wiseonup

Msvs_version not set, VCINSALLDIR not set, unknown version ‘undefined’ found at ….

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 12:00:00 +0530

Here are few things to try –

Install Visual Studio Community edition with payload “Desktop development with C++”.
Set up node-gyp on your machine. Follow this url. For Windows here are the steps –

Once node-gyp is setup, upgrade your dependencies to latest version that are supported by the installed node-gyp. Otherwise install node-gyp of compatible version in previous step.

Browsing google.com shows error page with error code ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 12:00:00 +0530

This issue occurred a month back and I was just not able to access google.com on my machine. Other sites worked just fine but google.com was not working in any of the browser I had – Chrome, Firefox, Edge. In Chrome, it showed this error code that indicated something is wrong with the certificate. However, Edge and Firefox show a slightly different error page. I googled on this topic (of course on my other machine J) and found many articles and youtube videos that gave a generic set of instructions on how to fix this problem. Most of them suggested removing browser cache and things like that. However, nothing worked for me.

What worked for me was something I found by accident. In Edge, go to browser settings –

Search for “manage certificates” and you should see an option with this title.

Click on this option and it will open a popup.

On this pop-up, delete all certificates for google.com.

This should fix this issue for you in all browsers.

How to combine/merge disk partitions with Healthy/Recovery partition in the way

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 12:00:00 +0530

Disk Management tool, the default application that comes preinstalled with Windows does not allow merging two partitions if they have a healthy partition between them. If you want to keep your healthy partition, the only way is to use a third-party tool.

I used NIUBI Partition Editor. This allows you to move a partition to the end of the disk provided the disk space to the right is unallocated. So, the only way to restore healthy partition is to sacrifice the partition on the right of the healthy partition.

Here is how it is done in NIUBI Partition Editor –

Install the free tool by downloading it from their site.
The editor will show the disks and their partitions like below –

Right click on the disk on the right of healthy partition and select Delete and choose Yes on the pop up. Make sure you take back-up of your important stuff from this drive as all data on this drive will be lost.

The space on the right of the recovery partition will show as Unallocated.
Right click on recovery partition and select “Resize/Move volume”. Drag the yellow box to the end of the gray bar and press OK.

The recovery partition show show on the right end of the disk.

Right click on Unallocated space and select “Create new volume”.
Expand the yellow box to take the entire gray space. Now your two drives are combined with recovery drive sitting next to this drive. Press OK to continue.

The final step is the important step. Click Apply to apply all these changes to your system.

How to access SQL server from public network

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0530

In order to access SQL server from network, there are couple of things that you need to do in addition to following this article by Microsoft - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/lesson-2-connecting-from-another-computer?view=sql-server-ver16

After following this article, you will have set up your SQL Express server instance to support TCP protocol and configured a fixed port. You will also have this port added to the inbound rules in windows firewall so that incoming traffic can be allowed on this port.

However, you may still not be able to access your SQL server from public network although it is accessible on your LAN.

The first thing that needs to be in place is a static IP address. Talk to your internet provider and ask him to provide you a static IP address. Once you have a static IP address, you also need to know how to log in to your router (again your internet provider customer care can help you with this). Usually router can be accessed at http://192.168.1.1 (or 0.1) with the credentials given to you.

You may have multiple devices connected on your network and we need a way to redirect incoming traffic to a specific machine that has SQL server installed on it. To do this, we need to add a Port Forwarding Rule in your router settings that forwards all incoming requests on a specific port to this machine on network. In order to add this rule, we need to make sure the local IP address of SQL server machine remains fixed every time it connects on LAN. You can change your PC IP config from "DHCP" (which is your PC asking the router for an IP) to Manual (also known as Static IP). You can use an online guide by searching for "Configuring manual IP address”.

In my case after assigning a fixed IP address to my sql server machine on LAN, I created a port forwarding rule in router like this –

And after adding this rule, my sql server was accessible from public network. Please note the server name has to be tcp:<Static IP Address>,<Port>

P.S

The sql user (admin) needs to have server role of sysadmin. It was set to public initially which failed and when I added sysadmin role, the connection worked.

How to back-up and restore remote monogo db to local server

Sun, 29 May 2022 12:00:00 +0530

It may sound difficult at first but it is very easy to backup and restore a mongodb database. Here are the steps to achieve this –

Download and install Mongodb CLI db tools from this link on both remote server as well as local machine –

https://www.mongodb.com/try/download/database-tools?tck=docs_databasetools

While installing remember the path where this installer is placing its files. For windows the default mongo db tools path that it took was C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Tools\100\bin

On server, open terminal and make the mongo db tools path as your present working directory and run this command –

mongodump

Since we are not passing any attributes to this command, it will create back up of all running databases under a dump folder which you can now see in present working directory.

