I’m not sure if affected computers are at risk of data loss but they may be at risk of loosing internet access.

Backups are very important and should be done regularly to protect you from data loss.

Are you doing backups?

To find out if you are infected with DNS Changer you can try this site. There is a little more information here.

Common Functions:
=+-/*()
sum
vlookup
find
mid, left, right
len
& – String Concatenation
if
date, day, month, year
now
pmt
{F4 key} for absolute addressing

If you want to learn Visual Basic for Applications, the list is also pretty short. I’d recommend some guidance to get started at these. Perhaps a couple of hours of one-on-one or a day of classroom instruction.

VBA Commands:

option explicit
dim
for, next
do, while
if, then, else, elseif
select case
function
{most of the Excel functions work too! Two main exceptions, instr replaces find and mid parameters are different.}

Inquiring 2h after all my hostpapa sites went down.

I purchased three years of hosting services from hostpapa.ca a while back. The pricing seemed good and the services looked good.

I’ve installed a few Web sites on Host Papa by using their cPanel to install WordPress and it’s seems to be working great. The only thing that was stopping me from transferring my more serious projects is that they don’t support rsync. This makes it difficult to transfer all the files and verifying that the transfer worked. Rsync allows you to do the transfer in steps. Also if it fails you don’t have to start over.

Today I decided to transfer one blog over to their services from one of my own servers.

Here’s the strategy that I used to transfer generalsocial.com.

1) Create a temporary directory in the hostpapa services called generalsocial.com-upload.

2) Upload the generalsocial file system to the temporary directory using SFTP.

3) Upload a backup of the database to the temporary file system.

4) Create another temporary directory called generalsocial.com-move.

5) Perform a test move of all the files in the generalsocial.com-upload directory to the generalsocial.com-move folder. I used the hostpapa filemanager which is part of cpanel. This is to verify that I will be able to transfer the files after I create the add-on domain for generalsocial.com. When I spoke to support just before doing this they told me to initiate the nameserver change THEN start uploading the files. But the difficulty I see here is that it could take days to upload a larger project and that’s a lot of downtime. So it seems more sensible to upload the files, verify them then transfer the nameservers. All I need to do is copy the files locally on their server then.

6) Using the database wizard, create a new database and user for the generalsocial.com site. This went well except it complained that my database name was more than 16 characters. The difficulty was it was my user name that was over so I had to try a few times before I got it.

7) Load the database backup into the new database. I found that the .sql.tz file I got from my backup system didn’t work. So I uncompressed it and sent it plain. That works except I had to comment the lines that create the database and also “use” the database.

8) I then went to the files I uploaded and subsequently moved to generalsocial.com-move and opened the WordPress configuration file. I updated the credentials. I used the hostpapa file editor for this which is part of cpanel.

9) I went to my registrar (EasyDNS in Toronto) and changed the name servers to the hostpapa servers. I think it was ns1.hostpapa.ca and ns2.hostpapa.ca.

10) On the hostpapa cpanel I added generalsocial.com as an add-in domain. This created the directory for generalsocial.com.

11) I transfered the files from generalsocial.com-move using the hostpapa file manager (cpanel).

In theory, I could be done at this point.

After a few minutes the name servers had propagated enough that I could see an error connecting to the database.

I went to cpanel to open the wordpress configuration file to verify that I had the database credentials right but at that point I lost access to the hostpapa cpanel.

I wasn’t able to access any of my domains that I was hosting at hostpapa (including the new generalsocial.com) site.

I contacted support and they said everything was working except of course the database error. I explained that it’s because they are in the same network. I demonstrated with the cool Web site http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ that all my sites are down.

Support asked me to email support so the system would generate a ticket number for this issue. He said that someone would get back to me. I explained that I hoped it would be soon as everything I have hosted at hostpapa is now down.

It’s about two hours later and still nothing. For the past couple of hours I determined that everything was down, went trough the support queue, spoke to support, ate, wrote this document of what I did.

I had started to document the process to make it faster to convert my other domains over to hostpapa.

Now I’m concerned if I made a good choice as everything is down.

Update April 18th: The problem was finally discovered. Host Papa had a block on my IP:

Darcy: I think the issue was that your servers banned my IP address while I was working on my site. 99.246.113.18

Don P: Thank you for contacting Host Papa. I do see there was a block on the IP address you have listed here.  I checked with a tier 2 representative and they confirmed the block is now removed so you should have no issues going forward.  I notice the block was due to a detected port scan, so you may want to check your computer or network for anything that would be actively scanning our server for open ports.  If you have any further questions, please let us know.  Thanks.

