4th December 2008, 09:55 am
I love my Blackberry Curve. Had it about 3 months now and really pleased with it.
Yesterday I read on the web about an upgrade to the OS (to version 4.5) that improved a few things, including html e-mail – which it didn’t handle very well.
So I decided to upgrade. Now, whenever you upgrade the firmware on a ‘device’ there’s a chance that things could go horribly wrong, but if you take care, make sure the device has enough power and give things time to work everything’s normally ok.
But, after getting half way through the update process last night it bombed out, leaving me with a dead Curve. The only sign of life was a flashing red light (2 intermittent flashes).
Thankfully the Blackberry designers have designed the Curve so that not everything is wiped when you update the firmware and a quick search of the web turned up these instructions which brought my Blackberry back to life.
So thanks ‘Reed McLay‘ – I wasn’t looking forward to ‘life without Blackberry’!!
3rd December 2008, 01:34 pm
The way I look at it, you can never have too many tools for monitoring the prefomance of your servers!
And it’s best to look round before you actually need them too. Run them on your system when things are ‘normal’ – that will make tracking down problems a lot easier when things start to go wrong.
A handy little tools that combines the functionality of vmstat, iostat, netstat, nfsstat is called dstat.
If you’re using CentOS this can be install via rpmforge (click here for details on adding the rpmforge repo) by doing a
then you can just run dstat (or ‘man dstat’ for some options)
Here’s an example of the output you can expect to see -
# dstat
----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read writ| recv send| in out | int csw
6 1 93 0 0 0| 31k 242k| 0 0 | 0.2 0.3 |2070 113
0 0 99 1 0 0|4096B 0 |1402B 452B| 0 0 |2037 72
0 0 100 0 0 0| 0 0 |1336B 468B| 0 0 |2035 77
0 1 99 0 0 0| 0 0 |1276B 452B| 0 0 |2035 67
0 0 99 1 0 0| 0 528k|1632B 452B| 0 0 |2049 90
0 0 100 0 0 0| 0 0 |2168B 468B| 0 0 |2039 68
0 0 100 0 0 0| 0 0 |1692B 452B| 0 0 |2036 70
1 0 99 0 0 0| 0 0 |1216B 452B| 0 0 |2032 64
0 0 100 0 0 0| 0 40k|1216B 452B| 0 0 |2050 91
0 0 100 0 0 0| 0 0 |1276B 452B| 0 0 |2033 88
0 0 100 0 0 0| 0 0 |1266B 562B| 0 0 |2036 75
2 2 96 0 0 1| 0 344k|1967B 1157B| 0 0 |2061 230
2nd December 2008, 04:54 pm
I saw the first ‘externsion scan’ of my Asterisk box this week. That is, an external server tried to register as an extension, starting at extension 100 all the way up to extension 999. I’m assuming if they had found a valid extension number then this would have been been followed by a brute force password (secret) scan.
This is an interesting article explaining the problem a little more – http://michigantelephone.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/why-didnt-freepbx-developers-implement-important-security-patch/
If you’re running Asterisk (and FreePBX) then the least you need to do is make sure that you’ve got pretty strong passwords for your extensions.
