Ryan’s Tech Blog

PuTTY stores its session information in the registry, and there’s no function in PuTTY itself to import/export sessions. This makes moving to a new computer a little sticky. I did some googling and whittled down the documentation for storing configuration in a file into a few steps:

1. On the old computer, open up a command prompt (not cygwin), and run:

   regedit /ea new.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY

2. Copy new.reg onto the new computer
3. On the new computer, open up a command prompt (not cygwin), and run:
   regedit /s new.reg

Done!

I had some problems getting qpsmtpd-forkserver to run on debian. The punchline: qpsmtpd-forkserver relies on an environment variable called QPSMTPD_CONFIG, which should point to the directory containing your config files.

$ export QPSMTPD_CONFIG=/etc/qpsmtp
$ qpsmtpd-forkserver ...

Problem solved.

I didn’t want to run qpsmtpd for its standard usage (wrapping a mail server on the same machine), I just wanted a mail proxy that ran some code whenever any email came in, and then forward the email to a real mail server running on a different machine. qpsmtpd has a great plugin system, and was the path of least resistance. However, Debian’s qpsmtpd package is setup to wrap another mail server running on the same machine, and its init scripts configure the QPSMTPD_CONFIG variable for you. This did not help when I tried to start qpsmtpd-forkserver on the command line. I eventually figured it out by reading through the perl code for qpsmtpd, and then the init script itself.

To add insult to injury, qpsmtpd-forkserver had no way to pass the config on the command line.

I don’t know if this behavior is debian-specific, or just an oversight by the qpsmtpd maintainers.

At any rate, I was able to look through the code and figure it out, which is more than I can say for my latest .NET problem. The solution to that one was to speed my move to a new machine.

A perplexing error while setting up my new system:

Server Application Unavailable

The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable.

Please hit the “Refresh” button in your web browser to retry your request.

Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the system event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur.

The web leads me far astray. I did not have anything in the event log.

The solution? Give MACHINE/ASPNET permission to my project. I found this a LOT faster by switching to .NET 1.1 in IIS, and that gave a much more useful error message. I guess “Server Application Unavailable” is .NET 2’s way of crapping its pants.

Yet another example of why I believe this:

Microsoft told me to update to IE7, so I did. To test something in IE6, I’m installing MS Virtual PC 2004 (provided free by MS), and running an image of Windows XP that has IE6 (also provided free by MS). I am following this article from the IEBlog: IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine.

I downloaded both files, and now all I have to do is debug the installation of both. MS Virtual PC thinks I don’t have a checkbox checked, but my network settings disagree. Windows doesn’t think the compressed OS image I downloaded from Microsoft is a valid exe file.

I appreciate that Microsoft is trying to help me out, but making IE7 a separate program from IE6 would be much more helpful.

I guess I’ll try rebooting.