Visited Cisco in Didsbury today to have a look at their Voice over IP offering. It’s grown up a lot since I last looked at it about 3 years ago. The Cisco phones can be plugged into any network point and the phone will automatically assign itself to a designated Voice VLAN through some CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) magic without the need for VMPS (VLAN Management Policy Server). This is really neat and means my long overdue rollout of VMPS can remain on the ‘rainy day’ todo list. The phone then sends out a DHCP request and boots up by pulling it’s OS from a TFTP service sat on a Cisco Call Manager box. The Call Manager box does all the Voice over IP grafting, currently it’s based on Windows 2000 with SQL Server backend. I was delighted to here that this will change in the next version that will be based upon Linux (with some unspecified SQL backend). The management and user interface to the system still look a bit sucky and disjointed (as it was 3 years ago). For example, you can group users into teams or set up the speed dials on a given phone though the web, but you need to login to two completely seperate systems to achieve this. However, as the backend management of the system is held in SQL, it should be relatively easy to create a PHP (/python/perl/whatever turns you on) front-end customised to your sites exact requirements. Quite an exciting thought.. (for a geek..)
Archive for the 'Work' Category
I was lucky enough last week to attend the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in London, using it as a venue to take my 102 LPI exam.
Travelling up the night before the conference was certainly a good idea. Last year, in an attempt to save some of my employers money, I decided to travel from Hull to London and back on both days. Never again. Not only did I have back pain from sitting on the train for so long for several days following, work still fussed around with paying my expenses even though I’d saved them a hundred quid or so by not staying the night in London. This year I travelled from my village train station all the way to London with only a single change at Doncaster. No driving or parking hassles this year. I was pretty thrilled by the cheap 19 quid each way price and I was even more thrilled by the WiFi Internet access onboard the GNER Mallard train. I wasn’t so thrilled by the Premier Travel Inn hotel. To quote the website page, ‘Please be advised there may possible noise due to the central location of the hotel’. Wow. They meant it. The hotel was 50 metres away from Earls Court tube station and my window had a fabulous view of the 4 main tube lines into the station. Not a place for a quiet nap.
The Expo kicked off on the Wednesday with a talk by Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. I’ve heard one of his talks before when it was published on his website, I was glad to hear that his English has improved incredibly since then. 
He gave a general overview of Knoppix and the technologies included in the latest release, mainly revolving around the UnionFS support allowing writes to be made and then saved to a writable medium such as a USB pen drive. Klaus also showed Knoppix running Knoppix from inside QEmu, a nice party trick, but IMHO, it has little real world use as QEmu is so incredibly slow. Hopefully Xen will bridge the gap in the coming months between QEmu and the commercially available VMWare.
The second talk I attended was with Alan Cox, talking about the state of the Linux desktop and how business views the state of the Linux desktop. This is an area that Alan has a particular interest in, his Masters is based on the subject. From his research is seems that KDE and Gnome have a fairly equal share of the market and that businesses really don’t care much for the choice of desktop. (Amusingly, KDE and Gnome where next to each other in the .Org village and it was nice to see them chatting to each other.) Alan came out with a couple of funnies during his talk, firstly referring to MCSEs as Microsoft Certified Solitaire Engineers, (well it made me laugh anyway), and then coming up with a suprising fact that the latest Intel processors produce more heat per square centimeter than the surface of the sun. I find the concept a little hard to grasp, but it still brought a smile to my face.
I dived out from the conference program at this point and met up with davee around the exhibitors. We had a good wander round and I had a chat with Matt from ByteMark Hosting. I was really pleased to hear that they’re increasing everybodys VM RAM allocations, this just might sort out some issues I was having with omahns-home.co.uk as it keeps sipping from the swap file after several hours of use. Continuing round I had a good look at a Dell blade centre, something we’ve been looking into at work for some time. I was quite suprised to see the blade didn’t have a single fan on it, or more worrying, a single PCI slot. It seems that the blade centre itself handles all the Fibre Channel magic itself allowing all the blades to share several SAN connections. I need to look into this a bit more I think..
The afternoon conference consisted of a talk by PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf. He demonstrated the new features available in PHP5. The new version is something I’ve been looking at for quite a while, but PHP5 isn’t available in Debian Sarge and so I’ve been putting it off and off. (I know about the dotdebs archive but I would rather stay with the ‘offical’ release.) Some of the new web service features are really neat and I sat their finding myself nodding away, thinking that this stuff will really save me time. Next up was a guy who introduced himself as an ex-cosmonaut, not something you hear everyday. Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu talking about the new release 5.10 (year 2005, month 10) called Dapper Drake. Wierd.
After a quick visit to the usual haunt of the Lonix crew with the local Lug and LugRadio faithful I retired back to my (noisy) hotel room to get some revision in for my exam.
