Iain

Thank you for the tips. I managed to find an article that showed exactly what to do. Here's the link, just in case anyone else needs to do this.

I have set up Ubuntu 12.04 server in an office and I also installed KDE. We have an application that we would like to run and display on the desktop of the server and would like to be able to access the desktop remotely. I thought that I could install xrdp and then use Windows Remote Desktop to access it but it opens a new session and the original desktop isn't shown remotely. I've done some googling and it seems that an option is to use VNC but I've tried several "walk-through" instructions and they all fail to bring the remote desktop to my PC. Is this really the way to do it? Does anyone have any other suggestions? I thought about using TeamViewer or LogMeIn but, as far as I know, these are better suited to a WAN, rather than LAN, situation. Thanks in advance.

I'd forgotten about all the goodies that come with a QNAP. As you say though, they're not cheap! I'll put this into the equation but suspect that the cost will rule it out.

Thanks - the red rectangle shows: "-6 Neutral" now!

I don't know if this was evident previously but I never saw it. I looked at my profile and saw a red rectangle in the top right with -7 in it. When I hovered over it, it said "Iain has -7 likes". What does this mean? I have never had any warnings. Is it a glitch or do I *really* have -7 likes?

@MRGRIM: That's useful to know. I don't know if this will HAVE to be a Windows/IIS project (if an off the shelf solution isn't used) and I would hate to do all the hard development work using Linux/MySQL to find that I had to start from scratch for the Windows migration! @alex_m: I had no idea that FreeNAS had a built-in media server. I'll check it out. Thank you for the comments.

I have been asked to look into some options to allow a small number of users in a business to upload videos that have been taken "in house" to a server and allow all users to download them. There must be the facility to add keywords to the file that can be used to search for the video. The file name will not be sufficient as a search term. The videos could be up to 500MB in size. My gut feeling is to use web pages with PHP (and possibly JavaScript) to upload files across the LAN to a server and have the file path, keywords etc. stored in a SQL database. Users would interrogate the SQL database via a web page to obtain a list of matching videos and a link to be able to download them. I have some experience with Linux/Windows/xampp but there might be a desire within the organisation to use Windows/IIS/MS SQL (I have negligible experience of IIS and MS SQL). I have two questions: First: Is there an off the shelf solution, such as a media server? If so, which one? I've heard of Sharepoint but don't know if that would work or if it would be overkill. Second: If I go with a bespoke solution (PHP, HTML, JavaScript, mysql) and develop this using Windows/xampp but the decision is made to run this on Windows/IIS/MS SQL, how easy would it be to transfer everything to the production system? Thanks in advance.

That's great - thank you.

Would you mind posting how you got this to work? I'm almost certainly going to go down a similar route within the next few weeks so your instructions will save me a lot of time!

I have MinGW and find it very easy to use.

I seem to recall that iexpress.exe can merge files and have them both run, though I can't be 100% sure about that because I've never played with it. It's built into Windows XP.

Hmm Jason - that's an interesting idea. I didn't think about copying the string from one to the other. At the moment, it's really an academic exercise. I started reading about pointers, * and & and just didn't understand why it's so easy to determine the address of a string if it's defined in one way but impossible to derive it programmatically if it's defined in another way. An alternative that I thought about (and still have to investigate) is to step through the code using OllyDbg (or similar). I've seen the actual address of the string in a register when defined as char[] so I thought about having some inline assembly to pull the value of the register and deliver it to a variable (outside the inline assembly) that could be printed using printf or used elsewhere in the code.

Thank you Jason. So, if I want to print the address of the location of the string in the .rdata section from within the program (rather than obtain it using OllyDbg), how would I do that? From what you said, it's the address of the char array. I can obtain the address of the stack location but that's not what I want.

I'd like to be able to retrieve the address of a string, but am finding it confusing. Here's the code that I'm using: //Compile using <g++ hak5.cpp -o hak5.exe> #include <stdio.h> int main() { char * Pointer_to_First_String = "hello"; char * Pointer_to_Second_String = "HELLO"; char amessage[] = "hello, world"; printf ("\nPointer to first string\t\t= 0x%08x\n", Pointer_to_First_String); printf ("Pointer to second string\t= 0x%08x\n", Pointer_to_Second_String); printf("\nThe value of amessage is \t= 0x%08x\n", amessage); printf("The value of *amessage (hex) is = 0x%08x\n", *amessage); printf("The value of *amessage (dec) is = %d\n", *amessage); printf("\namessage is:\t\t\t %s\n", amessage); amessage[0] = 'H'; amessage[7] = 'W'; printf("amessage has been changed to:\t %s\n", amessage); return 0; } The code compiles fine and returns the addresses of the first two strings (as confirmed by examining the .rdata section in OllyDbg) but the address returned for the final string is 0x0022ff2b. However, when I review the .rdata section in OllyDbg, the address of this final string is actually 0x0040316c. Is it possible to return this value programmatically? It seems that 0x0022ff2b is the stack of the main thread and I realise that this changes as the program runs. Thanks in advance.

Thank you for the further tips. I've started using MinGW and find it a very useful tool. It's certainly a lot easier than when I used to use Dev-C++ but maybe I'm just a bit more experienced in coding nowadays!