I checked around and I don’t think there is anything doing a port scan on their services from my network. The only thing that was going on is that I was trying to get my wordpress config file to have the right credentials to access the database.

Update April 20th: I went to upload images in a post and got this error:

“DSCN6749-600-600.jpg” has failed to upload due to an error Unable to create directory /home/darcy/www.generalsocial.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

I checked the permissions and they are 755 as they were with other blogs that I installed through their control panel. I asked support to see what permissions or user it should have. I was very annoyed when I got this answer:

FranciscoC: did you install wp manually or through fantastico?

darcy: no manually because I already had the blog on another server

FranciscoC: you will need to follow up with wordpress.org suppport in that case.

I understand a new blog can easily be added to Hostpapa’s services. For an existing blog it seems there are issues. And they don’t know the answer to how to add an existing blog to their services. This could be a big drawback.

I have a few projects that I am looking at migrating to their services. My projects and my friends’ projects. I will work on this a little more and next I will transfer the blog to another service and we will discover what issues there can be with getting a project off their services.

I’m sure glad I picked a non mission critical project to move first. We are four days later and the project is still not entirely functional. At this point I’m moving from recommending their services to not recommending (within my WordPress support group) until I can get this figures out.

Update April 20th: Okay I found the problem. It wasn’t anything specific about hostpapa services. It was the fact that my wordpress configuration had Settings/Media/”Store uploads in this folder” set to a non-blank entry. I will test further and report back.

Update April 28th: Now that the generalSocial project is up and running I decided to transfer a larger project.  EndlessLift.com is 1.3G of files and 25M database.

For this I found that I wasn’t able to upload the files without interruption since it was taking so long. I talked to support and they said to only allow 2 connections in my FTP client.

What I did instead was zipped up the files and then sent the single zip file. That went much better and faster. I was able to unzip it using the file manager in their cpanel.

On the database side the upload limit is 50M so I was able to upload the entire database in one shot.

After updating the nameservers at my registrar I was able to have the EndlessLift project up and running.

I’m happy. I think I was a little hard on Hostpapa in my previous statements.

Update April 30th: EndlessLift.com worked great so I’m now moving Mambohead.com. It’s about the same size but for some reason I had to resend the zip file a couple of times. As I write this I am about to unzip the files, add the database credentials and see if it works.

Update 3pm: I’ve had about 2h of downtime. The file transfer eventually finished but when you copy or move files using the cpanel file manager it doesn’t tell you status of the operation. So it can fail and you don’t know. So I wound up in a state with the files split between the two directories and the file manager wouldn’t let me copy or move the files again. So I deleted the directory, re-uncompressed and did the file copy again (but in parts).

The site came up blank.

Support says they can see my site fine and that nothing is blocked. I emailed a few friends and they see a blank too so this is an inconsistent observation.

I just went to wp-admin directory which seems to work and I noticed this error in the dashboard.

ERROR: The themes directory is either empty or doesn’t exist. Please check your installation.
You are using WordPress 3.3.2.

I just checked and sure enough some of the fines have not been transfered. The file manager in the cpanel seems to be flakey. I’m just going online with support now so they can manually copy the files. I’ve been in the queue for some time now so I also sent an email to their support support@hostpapasupport.com (which automatically opens a ticket). Just in case one of the reasons I’m in the queue is that they are looking around at my problem from my last chat session.

6pm Update: I am still in the support queue. I was starting to wonder if they were ignoring me because they didn’t know what to do. I went in and out of the queue and changed my company name to say I found the problem. I got through and the chat just ended at 6:14p:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From:
Date: Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 6:12 PM
Subject: Transcript of your chat with JonathanR from hostpapasupport.com (on the Support queue)
To: darcy@siteware.com

April-30-12 6:04:17 PM (30/04/2012 10:04:17 PM – GMT)

Powered by SightMax.

Welcome to hostpapasupport.com, JonathanR will be right with you.

