Stuff Joe Knows

Nexus One

I have been considering giving up my beloved Blackberry Curve for an Android device for a while, and decided to pull the trigger when I heard about the Nexus One.  After speaking with a T-Mobile CSR and doing the math, I ordered an unlocked Nexus One to use on my current T-Mobile family plan.  I am not under contract, but it would cost me less in the long run to get the unlocked version than take the discount now and have to go to individual plans.

Initial Impressions: Performance is excellent.  The screen looks very good, software takes minimal time to learn, and the interface and software is fast and responsive.  A welcome change from the relatively underpowered Blackberry.  Some of what I have to say may not be news to previous users of Android…

E-Mail E-mail performance is good, mailboxes are separate but easy to access, the notification ribbon allows one to jump directly to a mailbox containing new messages.  Setting up multiple SMTP/IMAP or G-mail accounts is pretty much automatic, just type in your e-mail address and password and it figures out the rest.

Navigation If you can get past the awful voice and text/speech the navigation is very usable (19 1/2 mile road becomes “nineteen one two road”.)  Street view, traffic, and satellite views all make navigation in unfamiliar areas easier.  Not a replacement for my Nuvi by any means, but certainly nice to have.

Voice Recognition Voice Recognition was pretty hit or miss in my experience, but humans often have trouble understanding me, so this was not too surprising.

Integration All the major applications (even non-Google) applications seem well integrated, they all share information well, no more cuttign and pasting constantly to find an address, or share a link.

APPS I have only used a few apps, here are my thoughts:

• Amazon.com – I personally love Amazon, and the ability to search it wirelessly and look up products from a bar code makes it very convenient.
• Twidroid & Meebo – good twitter and IM apps, but I think I preferred Beejive and SocialScope.  They may grow on me given time, so watch this space.
• Pandora – this has me excited, I’ve used Pandora One and Pandora on my Blackberry and was somewhat less than impressed, Pandora One seemed somewhat crippled to me, and the Blackberry just didn’t have the horsepower for it.  Pandora loads quickly on the Nexus, responds promptly to input, and doesn’t stutter or skip.  On the Blackberry it was essentially unusable when streaming the audio over bluetooth, but with the Nexus One connected to my Microsoft Sync radio, Pandora played flawlessly, no pauses, no skipping, no stutters, just nice sounding music.  On the Blackberry, changing between stations would often take so long it was faster to restart Pandora, if the new station started playing at all – no such trouble on the Nexus One.  This is what I expected from Pandora on the Blackberry.

Voice I took one brief call today and the call was loud and clear.  Notably the call lacked the long delay often experienced on the blackberry at the beginning of the call between answering the call and actually being connected to the other party.

BatteryThis is the big down side for me.  The battery takes a long time to charge, and does not last long at all.  Yes, I have all radios on and have data-intensive applications running in teh background, but under similar usage my Blackberry battery lasted days, where I got 10 hours out of my first charge on teh Nexus One.  Oh, did I mention it takes forever to charge?  Multiple hours on a home charger to reach full charge, Blackberry took less than an hour.  Hopefully as I spend less time fussing with the phone and tweak other settings the battery will at least last a full day.  For now, I keep a car charger and/or USB cable with me at all times.

WiFi WiFi performance seems strong, BUT the phone seems unable to automatically reconect to my home network (no SSID broadcasting) – PITA….

Conclusion Day 1 down, we will see how the weekend goes.  I will be travelling with the phone next week and get to test it more fully at that time.  So far I am very happy with the size/shape, performance, and software, I just hope something can be done about the battery life.

Please feel free to leave App suggestions in teh comments.

Safir01 Computer, Internet Android, Google Phone, Nexus One, Pandora

I had an iso I needed to get files off real quick – not worth burning the CD. I used this method to mount it in linux.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-mount-iso-image-under-linux.html

Andy Uncategorized

Came across this great how-to on disabling that annoying Administrative Rights popup in Vista (called uac). Thanks!

http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm

Andy Uncategorized

I got an e-mail from a friend last night.

