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

Obviously you’ll need to change the server name to your Asterisk server’s DNS name or IP address, and the username/secret settings to the extension you created in Asterisk.

Please make sure you pick a difficult-to-guess secret/password, especially if your box is accessible from the Internet.

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!

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.

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.

First, run the subinacl command against the NTFS volume to create an export file with all of the existing permissions -

Then create a lookup file to map the old_domain\old_user to the new_domain\new_user -

Next, create the bash script. Some of this will be specific to our requirements but should get you started if you need to do the same thing -

Then you just need to play the rights file against your NTFS volume.

Warning: Obviously, make sure you know what you’re about to do when performing any kind of mass update

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.

But yesterday, when the machine was switched off, I accidentally hit the button next to the power button when switching it on – the MediaDirect button. What happens next is that the system powers on and then boots from a ‘Hidden Protected Area’ of the hard drive that wasn’t visible from Linux so hadn’t been removed when I repartitioned the drive. This tries to start MediaDirect, but obviously it couldn’t find the MediaDirect partition (as I had removed it when I installed Vista & Ubuntu) so it *automatically* deleted my ‘Data’ partition and recreated a partition ready for MediaDirect. Yep, no warning, no clue as to what it was doing – just repartitioned my drive.

Whoever thought up that idea *is an idiot!* Just one popup message would have been really nice – “We’re going to repartition your drive and wipe your data – continue Yes/No”

I’m really surprised at Dell. I’ve now taken steps to remove MediaDirect from my laptop completely but Dell really should give people the option not to have this junk installed by default.

Luckily I was able to recover my data (hours of raw and edited video footage) but it’s definitely left a bitter taste.

There is lots more inforation about this issue on the web and here are some links. Included in these is how I recovered my data (look for testdisk) and how I wiped the HPA of the drive (look for dd)

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-628229.html

http://backports.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?t=481090

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

Install a Linux Server
I’m using a NAT VM to keep the DHCP server off of the LAN
Do a minimum install – we will install the required packages later
I’m using DHCP to give the server an IP address for testing but will need a static IP address assigning

I’m not using a firewall or SELinux – you might need to alter your install to accommodate them

On your linux PXE server

Ensure that the DHCP server is installed

Edit /etc/dhcpd.conf for your environment. Here’s mine -

Install tftp-server

Install syslinux

Copy pxelinux.0 from the syslinux install to /tftpboot

Create a folder to hold the PXE config file

Create a PXE config file – /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default – Here’s mine -

Create a tftp remap file. This is used to translate back slashes to forward slashes. /tftpboot/tftpd.remap. This should just contain a single line

Enable the tftp server by editing the following file – /etc/xinitd.d/tftp. Also make it use the remap file. The -vvv is optional but it could definitely help later on! Here’s mine -

Start the DHCP server

Start the TFTP server

Download the Windows Automated Installation Kit – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c7d4bc6d-15f3-4284-9123-679830d629f2&DisplayLang=en

The file is an ISO file so can be renamed to .iso and mounted using either vmware or one of the free tools (magiciso?) so that the install can be run

On to a Windows XP machine now …

From the install CD you just downloaded

Install the .NET Framework Setup

Install the MSXML 6.0 Setup

Install the Windows AIK Personally I did it to c:\waik to save typing too much!

Run the copype command to create your PE folder

Mount the .wim image

Create a folder to store the PXE stuff

Copy the PXE stuff to the pxe folder

OK – now the fun bit. Create the BCD file. This is a replacement for the boot.ini

You should get a GUID returned – not sure what you need to do if not I’m afraid! Replace the GUIDs below with the GUID you get back
The entry {ed26a7d4-0ed5-11dc-9d1a-000c29ea1605} was successfully created.

ok – nearly all done now. You need to copy all the files from your \pxe folder to your linux PXE server. I use winscp. Copy the files to a folder call /tftpserver/Boot (case is important!) I had some fun trying to do this with Vmware but that could have been a problem unique to me!

Back on the linux server … Just got to rename a few files

Now PXE boot a machine and press 1 (obviously you can make syslinux look much nicer with some menus and things!). Fingers crossed you should get a Windows PE 2 console.

A few extra bits …

If you want to boot a Vmware machine via PXE and connect to the network you’ll need the Vmware network drivers in your .wim file. This is surprisingly easy to do thanks to being able to edit the .wim file easily.

From your Windows XP Vmware client (or you’ll need to find the vm network drivers from somewhere)

Now you can copy your winpe.wim file to your PXE server and overwrite the old one. Make sure you change the case of the file again to WinPE.wim

Hopefully this is going to work for all sorts of drivers – raid, network, etc Also, you can obviously put anything else that you need in the .wim file.