JonathanR:
hello, how may I help you?

darcy:
I copied some files for a site but the cpanel file manager seems to work poorly for large jobs. Can you please copy the files from your end?

darcy:
When I copied the files to /public_html/mambohead.com from public_html/mambohead.unzip2/www.mambohead.com, it failed.

darcy:
my account is buzzdarcy.com

darcy:
the file manager wont let me copy the rest of the files

darcy:
actually I was moving the files so some are left behind

JonathanR:
if you are experiencing difficulties i would recommend trying with ftp

darcy:
the whole problem is that there is a lot of files

darcy:
so I zipped

darcy:
uploaded

darcy:
uncompressed

darcy:
then moved the files to my addon directory

darcy:
but it failed

darcy:
it will take days to ftp the files

JonathanR:
try moving the files using an ftp connection. if they are already uplaoded you can just move them

darcy:
can’t you help by copying the rest of the files for me?

JonathanR:
unfortunatly host papa will not move or manage customers files for them

darcy:
crap

darcy:
my site’s been down for hours

darcy:
okay I will go to a different computer and try ftp for moving the files rather than the unreliable cpanel file manager

JohnathanR: ended chat

I will try and do the file transfer with an ftp program since their system doesn’t work and the guy wont help me.

Update 7pm: Okay I’ve been working with an FTP client to move all the files that didn’t get moved by the cpanel file manager. It will take a few more hours. The site is finally up and  running but lots of the pictures in the blog are probably missing as those files are still being moved.

In retrospect before uploading the zip of the file system I think I will rename the internal directory so it will unzip right in place into the add-on domain directory.

Update 11:37pm: Moving Mambohead.com was a little messy. I think I’m brave enough to move Rubber-ower.com which is 1.3G file and 30M database. This system also has a custom database as well.

Earlier I zipped the file system and uploaded it. It just finished a short while ago. I just created the databases in the cpanel wizard and am loading them now. If that’s successful then I will uncompress the file upload. This time I named it to be the add-on directory name to see if it would unzip right into there directly.

Wow, it’s 11:40p and the databases are loaded. I guess I will now do the file system and add the database credentials. I guess I have to update the name servers so hostpapa will let me create the add-on domain.

Update 11:54p: It appears to be working. So the procedure was:

1) Get a copy of the file system from the backup. Put it in a directory that will be the same name as the eventual add-on domain directory in the hosting service. Compress it.

2) Upload file system to rubber-power.upload

3) Grab database backups.

4) Remove database creation code from backups.

5) Create the databases and users using the wizard in cpanel.

6) In phpmyadmin go to the databases and load the backups.

7)  In the registrar, update the name servers to point to hostpapa.

8) In cpanel add the add-in domain.

9) In the file manager expand the file system backup to public_html/. The content will go directly to the add-in domain directory.

10) Once the wp-config.php file appears, update it with database credentials.

Works.

Update May 7th: I transferred this site (siteware.com). This one had the extra step that I’m using email in the domain. It was simply a matter of going to cpanel and creating the email. Then to my client and putting in the credentials. Seems to have worked fine.

I did the transfer of the Web site from Windows and my rar program I used to zip the files up caused a problem. The cpanel file manager didn’t know how to um-compress those. So I just sent the site again uncompressed. That created a delay of about 20m for the Web but I’m pretty happy with the result anyways.

Update May 9th: I got a report that mambohead.com was down from a location about 1h away. Also, this morning I noticed they were all down. I am online with support right now to find out what’s up or figure out an explanation.

Initially I couldn’t make this post since this site is on their server now. But it came back up.

Here is the conversation with support:

