sysadminman.net

If you’re having trouble logging in to the Rhapsody website and you are running Firefox 3 on Ubuntu (or possibly other flavours of Unix) then the following might be useful.

If, every time you try to log in to the Rhapsody website, you are asked to install the Firefox plugin, even after apparently installing it, then the plugin is not getting installed correctly.

To install the plugin manually try -

Start a shell prompt

Then restart Firefox.

Hopefully, now you should be presented with a username/password box when you try to log in rather than the plugin install prompt.

I really like the delicious plugin for firefox and have been recommending it to people for a while now.

Recently though using the plugin with firefox 3 on both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) has been a real pain. “Favorite Tags”  and “Tag Bundles” have been disappearing and losing their settings. This has been going on for a few weeks now and the developers have been working hard on resolving the problem, which turned out to be a corruption in one of the settings files.

They have released a beta fix for this problem, which you currently have to sign up to a Yahoo group to download. Details of the problem and how to obtain the patch can be found here.

Hopefully they will release a mainstream version of this patch soon!

I love my new Blackberry Curve! I had a small problem setting up the Google Calendar Sync and thought this might help someone else.

I had no problem installing the software from http://m.google.com/sync - just point your Blackberry web browser at that URL.

However, when I logged in and tried to sync my calendars (I have 5 different calendars setup) I only saw “Default Calendar” listed under “My Calendars”.

It turns out this was because I was logging in to Google Sync using a secondary e-mail address I have assigned to my Gmail account (ie I was logging into Google Sync using user@mydomain.com rather than user@gmail.com)

When I logged in to Google Sync using my Gmail username (user@gmail.com) all of my calendars were listed under options after the initial sync.

Dan Goodin has written an interesting article for theregister.co.uk  about the benefits of using a personal VPN for your wireless internet traffic.

There are some downsides to running a VPN server at home. One of these is that all of your data must travel via your home PC/server and most peoples broadband connections will limit the speed that this will work at. The maximum speed of your VPN connection will be limited by the upload speed of your home broadband - which is normally quite slow. Also, dynamic IP addresses, port forwarding and NAT on your broadband router and having to leave your home PC powered on all the time could be a pain.

Another alternative could be to run OpenVPN on your own server (or vps) at a data center or, a cheaper alternative, to buy access to an OpenVPN server that has already been setup and configured. I have partnered with SynapseGlobal to provide both of these solutions - see here for more details.

I’ve been playing with OpenVPN for the past couple of weeks and I’m pretty impressed. OpenVPN allows you to create a private network between 2 computers. These could be 2 servers or a client and a server. A few of the reasons for wanting to do this are -

• bypassing your ISPs traffic shaping
• making your traffic appear to originate from a different country
• encrypting your laptop traffic over an insecure link - such as a coffee shop wifi connection
• anonymous web surfing
• bypassing a countries web access controls

Setup and configuration of the server component can be fairly complicated depending how you want to manage the certificates and networking on there. It’s possible to install it on Linux or Windows although I’ve only tested it on Linux. Running the server on Linux you also need to configure iptables to translate your private ‘vpn’ ip address to an external ip address on the vpn server.

Continue reading ‘Running OpenVPN’ »

I’ve been interested in trying to stream some of my videos from my server rather than from YouTube. YouTube is great but the video quality is pretty poor.

I’m running CentOS 5.2 and decided to just try installing ffmpeg from rpmforge rather than compiling it. Lazy but easy!

rpmforge is a repository where you can find lots of prebuilt packages that are not part of a standard Redhat/CentOS install. You can find instructions for setting it up here.

So, with rpmforge configured, this was all I needed

Then I looked round for a player to stream the video (which were going to be in flash format). Flowplayer looked pretty nice. I just wanted something simple that would have only the video and controls on the page.

After looking over the sample html pages that come with flowplayer it was easy to create a page with just the video on there. So I uploaded my videos which were in mpg format.

Running the command

converted the video to flash format with a pretty high quality but without making the files too large. I’m sure I could probably find better settings if I played around a bit more.

And here some examples of the end result -

http://video.sysadminman.net/takeoffsywell.html

http://video.sysadminman.net/alconbury.html

http://video.sysadminman.net/fisty_nuts.html

Just out of interest - the aircraft is a Pegasus Quantum 582 which you can see a picture of here.

I no longer own it and and miss the summer evenings flying around the english countryside.

I get a lot of people asking me about running Asterisk on a VPS. It’s a great way to get started and experiment with Asterisk and find out what it can do.

If you’ve used something like Skype or Vonage before then you’ll have an idea what you can do with VOIP but running your own Asterisk server makes things so much more flexible.

If you combine Asterisk with FreePBX, a great web interface for configuring Asterisk, then you’ll have an extremely capable PBX. There are many plugin modules available for FreePBX which provide an easy way to setup advanced features such as voicemail, IVRs, follow-me, time conditions, conferencing …

It is possible to run Asterisk on pretty much any VPS but you’ll definitely have a better experince using a VPS specifically designed for running Asterisk. A couple of features that may not be available with a ‘normal’ VPS is the ztdummy driver and high quality bandwidth.

Continue reading ‘Asterisk on a VPS’ »

Here’s a small bash script to destroy all existing zfs snapshots.

Run at your own risk! 

If you’re running Asterisk on a VPS or a dedicated server then setting up your iptables firewall can be a tricky.

I thought I’d post my firewall script to help get you started. I save this script as /usr/local/bin/firewall.sh and then add a line to run it from /etc/rc.local

It allows SSH’ing to the machine plus rules required for SIP connections (you will need other rules if you use IAX) plus some basic “bad stuff” filtering.

I’ve commented it so, hopefully, you’ll be able to figure out and chages you need.

Continue reading ‘iptables for asterisk’ »

As someone pointed out here another possibilty for these kind off error messages is that, if you’ve just changed the SSH port from 22 to something else for security, then there’s a good chance your firewall may be blocking the connection.

Redhat5/CentOS5 cetainly has a firewall enabled as default. Try ‘iptables –list’ to see if you’ve got iptables running