SYSADMINMAN

If you’re looking for a softphone to use with Asterisk X-Lite is great.  It works on both Windows and Linux, although the configuration screens are a little different on the different versions.

All you should need to get it working with Asterisk are the following settings  (screenshot from the Windows version) -

Continue reading ‘SIP soft phone – using X-Lite with Asterisk’ »

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!

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.

We are currently in the process of migrating our users from one Active Directory domain to another.

The users already exist in the target domain so we were looking to mass change our NTFS permissions to include the user from the new domain whilst also retaining the permissions from the old domain.

A tool that Microsoft supplies looked ideal for the task – subinacl – apart from in one respect – the tool was deigned to replace permissions instead of adding to them. The way we got round this problem was to edit the export from subinacl and add in the new permissions that we wanted and then to run the export file against the NTFS volume.

So this was a 4 step process.

Continue reading ‘Modifying subinacl exports with a bash script’ »

I’ve used Dell laptops for a while and when I was looking for a new one about a month ago I was interested in a Dell Vostro as I’d read good things. One of the good things I’d read was that you could order it without all the crapware that comes installed on most machines these days.

So I brought a Vostro 1400 and was pretty pleased with it. One of the first things I did was *wipe all the partitions* on the drive and set it up to dual boot between Windows Vista and Ubuntu – with a nice big partition to store my data. This could then be accessed from both Vista and Ubuntu – ideal.

Continue reading ‘Dell/MediaDirect wiped my data!’ »

Spent a little while trying to get WinPE2 (Vista) to boot via PXE from a linux server and thought it could be useful to someone. We already had our Red Hat stuff booting from there and it seemed like a good idea to keep it in one place!

Some of the stuff could be useful for booting via PXE from a Windows box too

Windows XP was used for WAIK stuff
Fedora Core 6 was used for PXE Server
Both running on VMWare Server along with a blank VMWare machine as the PXE client
* Note – there’s a bug in RHEL5 that’s stop’s the tftpd.remap file working. Not sure how many versions this affects

Continue reading ‘PXE boot WinPE 2 (Vista) using Linux as the PXE Server’ »