May, 2009

Development / Useful Tricks — No Comments
15
May 09

MySQL Password Hashing in .NET

As I was surfing through StackOverflow today, I noticed a question that got me thinking. This developer had been working with a classic ASP application that used MySQL for it’s backend database. The project on his plate was to convert this application to ASP.NET with MS-SQL as the database. The only problem he encountered was the fact that passwords were stored in the database using a MySQL-specific hashing algorithm called via the PASSWORD() function. He needed a way to convert these passwords to .NET.

Given that I have a MySQL database laying around, I decided to poke around in the source code to see exactly how MySQL’s PASSWORD() function really works. It didn’t take me long to find inside the file “libmysql/password.c” this little gem:

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Development / General Information — No Comments
5
May 09

.NET 3.5 SP1 on a Windows 2008 VPS

Recently I’ve been debating moving my site over to a Windows VPS.  If I make this move, I’m hoping to take advantage of the new features available in Windows Server 2008 as well as .NET 3.5 SP1 and IIS 7.  After some preliminary research, I decided to give KickAssVPS.com a try.  Within a few hours of my order, they had my VPS up and running, and so far I’ve been fairly pleased with the performance.

When I logged into my VPS, one of the things I wanted to install right away was SQL Server 2008.  In order for SQL Server 2008 to install, you must first have installed the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.  I figured it was no big deal and decided to let SQL handle my install.  Once the installer got going, it immediately halted and displayed an error message telling me it couldn’t be installed.  After checking the log file, I found the following:

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