link only:
More details in a few hours will be posted here.
Feb 08
I was reading an article at Independant.ie
Call me cynical if you like, but I cannot help thinking that 3 paid John Kennedy to review the 3g Modem.
The reason for thinking like that is because if you have been following the discussions at tomrafteryit.net on this thread or on this thread , you will get an idea you how bad this product really is (*cough* “service”)
It seems to work when reporters are trying it out, but since all they do is generally just surf the web and try to get a video or two downloaded, thats not really a proper test. Plus the fact that 3 probably tested and “made sure” it would work before giving it to the reporter.
You can bet they dont do that for their average customer 
Feb 07
I have done some SEO tweaking to the blog, and I ran a report using WebSite Grader. The Protocol Solutions blog got a SEO grade of 90/100.
The last time I did this the blog got a grade of 82/100 or 83/100. This is not a drastic improvment, but its always nice to be quantify the various changes and “know” that (eventually), these changes will help organic searching.
I dont know why but now our Alexa rank is about 608,000. The last time I checked this it was somewhere around the 1.3 million mark! Obviously this is a big improvment.
We had hoped to break 5,000 visitors a month, and we did. It is only the beginning of the second week of February, and already we have had 7,000 visitors. This is great!
The blog, is getting double the traffic , that the homepage gets, but nobody is complaining
Feb 02
On some pages, at our website (www.protocolsolutions.co.uk) , visitors will notice the two rss feeds, one for the articles and one for the blog.
It is half way completed and when it is complete, we will test it.
Ok, an update on the above post, all pages at www.protocolsolutions.co.uk now have the options of RSS for the blog and for the articles written by Paul Walsh
Jan 30
If you are currently an RSS feed subscriber to one of our feeds, Paul Walsh would like to ask you:
(1) Do you prefer the feeds to be seperate?
(2) Or would you like all feeds from Protocol Solutions blog and website to be combined into one RSS feed?
Right now the feeds we have are:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/psarticles
and
http://feeds.feedburner.com/pspw
If you would please submit a comment with your preference.
Jan 29
A few clients have mentioned that they do not want to have to install spyware prevention (and similar tools), because they can be quite processor and ram intensive.
So here is a quick hack to immunize against known spyware for windows XP and Windows 2003. (they keyword is known! This will not work against new spyware unless you add them in)
Here are the default locations of the HOSTS file:
| Windows XP | = | C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC |
| Windows 2K | = | C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC |
| Win 98\ME | = | C:\WINDOWS |
(1) Go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
(2) Backup the file called HOSTS (there is no extension)
(3) Open HOSTS with notepad
(4) Add all web addresses that you want to block
(5) Save the file in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc (call the file HOSTS) with no extension
This hack will also speed up and force some web addressses to remain cached (useful for say the top 5 website you vist)
Click here to download an example that applies both techniques.
Due to the restrictions imposed by VISTA UAC (Users Access Control), this technique may not work.
Be warned, it is advised that you do update the list to keep this effective. (get the updated list 2 or 3 times a month from here : http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/updates.htm )