An It-slave in the digital saltmine

An email sent to op5-users from op5s CTO, Peter Östlin.

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Background

I was with my geekfriends at a ski resort and I managed to get an Internet connection using a cellphone. Of course I wanted to share it with my friends. As geeks we brought a switch and a couple of ethernetcables.

Solution

Using this script on a Ubuntu 9.10 I managed to share my connection:

sudo ifconfig eth0 10.8.16.1
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.all.forwarding=1
sudo iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
sudo iptables --table nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

Conmnect everymachine with the switch and the clients just needed to use a 10.0.0.0/8 network adress and add 10.8.16.1 as default gateway and it works!

Background

At op5 we often run into BizTalk at customer sites as a business critical application. We have done an investigation and come up with a plugin  to monitor BizTalk.

To fully understand this document BizTalk knowledge is necessary.

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My laptop and cellular phone has both Bluetooth and it has annoyed me for a while that I have not managed to get a working Internet connection using Bluetooth. I have only managed to get it working with a USB cable between my phone and laptop.

After some Google search and reading of man pages I finally get it working.

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After fiddeling with my Bluetooth GPS reciever I wanted my friends and my wife to keep track of me. I wanted to use OpenStreetMap because I really like the idea of free and open maps instead of the unintelligible Google Maps licenses. The result can be seen here where I show the op5 office location outside Stockholm, Sweden.

Pre req

• a GPS reciever
• gpsd
• gpsd-client

In my setup I have the GPS reciever attached to my laptop which I travel around with. On my webserver I have gpsd-client and a script that generates the webpage. I use a VPN connection to allow my webserver to communicate with the laptop gpsdaemon. On the roads I use 3G attached cellphone and when I have an internet connection via cable or wifi I use that.

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Every computer geek ends up with a bunch of disks with unknown status in the drawer. It can be rather cumbersome to put them in a machine and check the status especially if some are SATA and others are PATA, it gets even more complicated if they are mixed 3.5" and 2.5".

In situations like this I recommend a USB SATA/PATA interface i.e. Plexgear at Kjell&Company, the adapter looks like it is OEM:ed so there probably several with different brands.

Features:

• USB-SATA
• USB-PATA 2.5"
• USB-PATA 3.5"
• Power Supply for normal devices and SATA devices

The only thing I miss is that it does not contain a SCSI interface aswell 🙂

I have used it to backup files on a LVM disk, transfer files from old disk to a new when upgrading, reinitialize a disk that refused to install Windows 7, attach a DVD-Rom to a blade server and so on.

In my opinion every geek and sysadmin should have one.

I have owned a PSP for several years. It is a fabulous machine with real impressive hardware and possibilities. The big problem is that Sony tries to look in the owners so the potential of the hardware is not there. There has been way around that by installing cracked firmware. The main obstacle has been the boundaries around video. It has not been possible to look at full resolution videos without running third part software which requires a cracked firmware, i.e. using http://jonny.leffe.dnsalias.com/

Now I have upgraded my PSP to firmware 5.50 GEN-D and finally I can drop movies into the /VIDEO folder and look at them in full resolution. So finally I can look at mythtv recordings on my way to the work or my kids can look at movies in the back of the car when we are travelling. Now it time to buy a second PSP.

Converting movies into a PSP accepted format is rather painful. I have not find any good solution running on linux. I have fiddled several hours with handbrake, avidemux, commandline driven ffmepg and PSPVC. The only program that makes the converting somewhat painless, just time consuming, is PSPVC on windows. The main problem on linux seems to be that ffmpeg is broken and need to be recompiled.

My recommendation to Sony is to open up their excellent solutions. Right of my mind I know four failures Sony have made because of their vendor look in strategy:

• Betamax video format, technically much better then VHS but closed. Betamax died and crappy VHS conquered the world.
• MiniDisc, an excellent technology which Sony refused to open up until it was to late. If they would have opened it would replaced floppys and killed Compact Cassets much earlier. Probably portable MP3 players would be postponed a year or two.
• PSP, if Sony would have opened it with SDKs and open APIs Apples POD products would not exist or be a margin product.
• PS3, with a open hardware platform so a real Linux solution could run, not the hybrid they have now, Sony would own the HTPC market. With the power of the PS3 and possibility to install for example mythtv, XBMC and other media solutions they would sell alot more PS3 and when the PS3 is there, several games would be sold aswell. 

So Sony if you want to get richer, open up!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

After the problems I have had with Bredband2, I want to test Phonzo.se as a new VoIP provider.

I registered on their homepage and after a couple of days I got a snail mail with my credentials.

I configured my FreePBX and calling in worked directly, but not outgoing. After 2 hours of troubleshooting I started to google "phonzo asterisk" and found several people that has the same experience. The reason is that Phonzo does not accepted "Asterisk PBX" as useragent and that is default in Asterisk.

After changing sip.conf

[general]

...

useragent=it-slav PBX

....

It worked!

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I have used Digisip as SIP VoIP provider for several years. It has been working very well until Skycom bought Bredband2 and Digisip. After that it has been very problematic:

• Without any information my Asterisk could not register anymore. After discussion with Bredband2 support they activated my account again after a week. According to Bredband2 this was not a disturbance in their service, it was regular maintenance. It is a policy to only compensate service problems.

• Bredband2 has several times shutdown my ability to call out. Every time they claim that I have no money left. After asking them to recheck they find my money and open my possibilty to call again.
• Before Bredban2 and Digisip join, I got an email with my account status every month. Today I have to send an email to the support to ask and the only info I get is how much money I have not used. No specification at all.

The webpage http://www.digisip.se, redirect to this page in swedish. It claims that service is much better when Bredband2 and Digisip has joined and refer to the support if you want to know account balance and so on, during the period until everything is working again. This page has been there for several months.

I have asked several times to get my money back and end my account. But Bredband2 refuse and claims that the lack of availability is regular maintenance.

I have finished reading the great book "FreePBX 2.5 Powerful Telephony Solutions", by Alex Robar and it is 277 pages.

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