QNAP installation of Serviio - a free DLNA server.

QNAPs come with a media server pre-installed ready to go - Twonky - which is pretty decent app with iPhone apps for beaming and controlling playback from your library.

However, after a recent update Twonky was unable to play MKV files. It did appear that by renaming the files to .avi or .wmv they could play, but that is a rather boring solution to the problem.

I read that Serviio could possibly do the job better so set out to install and test. First needed the JAVA files from here. You can download either Java SE for Embedded 7 or Java SE for Embedded 6. The version you need is either "ARMv5 Linux - Headless EABI, SoftFP ABI, Little Endian" (for Java 7) or "ARMv5 Linux - Headless EABI, SoftFP, Little Endian" (for Java 6).

Put the file into your /share/Public folder leave it as .tar.gz also for some reason the file only downloaded properly with IE.

After installing JRE crack on with the Serviio install, there is a QPKG you can grab here

http://forum.serviio.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=9467

Best thing about serviio apart from playing all the files is the '**' mark on your last watched episodes, so if you have a whole series to watch its easy to keep track of where you are - something I really missed when moving from XBMC to Twonky. Serviio also supports resuming of files, so if you stop playback and restart later it will pick up from where you left off.

Update: Installed Serviio 1.4 using the instructions here http://advancedhomeserver.com/serviio/ 
The web ui has a bug and prevents license file uploading. But this can be done from the command line http://wiki.serviio.org/doku.php?id=upload_license_via_command_line

SSRS 2008 R2 'My Subscriptions' page blank - Fix

Really annoying bug this one, fixed the same way as Ant describes at...

original post at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12157528/ssrs-my-subscriptions-is-empty

The users were authenticating in Report Manager as SOMEDOMAIN\MyUser, while the ReportServer database was storing the users without the domain.

All I had to do was prepend the domain to the applicable users' names in [ReportServer].[dbo].Users.

SMTP test from telnet

Need to test out access to a mail server?

From GNU/linux is easiest, fire up the terminal

You will need your username and password as base64, to get these use perl

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("username");'
perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("password");'

Save this output to use later

telnet mail.yourserver.com 25
EHLO mail.yourserver.com
AUTH LOGIN
[paste in your base64 username]
[paste in your base64 password]

Now you know if your server is working with those access details or not...

Thanks NDCHost
http://www.ndchost.com/wiki/mail/test-smtp-auth-telnet

Storm: Great free app to test SOAP/REST WSDL feeds

Been working on a project that uses WSDL / Web Service feeds. This is a handy tool to quickly test out feeds, check access and contents of the envelope.

http://storm.codeplex.com/

Mobi SSRS

Pretty decent mobile access to SSRS reports on iOS devices. Handy to produce dash board type info. Be sure to set the correct localisation if you want to use date parameters.

http://mobiweave.com/#!/bi