Hello dear readers and attendees,

This is the post that I will be/ will have been referencing during my presentation to the Seattle Central Community College’s Byte club on Thursday, December 10th at 1500-1630.

I will begin with a bit of an autobio and find out what kind of students we have in attendance. Please feel free to comment if you’d like to keep in touch before or after the presentation. I will discuss some of the bits and pieces of some industry standard platforms which I’ve developed, deployed, maintained, managed, co-operated, administered and replaced. We can discuss some of the patterns that work well in the industry, and some that are a bit harder to tame.

Once we have touched most of the areas of specialization represented at the meeting, I will dive in to an AngularJS demo I am developing in github here:

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I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also …

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so …

I’m leaving myself some room for bug fixes. It works for us in house. I would love to help others to give it a try. especially those who could benefit from making nearly immediately answered queries to the NIST’s NVD database.

The code in this release cannot by itself track the feed from the feds in real time. The nvd entry loader needs a little bit of love in the area of record merging before this starts working. It’s on my TODO list.

I’m sorry for the outage of git.colliertech.org. I’ll get that back up here shortly. In the meantime, feel free to grab it from this location while the CPAN indexes and processes my submission.

http://www.colliertech.org/federal/NIST/NIST-NVD-1.00.00.tar.bz2

don’t forget to check the cryptographic signature:

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Topology Participating hosts

* 1x BIG-IP VE
* 1x Debian Squeeze “Provisioning Server” serving DHCP, TFTP & DNS
* 3x Nortel/Avaya 1120E hard phones flashed to SIP1120e04.01.13.00
* 2x Debian Squeeze + digium asterisk packages:

$ grep asterisk /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://packages.asterisk.org/deb squeeze main
deb-src http://packages.asterisk.org/deb squeeze main

DUNDi

*CLI> module reload pbx_dundi.so
*CLI> dundi show peers
*CLI> dundi show mappings
*CLI> dundi lookup 4012@extensions bypass
*CLI> dundi set debug on

SIP

*CLI> sip show peers

dialplan

*CLI> dialplan show RegisteredDevices

Work in progress

Yesterday, I installed a trixbox virtual machine using the …

Learned a few things during my trip to the Philippines this time. Another country that amazes me. For the first time in history, Philippines attracted more foreign direct investments (FDI) than Malaysia, in 2010 (see: Malaysia’s FDI plunge).

Mobiles

There are a lot of people here using prepaid phones as opposed to postpaid phones. This is because the requirements of getting a postpaid account is quite tough (you need bank documents, etc. before they give you an account).

Many people carry more than one phone (or have more than one SIM). Smartphones face an uphill battle – they cost too much and there is generally no operator subsidy because everyone prefers prepaid accounts. It makes economic sense to have more than one SIM, as you’ll end up saving money (operators like to offer free text, calls, …

I’ve been a big supporter of Zimbra, because I think they’re one of the few projects/companies that get email/calendering/a groupware solution, right. Sure, I don’t necessarily like the model where they cripple the open source version in terms of say, backups (but this I guess will be fixed when MySQL supports online backups natively). No AdSense zimlet? Its easy enough to write one (with spare time).

What’s annoyed me of late with Zimbra, is its lack of ability to work with my Nokia E61i. Its a known problem (since February this year?), as it also affected the E61 (and probably other Series 60 phones, when you’re trying to access the Zimbra server over IMAP). You get the certificate being displayed, you get the headers, and when you try to open any email bodies, it just stops working.

The …

Have an Intel Mac? Rely on SIP soft phones, like X-Lite? Realize that it always crashes?

Try the beta, from CounterPath. It’s not called X-Lite, its beta, so it might eat your babies, but I’ve been using it for a while (because MySQL loves VoIP), and it works a charm. Looks like my office phone is back in business, even when I’m on OS X.