Welcome to hostpapasupport.com, DanielR will be right with you.
DanielR
Hello Darcy, how may I help you?
darcy
hi there
I
darcy
am unable to get to my sites for some reason
darcy
rubber-power.com
darcy
example
darcy
my friends noticed yesterday evening that the sites were up and down (mambohead.com).
darcy
right now I can’t access any of my sites.
darcy
it’s back up again
darcy
up, then down, then up, then down
DanielR
I am looking into it
darcy
okay
DanielR
you cannot get to your sites now?
darcy
I can now
DanielR
were you trying to upload anything through FTP?
darcy
no
darcy
I transfered a blog yesterday evening. Everything went fine
darcy
I used ftp yesterday evening.
darcy
I got a report from my friend that mambhead.com was down (he lives an hour away and reported it last night late. This morning I noticed they were all down. Came back up by the time I got through the queue here.
DanielR
I see that there have been some blocks on your IP address recently which is why you have not been able to view your website
darcy
yes, that happened (that I was aware of) when I first tried to transfer a site.
darcy
I’m not convinced that any of my compters did anything wrong (or that my friend that reported site down last night did anything wrong) though
darcy
where there blocks in the past 24h?
DanielR
yes there were a few blocks in the last 24 hours
darcy
what were the triggers for that? What could be causing me and my friends from seeing the sites?
darcy
how many blocks and to what ip addresses (can I see this in my cpanel)?
DanielR
our firewall detected portscann from your IP address
darcy
that’s what they said last time but I’m not convinced. If my computer was doing that then it would do it no mater where I bring it. When this first happened I went to my lap with this computer and everything was working from there so it suggests it’s not my computer.
darcy
it took many hours to discover it last time so I thought it was up and down but that’s just because I was at different locations with my laptop.
darcy
Can I see this in my cpanel? (what was blocked and so forth)
DanielR
you would not be able to see that in your cpanel
darcy
can you tell me what ip addresses were blocked in the past 24h?
darcy
I’m noticing it’s really slow at this exact moment. but is up
darcy
It’s down now
darcy
it’s 1122am local time
DanielR
The server is currently overloaded
DanielR
our systems administrators are working on it
darcy
from my visitors or the rest of the customers in the same virtual?
darcy
I don’t think I have that many visitors
DanielR
it is not you that is overloading the server
darcy
okay
darcy
can I see the list of ip blocks in the past 24h so I an see if that’s relevant in this case?
darcy
I was hitting refresh every 30 seconds and it just came back at 1130a so that was about 10m down at least.. for this one
DanielR
May 7 22:48:19 hp68 lfd[20928]: *SSH login* from 99.246.113.18 into the buzzd397 account using password authentication May 7 23:17:20 hp68 lfd[8339]: *SSH login* from 99.246.113.18 into the buzzd397 account using password authentication May 8 03:55:52 hp68 lfd[31514]: *Port Scan* detected from 99.246.113.18 (CA/Canada/CPE001a70745232-CM000f9f78b77a.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com). 21 hits in the last 228 seconds – *Blocked in csf* for 3600 secs [PS_LIMIT] May 8 04:55:53 hp68 lfd[7544]: Incoming IP 99.246.113.18 temporary block removed May 8 11:02:30 hp68 lfd[4878]: cPanel Reseller [hpspprt]: UNBLOCK 99.246.113.18
darcy
so that’s like last night?
darcy
that is about 11pm which is around the time I transfered siteware.com
darcy
bit I didn’t notice any outage at that time.
darcy
I got a report later on from a friend an hour away.
darcy
that the site was down
darcy
The report I got from my friend was 1219am and he said it was up by 1239am
DanielR
I am sorry but I do not know what was happening last night
darcy
what could be causing a port scan or a false alarm of a port scan?
DanielR
That is why I asked about FTP some FTP clients like to open a lot of simultaneous connections which our firewall interpret as port scann
darcy
I used winscp on windows and in linux I use natilus
darcy
nautilus
DanielR
See if they have a setting for simultaneous connections
darcy
probably in winscp but not in nautilus.
darcy
but my friend that reported the site down wasn’t doing ftp, he would have been just looking at my projects on mambohead.com
darcy
okay, so I will look at my ftp clients to see if I can limit connections. How long has this load problem you mentioned earlier been going?
DanielR
it should be working now
darcy
oh, okay
darcy
thanks
 

I had just finished the blog post and I realized that there was a much quicker way reassemble the data.

I was using the Split function to count the occurrences of spaces. So why not keep the array since it will have an entry for each part of the name.

In my example below the three name parts are referred to as:
aFieldParts(0)
aFieldParts(1)
aFieldParts(2)

[sourcecode language="vb"]
Public Function SeparateName() As String
‘Connect to data
Dim oRS As Object: Set oRS = CreateObject("adodb.recordset")
Dim strSQL As String
Dim strField As String: Dim spaceCount As Integer
Dim aFieldParts As Variant
Dim intFixFlag As Integer
strSQL = "select * from Contact"
oRS.Open strSQL, CurrentProject.Connection, 3, 2

‘Loop through data
Do While Not oRS.EOF

‘count spaces
oRS.Fields("Status") = "" ‘Issues warnings for the record
strField = oRS.Fields("Alias") ‘Load source field from table

‘clean spaces
strField = LTrim(RTrim(strField)) ‘Remove leading and trailing
intFixFlag = 1
Do Until intFixFlag = 0 ‘Remove consecutive spaces
If InStr(strField, " ") > 0 Then
strField = Replace(strField, " ", " ")
Else
intFixFlag = 0
End If
Loop

‘Decide how many parts the name has by counting the spaces
aFieldParts = Split(strField, " ")
spaceCount = UBound(aFieldParts)