Hey Andy,

I wonder if I can bother you for some network troubleshooting?

Now, I have my FIOS wireless router set up to talk to a linksys wireless game adapter wired to my xbox.  works well (most of the time).

I am getting a tv and blu-ray player that also want to be hooked up to the internet (everybody thinks they are a computer these days, i.e, streaming content!)

I’d like to ’share’ the wireless connection point using a router/hub or somehow get all 3 talking to the FIOS wireless router.

I have an old netgear firewall/router that may or may not work (it is OLD), and I have a (newer) linksys wireless router that I could use to talk to the FIOS wireless directly? or use as a hub for the game access point? (turn off the wireless stuff)

hope that makes sense.  basically I want to hook up 3 things on one side of the room to the FIOS router on the other side of the room.

let me know what you think – if any of this will work.  probably have to change some DNS stuff somewhere/somehow.

Thanks!

John

to which i replied

Easy peasy!

You’re right in that we need to add a switch to the ethernet-side of your wireless gaming adapter. Either of your old routers will do here as they both likely have a 4-port switch built-in. We need to do 3 things (turn off two things actually, and change one) on the router.

1. Turn DHCP off – without dhcp, the router won’t pretend it is authoritative on the network, requiring all to do what it says.
2 turn wireless off – having a second wireless access point doesn’t hurt anything but it could interfere with the gaming adapter’s signal to noise ration.
3. Change the ip address of the router itself – verizon’s default ip for their router is 192.168.1.1 – same with the linksys at least, maybe the netgear too. That will stop this from working entirely.

Then connect one of the 4 LAN ports to the gaming adapter and the other 3 to the 3 devices. The WAN port is unusable in this configuration.

You might be thinking you could put the WAN port into the wireless gaming adapter and the devices in the LAN ports, leaving one available for the future which isn’t strictly wrong, but the subnets would likely conflict between the verizon and secondary router, and then your devices would be firewalled from your network making streaming local content difficult – in other words, don’t try that. This is easier.

Andy

Hope that’s helpful to someone.

Andy Uncategorized

This is a real winner. Philippe from FreePBX mentioned this in our Open Telephony Training Seminar last year in regards to embedded systems but I’ve seen excellent performance enhancements on all the systems I’ve installed it in.

yum install php-eaccelerator

That’s it! You can do a before and after comparison by setting “DEVEL=yes” in your /etc/amportal.conf and running a couple page loads before and after you install php-eaccelerator. A page generation time will show in the top right corner of the page.

How well did it work for you? Let us know in the comments.

Andy Uncategorized Asterisk, FOSS, FreePBX, Linux, VoIP

We have a Windows 2003 fileserver that uses storage on an iSCSI array that seemed to “lose” it’s shares every time it rebooted.  I suspected it was trying to initialize teh shares before the iSCSI target was connected and not finding them, so went looking for a way to force Windows to wait for the iSCSI target to be connected prior to attempting anything else.  As it turns out, what I suspected was happening was absolutely correct, and was relatively easy to fix.

the magic command, to make the Server Service dependant on the iSCSI service, and hence start after it is

sc config LanManServer depend= MSiSCSI

assuming your iSCSI targets are set up persistantly, you will no longer have to re-create your fileshares every time your server reboots.

for more information please visit KB870964

Safir01 Computer iSCSI, Window 2003

Sure is nice how windows hosts automatically update their DNS records in your AD integrated DNS servers, huh?
Sure would be nice if your Linux hosts did the same thing, huh?