Copy the database folder that you want to restore on local and transfer it to your local system.

On your local machine, create a new folder called dump under mongo db tools path and paste the copied folder.
On your local machine, open terminal and make the mongo db tools path as your present working directory and run this command

mongorestore

This will restore/create a database in your local mongodb server.

P.S

Before running these commands, make sure your mongo db server is running.

The Kashmir Files - A true story of Kashmiri Pandits

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 12:00:00 +0530

This movie left me numb. I could not get up from my seat when the movie was over. It was as if I was paralyzed for a moment.

I have heard of these stories throughout my childhood. Some of the people killed were relatives, some were distant uncles, some were known to our known ones. We were too small to understand the pain at that time.

After this movie was released, me and my wife decided to watch it in theater. Looking at the houseful status of PVR near us, we decided to postpone watching this movie. My wife said – “let everyone watch our story. We are going to watch it anyway”.

Today was the day we had our tickets booked. I dressed up in my best outfits and so did my wife. It didn’t feel like we were going to watch a movie. It felt like we were going to pay tribute to our people who lost their lives during this genocide. It was also a small contribution towards the success of this movie.

The Kashmir Files reveals the pain that our parents and grand-parents have gone through during 1980s and 1990s. I was 7 years old when this genocide happened. The generations born after me may not remember much of Kashmir. I certainly do.

I remember my maternal grand father carrying me over his shoulders to our apple orchard. He used to settle me on a branch of an apple tree. I used to eat as many apples as I could and by the time he came back, all the apples within my reach were gone. So, he used to settle me on another branch and I could reach more apples.

After the forceful exodus, I remember my maternal grandfather giving me a rupee to buy something to eat. He did not have much to offer. I understood that we were displaced from our motherland but I did not understand the pain our elders were going through. They were rendered homeless all of a sudden. I did not understand what that meant.

Today after 32 years of exodus, I am of same age my father was in 1990. I cannot compare my life with the one he lived 32 years back. I remember my parents, grand-parents, aunts all living together in a small accommodation.

The Kashmir files precisely shows the reality of genocide of Kashmiri Pandits. In this movie Krishna Pandit depicts the generation I relate with. I feel there could be a sequel to this movie that portrays how Krishna Pandit grew up under such turbulent times.

I remember I had a small trunk full of books and I used to study next to our designated kitchen area where my mother used to cook, my sister with her study trunk, my father and grand-father sitting next to us and all of this happening in a 100 square foot of rented space.

Sometimes I find it hard to believe that we have seen so much in this life time. I am so proud to be a Kashmiri Pandit. This community has set an example of getting back to prosperity by sheer determination of sticking to the path of knowledge and education.

During all these years, the only political personality that had a direct impact on my life is Lt Sh. Bala Saheb Thakrey. He was the man who openly embraced our community in those turbulent times. He is the reason I am an Engineer today. Whenever I see his picture anywhere on TV/internet, my eyes bow down to thank him.

We stayed in rented accommodation for 10 years. I grew up as a child with insecurities. It felt as if something was missing in our lives. I used to visit my class mates who were locals and lived in their own houses. I felt underprivileged. The locals used to call us cowards because we ran away from our motherland.

By the mid of 1999, my father built a small house in a remote area of Jammu where few other Kashmiri families were purchasing land at cheaper rates. The money was raised by selling our land in Kashmir to Muslims at a throw-away price. It was the year of my 12^th standard. I remember the session had already started and my father was not sure if we should shift to new house because that would impact my studies. When he asked me, I said I want to go to the new house and I will take care of my studies.

When we finally shifted to our house, I felt a kind of relief that I had never felt before. I felt like a free person who could do anything. A new stream of energy – a flood of energy. I knew I was going to do well in my studies. Since it was a remote area, I used to walk for 12 Kilometers a day for school, tuitions but I never felt tired. I was so happy that I was finally staying in my own house.

I stayed in that house for only eight months. I had to leave for Maharashtra for my Engineering (eyes bowing down to Bala saheb Thakrey). The life has been kind since then.

Can’t connecto to vpn. The L2TP connection attempt failed because the security layer encountered a processing error during initial negotiations with the remote computer

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0530

After recent Windows 10 update, you may get this error while trying to connect through Windows 10 in-built VPN client.

Can’t connecto to vpn. The L2TP connection attempt failed because the security layer encountered a processing error during initial negotiations with the remote computer.

The easiest fix is to uninstall the latest windows security update. Open Control Panel -> Programs and Features. Click on “view installed updates” link –

And you should see a Windows security update KB5009543. Uninstall this update. It may require a windows reboot.