Select Case spaceCount
Case 0
oRS.Fields("FirstName") = strField
Case 1
oRS.Fields("FirstName") = aFieldParts(0)
oRS.Fields("LastName") = aFieldParts(1)
Case 2
oRS.Fields("FirstName") = aFieldParts(0)
oRS.Fields("MiddleName") = aFieldParts(1)
oRS.Fields("LastName") = aFieldParts(2)
Case Else
oRS.Fields("Status") = "x"
End Select

Debug.Print strField & " " & spaceCount

oRS.Update
oRS.MoveNext
Loop

oRS.Close

End Function
[/sourcecode]

Here I’m going to show a little more detail on how this works and also how to deal with various issues and anomalies that may appear in the data.

Leading and trailing spaces

This is an easy one since there are functions that take care of this:

strField = LTrim(RTrim(strField))

I’ve used the LTrim function to remove the leading spaces and RTrim to remove trailing spaces. One could also use the Trim function which removes both leading and trailing spaces. The difficulty I’ve always had with Trim is that in some computer languages it only trims the trailing spaces. So whenever I see “Trim” in code, I need to either remember or look up if it’s trimming all or just trailing. By adding both, it’s always really clear what’s being trimmed.

Double spaces

The command Replace(strField, ”  ”, ” “) can be used to replace any occurrences of two spaces with one. It’s important to notice that in this command, the first pair of double quotes has two spaces between them. The second pair has a single space. So it reads like “Replace within strField occurences of double space with single space”.

The cool thing about this command is if you run it on the same string twice it will remove triple spaces. The first time it sees the triple space it will remove the first pair (replacing it with a single space). Add that to the remaining space and there are now two spaces left. The second time the function is invoked it replaces the final two with one.

So to remove all spaces except single spaces, you simply run the function over and over till we’ve run out of occurrences of more than on space. To keep track of this we use a flag:

[sourcecode language="vb"]
intFixFlag = 1
Do Until intFixFlag = 0 ‘Remove consecutive spaces
If InStr(strField, " ") > 0 Then
strField = Replace(strField, " ", " ")
Else
intFixFlag = 0
End If
Loop
[/sourcecode]

Counting how many words

The next thing to think about is how many parts each name has. You can do this with this statement:

spaceCount = UBound(Split(strField, ” “))

This is a little subtle since the Split function is used for dividing up a string using a delimiter into an array. Here, Split is being used to separate the full name into parts using the space as a delimiter. So the more spaces that occur the more parts it finds. It adds all the parts it finds to an array. The UBound function tells us how many parts the array has. So this is a roundabout way of counting how many spaces exist in a string.

Extracting the data

Once we know how many spaces we have, we can then decide how to extract the various parts of the full name.

For instance if the spaceCount is zero then there are no spaces. This means that the name only has one part. What do do with it? Perhaps put it into the first name field as is.

oRS.Fields("FirstName") = strField

If the spaceCount is equal to one then we know we have two parts. We can put the first part into the first name field and the second part into the last name field.

oRS.Fields("FirstName") = Mid(strField, 1, InStr(strField, " "))
oRS.Fields("LastName") = Mid(strField, InStr(strField, " "))

If the spaceCount is equal to two, then we have three parts. We can separate them into first name, middle name and last name.

oRS.Fields("FirstName") = Mid(strField, 1, InStr(strField, " "))
oRS.Fields("MiddleName") = Mid(strField, InStr(strField, " ") _
         , InStr(InStr(strField, " ") + 1, strField, " ") - InStr(strField, " "))
oRS.Fields("LastName") = Mid(strField, InStr(InStr(strField, " ") + 1, strField, " "))

This is getting rather messy and as I write it, I realize there is a much shorter way. We can simply keep the array from the Split function. We can then reassemble the parts of the array rather than extracting them from the original string. I’ll revise the program and show this later.