This is actually easier than it sounds. First make sure your (Microsoft) DHCP server is configured to “Dynamically update DNS for hosts that do not request updates” this is in the properties for the DHCP server within the DHCP management MMC.

then on your Linux host edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and add the following line:

send host-name “”;

the quotes and the semicolon do matter, replace with your server’s hostname and DNS suffix (linuxserver.microsoft.com, for instance)

Safir01 Uncategorized Active Directory, DNS, Linux, Microsoft

Information on the web regarding automatic provisioning of these phones is limited at best, and the SPA Configuration Profile Compiler is no longer available for free, so I am sharing my experience provisioning a few of these phones in our office.

I have two Linksys IP Phones, model SPA962.  we are using AsteriskNOW 1.5.  I will assume your Asterisk configuration is good, and will focus on configuring the phones.

Prerequisites to use this guide:

• Extensions configured in Asterisk for the phones you are setting up
• tftp server is working and option 66 is configured in DHCP
• Phones can see the network, DHCP, and Asterisk server (duh)

By default these phones look for a provisioning script named “spa$PSN.cfg” in the root of your tftp server.  we will take advantage of this to specify our common configuration settings as well as phone-specific configurations.  When everything is set up we will roughly mirror the “aastra.cfg/MAC.cfg” model used by Aastra phones.  $PSN is a macro that expands to the Product Series Number, for example 962.

This is my (xml) spa962.cfg:

<flat-profile>

<Profile_Rule_B> /$MAU.cfg </Profile_Rule_B>

<Dial_Plan_1_ group=”Ext_1/Dial_Plan”>(*xx|[3469]11|0|00|9[2-9]xxxxxxxxxxxx|91xxx[2-9]xxxxxxS0|9xxxxxx</Dial_Plan_1_>

<Primary_NTP_Server> NTP1.IP.ADDRESS </Primary_NTP_Server>
<Secondary_NTP_Server> NTP2.IP.ADDRESS </Secondary_NTP_Server>
<Time_Zone>GMT-04:00</Time_Zone>

<Select_Background_Picture group=”Phone/General”>BMP Picture</Select_Background_Picture>

</flat-profile>

 Profile_Rule_B specifies a secondary configuration file to read, $MAU expands to the MAC Address of the phone in uppercase letters, similar to an aastra phone – this is where we will put the phone-specific settings.

NTP servers, Time zone, and Background are purely optional.  More on the background later.

The default dialplan is acceptable, but I found that I had to add the leading “9″ to the dial rules to be able to dial toll-free numbers in my configuration.  YMMV

This is one of my (xml) MAC.cfg files

 

<flat-profile>

<Proxy_1_ group=”Ext_1/Proxy_and_Registration”>ASTERISK.IP.ADDRESS</Proxy_1_>
<Display_Name_1_ group=”Ext_1/Subscriber_Information”>Jimmy Flynn</Display_Name_1_>
<User_ID_1_ group=”Ext_1/Subscriber_Information”>201</User_ID_1_>
<Password_1_ group=”Ext_1/Subscriber_Information”>1234567890</Password_1_>
<Auth_ID_1_ group=”Ext_1/Subscriber_Information”>201</Auth_ID_1_>

<Extension_1_ group=”Phone/Line_Key_1″>1</Extension_1_>
<Extension_2_ group=”Phone/Line_Key_2″>Disabled</Extension_2_>
<Extension_3_ group=”Phone/Line_Key_3″>Disabled</Extension_3_>
<Extension_4_ group=”Phone/Line_Key_4″>Disabled</Extension_4_>
<Extension_5_ group=”Phone/Line_Key_5″>Disabled</Extension_5_>
<Extension_6_ group=”Phone/Line_Key_6″>Disabled</Extension_6_>

</flat-profile>

This should be relatively self-explanatory…

Proxy_1_, Display_Name_1_, etc are settings for line 1, substitute the appropriate line # for additional lines.

Extension_1_ – Extension_6_ are the settings for the line buttons on the phone.  I have one line, so i disabled extensions 2-6 to avoid having it listed 6 times.

I also configure the tftp URL for the background BMP here, so each phone can have a different background if necessary.  if there is nothing configured here, or manually on the phone, the background is black.