To stop Windows from installing this update again, you can turn updates off till the time Windows pushes another update to fix this problem.

When is the right time to start your own start-up?

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0530

I remember watching an interview of Steve Jobs where he mentioned that the right time to start a company is when you are young. By starting young, you get lot of time to experiment and you have less liabilities to worry about.

When I saw this interview, I was 35 and I was thinking about starting my company. And this led me to deeply introspect my thoughts about starting a company. I started answering these questions one by one and these answers moved me closer to my decision.

Here are some of the fundamental questions each aspiring entrepreneur should ask themselves before starting this journey –

Do you have the skill you can sell and earn money?
Do you have enough savings in your bank or other earning member in your family? Even if you have few paying clients already, remember they can leave you any time.
Do you have the patience to deal with all sorts of people? Once you are on your own, you will be dealing with people from varied backgrounds.
Do you really feel you are ready for all this? This is the most important one. If you feel the calling from inside, you should most likely get started.

I feel it is easy to start a company when you have gathered enough experience and skill and you remain energetic and passionate about your work. Life is not a race. It is a journey and it has to be enjoyed. Starting your own start-up should not be stressful. Rather it should be the best thing that has happened to you. Plan your days ahead and take one step at a time. It takes a lot of courage to persist in this game but once you taste the success, you will never look back.

How I found the right Accountant for my start-up

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0530

Four years back, when I started my company, I did not anticipate I will have to deal with so many things apart from serving to core clients. I was not a novice either. I knew I will have to handle everything myself but I was sure I will find people who will take care of these overheads for some fee. Well turns out I was way too optimistic.

Finding the right accountant for managing company accounts, taxes and annual filings turned out be one of the challenging things to concur. I started interacting with accountants in my local area, visited their offices and tried to explain what my start-up was and how it intended to earn money. I thought my business idea was so common that they should easily be able to understand it but I was mistaken. After I explained my business model to few local accountants and I saw a feeling of uncertainty on their faces, I knew they were not completely sure if they understood it. So, I decided to do it myself through an online platform called cleartax.com.

The issue with using an online platform for your accounts is that you are only delegating the work and not the responsibility and I was just not meant to handle this responsibility myself. So next year I made sure I find someone near my place who can help with my accounts and whom I can meet in person to discuss my plans and take advice about the actions required in future.

The biggest challenge for start-ups is finding right people to help them in their journey. This time I was ready to be flexible and after meeting more accountants in my local vicinity, I finalized one and delegated this responsibility to him. Thinking that I don’t have to worry about my taxes and annual filings, I was a bit relieved. He was supposed to remind me of timely submission of taxes and other formalities like filing quarterly GSTs and finalizing balance sheets. This association did work to some extent. However, there was something important missing in this relationship and it took me some time to realize what it was.

So, what was it that I found missing? Although I had a chartered accountant who looked after my company accounts, I felt I was not getting enough feedback on how my company was doing financially and what I should do in future to make it look better. When I asked such questions to my accountant, he did not have clear answers. And I was getting a bit frustrated with this setup. So, I started talking to more accountants. And this time luck was in my favor.

I met this person through a relative. He could answer my questions with clarity and that is something I was looking for. I switched to this accountant instantly and I have been living in peace since then. The good thing about him is that he informs me where my company is heading in terms of revenue, where my spending should go (like hiring, advertising, infrastructure etc) and what my financial projection looks like.

Looking at these events today, I feel it is ok if you do not hit the right person the first time. Chances are you may not realize their true value. And it takes some time for you to realize what you truly want. The key is to not settle for less. One should keep looking for the right person till all the boxes are checked.

reactjs navigation

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0530

In this article, I am going to create a demo reactjs app that has navigation implemented to move from one view to another.

Pre-requisites

VS Code editor or any other editor.
Node and npm – download and install the latest stable release from https://nodejs.org/. Node 14 or higher is required for this tutorial.

Create a new react app

npx create-react-app react-navigation

This may take less than a minute and end with this message the end –

As the output from the command suggests, run these commands –

cd react-navigation

npm start

By this time, we have created a blank reactjs app which is running on localhost:3000

And the code looks like this in VS Code –

Time to implement react navigation.

Install react-router-dom with this command

npm install react-router-dom -s

Open app.js in VS Code and make following changes –

This is the most important step to understand react navigation. Here we import BrowserRouter, Routes and Route components from react-router-dom package and use them in App component html. You can add more Route tags as you add more pages to your site.

For this example, we need two react components to act as two different pages. Create these two components under a new directory name pages under src folder

HomePage.js

UserPage.js

Refresh your site (npm start) and you should be able to navigate between home page and user page.