[sourcecode language="vb"]
Public Function SeparateName() As String
‘Connect to data
Dim oRS As Object: Set oRS = CreateObject("adodb.recordset")
Dim strSQL As String
Dim strField As String: Dim spaceCount As Integer
Dim intFixFlag As Integer
strSQL = "select * from Contact"
oRS.Open strSQL, CurrentProject.Connection, 3, 2

‘Loop through data
Do While Not oRS.EOF

‘count spaces
oRS.Fields("Status") = "" ‘Issues warnings for the record
strField = oRS.Fields("Alias") ‘Load source field from table

‘clean spaces
strField = LTrim(RTrim(strField)) ‘Remove leading and trailing
intFixFlag = 1
Do Until intFixFlag = 0 ‘Remove consecutive spaces
If InStr(strField, " ") > 0 Then
strField = Replace(strField, " ", " ")
Else
intFixFlag = 0
End If
Loop

‘Decide how many parts the name has by counting the spaces
spaceCount = UBound(Split(strField, " ")) – 0

Select Case spaceCount
Case 0
oRS.Fields("FirstName") = strField
Case 1
oRS.Fields("FirstName") = Mid(strField, 1, InStr(strField, " "))
oRS.Fields("LastName") = Mid(strField, InStr(strField, " "))
Case 2
oRS.Fields("FirstName") = Mid(strField, 1, InStr(strField, " "))
oRS.Fields("MiddleName") = Mid(strField, InStr(strField, " ") _
, InStr(InStr(strField, " ") + 1, strField, " ") – InStr(strField, " "))
oRS.Fields("LastName") = Mid(strField, InStr(InStr(strField, " ") + 1, strField, " "))
Case Else
oRS.Fields("Status") = "x"
End Select

Debug.Print strField & " " & spaceCount

oRS.Update
oRS.MoveNext
Loop

oRS.Close

End Function
[/sourcecode]

Contact

ContactID AutoNumber
Status Text 255
Alias Text 255
FirstName Text 255
LastName Text 255
MiddleName Text 255

Now we need to get the FirstName and LastName filled in.

You can make a an update query to do this sort of thing but it’s not as flexible as the method I’m showing here.

This method uses VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to make the changes. The idea is to set up a loop that will visit each record of the table. During each visit we can read and write values too and from any field and perform calculations.

Setting up the loop is easy. In this example I’m using ADO (Active-X Data Objects). In this case it’s a four step process to use ADO.

1) We set up a connection to a database.

2) We set up a record set (this is a collection that represents the outcome of a SELECT query).

3) We loop through the record set collection (making our updates).

4) We close the record set and the collection.

When working in MS-Access with the tables inside the same database we don’t actually have to make the connection. It’s already there and can be referenced as CurrentProject.Connection. So we don’t have to create that object. We still need to create the recordset object however. We use Dim oRS As Object: Set oRS = CreateObject(“adodb.recordset”) to create that connection.

We send the SQL statement and the connection object to the recordset when we invoke it.

Once the recordset exists we can then loop through it using some of it’s methods:

oRS.eof
oRS.movenext
oRS.fields(“field1″)
oRS.update

We use the movenext method to advance a pointer through the recordset. When the recordset is created there is a pointer is on the first record. When we read the content of the recordset we will receive the data from the first record. We can read the fields of the recordset using the fields collection. Once we finish with a given record we can run the update method, then the movenext method to move to the next record.

During each visit to a record we can read and write the fields as necessary.

In my quick sample below I’m using the select case statement to perform different actions based on the number of spaces found in the name.  I’m using UBound(Split(strField, ” “)) to come up with a count of the number of spaces.

For example, if you look at the code below you will notice for case 0(if no spaces exist in the name), I’m using oRS.Fields(“FirstName”) = strField to transfer the entire name to the FirstName field.

I made up a section for dealing with one space (which implies that the name has two parts). For three or more parts (in the name) I haven’t written anything yet. I’m just writing an “x” to the status field so we can quickly see which records have not been touched.

[sourcecode language="vb"]
Public Function SeparateName() As String
‘Connect to contact table
Dim oRS As Object: Set oRS = CreateObject("adodb.recordset")
Dim strSQL As String
Dim strField As String: Dim spaceCount As Integer
strSQL = "select * from Contact"
oRS.Open strSQL, CurrentProject.Connection, 3, 2
Do While Not oRS.EOF

‘count spaces
strField = LTrim(RTrim(oRS.Fields("Alias")))
spaceCount = UBound(Split(strField, " ")) – 0
Select Case spaceCount
Case 0
oRS.Fields("FirstName") = strField
Case 1
oRS.Fields("FirstName") = Mid(strField, 1, InStr(strField, " "))
oRS.Fields("LastName") = Mid(strField, InStr(strField, " "))
Case Else
oRS.Fields("Status") = "x"
End Select

Debug.Print strField & " " & spaceCount

oRS.Update
oRS.MoveNext
Loop

oRS.Close

End Function
[/sourcecode]

FoxyUtils

For those of you who are more technical here is some more info.

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