Once these files are setup and the phone is plugged into the network it gets it’s IP and option 66 from the DHCP server, it then looks for spa$PSN.cfg on the tftp server and loads it’s settings.  This file includes the Profile_Rule_B setting telling it to look for it’s $MAU.cfg file as well, so after a short period it reboots and downloads both spa$PSN.cfg and $MAU.cfg, adding all the settings from both files to it’s configuration.  If everything is configured correctly, the phone should come up, register to Asterisk, and show “green” on it’s assigned line buttons.

These are the minimum settings I consider necessary to use the phone, if you have additional settings, I suggest configuring a phone, then downloading it’s XML configuration to use as a template to build your spa$PSN.cfg and $MAU.cfg.  This file can be obtained by visiting http://<device ip address>/admin/spacfg.xml in a browser on the same subnet as the phone, and contains the XML syntax for every setting you can imagine.

This is a brief overview of the minimum information needed to provision these phones, for more in-depth information please see the following document:

Cisco Small Business IP Telephony Provisioning Guide (pdf)

Safir01 VoIP Linksys IPPhone Asterisk

Caution: this is a destructive process, it will completely destroy any current configuration in the router.

First, you need to gain access to ROMMON – connect to the Console port on the router and send a break sequence as the router boots – typically this is Ctrl+break.

once you are at the rommon 1> prompt enter the command

confreg 0×2142 (that is a zero)

this will set the router to ignore the configuration file when you reboot it, effectively resetting it to factory defaults.

reset

This will restart the router and bring you to the initial configuration, type noat each of the prompts and you will be returned to a router with a default configuration and no password.  Now all we need to do is reset the configuration register and save this blank configuration.

Router> enable

Router# configure terminal

Router (config) #config-register 0×2102 (those are zeros)

Router (config) #exit

Router#write

This will reset the config register to the default, so that the router boots normally, and write this blank configuration to the nvram.

If you are particularly clever you can salvage your configuration by sending the router a “copy startup-config running-config” to copy your configuration to memory, reset the passwords, and fix your interfaces (they will all be administratively down) but that is beyond the scope of this article.

some more information is available from Cisco at the following:

Cisco Password Recovery Procedure

Safir01 Computer, Internet, Security, Uncategorized

I like Asterisk Now 1.5. It uses Digium’s own yum repository to keep Asterisk and it’s other pieces up to date and, if you’re careful, it will even let you update it

They left out a bunch of stuff though – most of it on purpose. Here are my crib notes for making it work fast. They’re rough and I’m sure there are better ways to do some of the things – this just works for me. Also – these are mostly from the beta2 release. The actual 1.5 release is a little different. Leave your other tips and tricks in the comments and I’ll try to include them.

1. in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf change the apache user and group from ‘apache’ to ‘asterisk’. then run /etc/init.d/httpd restart. The Asterisk Now developers insist this isn’t necessary (and it probably isn’t) but I’ve found FreePBX works better when it is run by the same user that owns Asterisk. Maybe I’m just superstitious?

2. We need some tools to fix music-on-hold. add the rpmforge repository by running
rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
or
rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
depending on your architecture.

then run yum install mpg123 sox
mkdir /var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3
chown asterisk:asterisk /var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3
chmod 755 /var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3
cp /var/lib/asterisk/moh/* /var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/

3. To fix Flite, run

wget http://dialogpalette.sourceforge.net/extras/flite-1.3-1.aah.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh flite-1.3-1.aah.i386.rpm
wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/asterisk-flite/asterisk-flite-0.5-1.fc8.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh asterisk-flite-0.5-1.fc8.i386.rpm

4. to fix CDR run this
yum install asterisk-addons
yum install php-gb


5. Once Dahdi is configured (and don’t expect it to work after just running dahdi_genconf…) use this to start it on boot.
chkconfig --add dahdi


Enjoy!

Andy Uncategorized