SCDIT Blog

We got a call from a customer who was getting an error in Outlook saying “An unexpected error has occurred.” We Google’d for some advice, but all the suggestions were regarding a corrupt Outlook profile. Well being Windows 11 these settings were a bit tougher to find.

We realized the user was pulling their contacts from their migrated Office 365 account. This was a newer computer and we discovered when they typed in the “Board Members” it populated the Bcc field they wanted but the email wouldn’t send. This is because the group “Board Members” no longer existed in the new Outlook profile.

We went to the ribbon at the top of their Outlook and clicked on the address book icon.

Once the address book opened we went to the top menu item “Tools“, and selected “Options“. Here you need change “Address Book:” to “Contacts“. Now their group was listed and the email sent.

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We recently moved a customer’s website to new hosting and after restoring the website we got blank site with just “No input file specified” on the screen. The site had no issues on the old host, and was working great in XXAMP. We were at a loss and headed over to Google for some help.

We do often like the results we get from StackOverflow, so we started with the following suggestions from this page.

“No input file specified” Error in WordPress – Stack Overflow

The hosting plan didn’t allow direct access to the Apache settings. This is one of the suggestions in that article.

We got it resolved and we believe it was by going to PHP 8.2. We tried 8.1 and still had the issue. This is hard to completely determine if PHP was the total reason we got it fixed. We had also took our localhost copy and turned all the plugins off and switched the permalinks to be plain. We switched the permalinks back once the site was live.

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We discovered we were getting less email inquires so we tested our contact us form, and discovered something was broken. This lead us into investigating the issue. We were routing our contact us form through GMail due to DKIM issues. Our domain and email server are not in the same place, so we run into this issue.

We switched from PHPMailer to SMTP and struggled a bit with the setting. That was partially due to our current hosting settings. We found the best settings were documented by Joomla. See the link below:

https://docs.joomla.org/How_do_I_use_Gmail_as_my_mail_server%3F

It is suggested to use a GMail App Passwode instead of your GMail Password. We found a good article on this setup, but didn’t capture the URLs. We found another article that was just as good.

Link to Article

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We often run Web Access Firewalls on our sites and we noticed a common threat is from Karthi The Hacker. On their website they claim to be an “Ethical” hacker. From our education the term “hack” is actually “attack”, and this is how we view these attempts. We found their IP address to be “89.39.105.112” and put them in our block list.

We don’t know the extent to which this “ethical hacker” is trying to penetrate our website, but we don’t care for it. Check your website firewall and see if the attacker is trying to penetrate your site. If you don’t run a Web Access Firewall contact us and we can help choose one and get it installed properly.

We contacted Karthi to see why we saw these results in our firewall. He is what the response was:

I haven’t tested your site yet. The images that you attached in this email appear to be the payload of my open source tool, which I published for penetration testing and bug bounty purposes. It’s possible that someone from somewhere in the world may have used this tool for their own testing.

Tool link : https://www.npmjs.com/package/redirecthunter 

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We made a few post recently and in Firefox and while logged in the posts showed up on the blog page; however, in Chrome and Edge the post wasn’t showing in other browsers. We checked on our phones and the post were not there. In the back-end of the site everything looked like it should.

We did a search and quickly found our answer here.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/new-blog-posts-not-showing-up-4/

It was the “Caching” plugin we had installed. We are using “Fastest Cache” plugin. We cleared the cache and the posts were showing. We had made a post almost a month ago that wasn’t showing. We will need to review our caching settings to make sure our posts get out there.

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We took over a website that uses Umbraco a Windows based CMS. Finding hosting was tough, but we found HostGator which offered a lot for a little. Things were going fine for 90 days till the Let’s Encrypt SSL needed to be renewed. Before we knew it the site was getting privacy issues and the customer is worried. We had to call HostGator tech support, because there was nothing in the hosting that we could see that would cause the issue.

This took a couple of days to resolve, and it wasn’t something we would have known. HostGator’s tech support dug around and found that with Umbraco the needed to add a “path” to the “UmbracoReservedUrls” key. They needed to add the value “~/.well-known/”.

We didn’t like it took a week to get resolved, but we are still happy with HostGator’s web hosting.

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