Conclusion

React navigation is an important concept in reactjs and almost every app needs to navigate between its views. This article helps in making this concept easy for you to understand and use the code examples given in this article to get started with react navigation.

Free SSL certificate for your website hosted on IIS

Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0530

SSL is the basic requirement for a website these days. It affects your site’s credibility if your site is not secure and your visitors are noticing that “Not secure” tag right in the address bar when they visit your site.

SSL certificate is also important to make sure your site’s content is browsed securely and is prevented from middle man attacks and other risks I am not aware of.

So how can we implement SSL for free on a site hosted on IIS? When I googled this subject, I found some sites that provide SSL for free. The only thing was I had to sign up on the site and create an account and create a free SSL certificate for myself. The only problem with this is that over the years I have signed up on too many platforms and I tend to forget passwords and even the platforms entirely.

Luckily, I found another easier way to install free SSL on IIS. It is a windows console command like utility called win-acme. You can download it from their github release page –

https://github.com/win-acme/win-acme/releases

Under the assets section, look for the one that ends with .x64.trimmed.zip. The latest at the time of this blog is win-acme.v2.1.20.1185.x64.trimmed.zip

Download and extract the contents of this zip into a folder. Open Command Prompt as Administrator.

Change your current working directory to the folder where you extracted the zip and run this command –

wacs.exe

This should start a wizard –

Type N and hit enter. It should show a list of sites hosted on your IIS –

Enter the number of the site you want to create SSL for and hit enter –

Enter A and hit enter –

And that should be it. Your site is hosted on SSL. You can check by visiting your site and making sure the site shows a lock icon in the address bar –

P.S

This solution only works for sites that have been configured with host bindings. So you should have a domain name registered with some provider. Then you should have a CNAME entry under that domain that points to the IP address of your machine where IIS is installed. And finally you should have host name populated with the domain name under Bindings of your site.

If you are new to IIS, you may have to do few more things in configuration to make sure your site is redirecting to https if users try to access it on http. You can simple copy following block inside your web.config under System.WebServer tag –

Make sure you have urlrewrite plugin installed in your IIS before you add this tag to web.config though. You can download it from IIS official site - https://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite

Conclusion

In this blog, I have tried to offer simplest way to install SSL certificate on a website that is hosted on IIS. I hope you liked this blog and in case you faced any issues, I would love to help. I can be reached at naveenraina@outlook.com

Create your own blog site in a day with Umbraco

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0530

I want to share my experience of how I developed this blog site within a day. This blog site is built with Umbraco and a free plugin Articulate. Although it took me a day to figure out which plugin to use and whether it meets my requirements, I want to make this journey easier for others who are looking to build a blog site in a day.

Pre-requisites

This article is meant for C# and .NET developers. It may not be easy for developers working in other technologies to follow the steps I am going to mention in this article.

You need to have a hosting server with IIS where you can deploy your code. You also need to have rights to change permissions on folders.

Visual Studio 2019 is more suitable for this article but other versions will also work.

Umbraco project setup

In Visual Studio 2019, create a blank ASP.Net web application using .NET Framework.

Enter the project name and leave everything else as it is.

Choose Empty in the dialog that comes next.

Right click on project name in solution explorer and select “Manage NuGet Packages”

Go to “Browse” tab and search for “UmbracoCms” and install the plugin. Make sure the version is 8.x.

It will take some time to set things up. Once done run your application with CTRL+F5. It will ask you to configure your Umbraco. Create a user name and password for yourself and continue with the wizard.

It will take some time to setup Umbraco site. The application may break in Visual Studio couple of time. Just hit F5 and it will continue setup. Once done, it will take you to Umbraco back-end –

Skip the tour dialog. Go to Package menu and search for “Articulate”

Click on the tile and Install the package in next screen. You will have to accept the “terms of use” checkbox. Once install is complete, click on Finish button and it will refresh the page.

Go to Content menu and delete Home node.

And you are ready with your first blog site. You can check your blog site at localhost –

To create/edit/delete a blog, expand Blog node and click on Articles

Here you can create a new blog through Markdown or Rich text. I prefer Rich Text.

And you can enter details of your blog

Once you enter all details, Save and Publish.

The good part about Articulate is the support for categories and tags that help your organize your blogs in a better way out of the box. You can create new categories and tags by typing a new name in the text box and hitting Enter. It also allows you to add Meta description for SEO optimization.

Deployment

You should be able to deploy this site like any other Umbraco site. However, I hit some issues which I will describe in my next blog.

CONCLUSION

In this blog, I have tried to offer simplest way to setup a blog site. I hope you liked this blog and in case you faced any issues, I would love to help. I can be reached at naveenraina@outlook.com