I started the next day with another walk around the exhibitors stand before the talks started. I wasn’t too suprised to see the Lonix stand completely empty, must of been a good night. Spent the next 20 (longest ever?) minutes watching a quick talk at the Novell stand. It was the usual Novell talk, very dry and lacking in detail or any live machines running the software contained in the talk. However, I was rewarded with the obligatory free soft penguin. Talking to a couple of the people on the Novell stand, it quickly became obvious that most of the staff were just pretty bimbos. One replying ‘Zenwhat?’ when I asked if they had any live demos of ZenWorks running before rushing off to ask someone else if they knew anything about the product. I was pointed in the direction of a machine with two (fairly offical) guys sat around it. The box had OES running on it, with what looked at Zenworks 7 although I never actually found out as I was just completely blanked by the staff at the stand. I left the Novell stand at this point, thinking that maybe next year I should wear a suit.. Had a quick look at the Hula project, the guy at the stand demonstrated the new AJAX interface to the calendar module. It’s pretty nifty and seemed to be able to do all the Outlook style resizing and drag’n'drop of events all from the browser in real time. Clever? Yes. Useful? Yes. Two years too late? Yes.
The only talk I managed to attend on the second day was the Asterisk talk by the founder of the project. It was pretty quick but went through the features of the OpenSource PBX. Asterisk is something I’ve been meaning to look at for ages. I already have a single phone line interface card to play with, just never had the time.
The afternoon consisted of my LPI exam. It was considerably better organised than the last one. My 101 exam was sat in a tiny cubicle with 3 other people sharing the same small desk. This time each person had a full desk in a large room. I spent about 30 minutes (out of the 90 allowed) on the exam. Out of the 70 questions, I was 99% confident on about 45 of them. 3 questions completely stumped me so I just had to guess. The rest I was fairly sure on, but we’ll just have to wait and see as each question is weighted depending on the difficulty and topic it covers. Fingers crossed..
My overall thoughts on the conference is that it’s become very commercial. Many of the exhibitors would ignore you if you didn’t have a suit on for example. The ‘technical’ talks were also incredibly vague, none of them had anything even mildly technical in them. Especially when compared to previous Linux User & Developer organised expos. I will be attending next year though and hopefully I’ll be joining in the social events rather than revising and sitting an exam. 
Well I never. After years of poor (virtually non-existent) support from Dell, it seems they’ve finally sorted themselves out.
Following a fascinating thunderstorm last week, our main server room at work lost power for anything up to 9 hours. When the power came back on, all the servers duly booted up and resumed normal duty. But, and it’s a big but, not the air conditioning unit. As a result we noticed a disk in a Dell PowerEdge 2650 had died, most likely due to the heat that had built up in the enclosed room.
As the disk was under 3 years old and all PowerEdge servers come with at least a 3 year warranty, I reluctantly opened a support request on the Dell website. I say reluctantly because in the past getting any support out of Dell has proved a fruitless waste of time. The first response was an e-mail. A machine generated e-mail with the usual idiot instructions, ‘Is it plugged in’ blah blah. Sent a reply straight back stating that we had performed all their directions in the e-mail to no avail. (We hadn’t really.) A further e-mail arrived stating that the on-line support covers the software only and that I should call up on a number provided. Straight on to the phone I managed to get through to some drone in India. Not a good start. Went through the details of the problem only to be told that no technicians where available and that they would give us a ring back. Yeah, right, I thought.
I was stunned to get a phone call back around 30 minutes later from an engineer in Ireland (Dells’ Europe base). The engineer was straight to the point, asking if we had checked the disk in the SCSI BIOS with a verify operation. We told him that we had tried it in an identical 2650 server and the BIOS couldn’t even see it. The engineer was happy with that and immediately offered someone to drive up a replacement disk. (!). At it was late in the afternoon and I was heading home I told him that tomorrow would be fine. To this he asked what time we would like it delivered and if we would like a Dell engineer to be present to perform the installation. Very impressive, athough not required, I’m fairly sure I can fit a SCSI disk.
Following morning, the disk duly arrived, followed closely after by a confirmation call from Dell to make sure the disk had arrived and that we had managed to get it in to the server. Amazing. Dell seem to have completely changed around their support division. Maybe it is worth paying for the 3 year warranty after all..
I’ve been struggling with a storage problem at work for the past 3 days. We purchased 4 x 400Gb disks to provide over a terabyte of storage utilising 2 PCI SATA controllers that I knew had Linux drivers for them in the vanilla kernel. Worryingly, we already have enough video footage to pretty much fill all 4 disks. Back to the problem. The server will be providing the disk as Samba shares, running on Debian, naturally. Unfortunately the installer was failing when partitioning the disks. I spent a couple of hours last night Googling suspecting that it was the early SATA support in Linux causing the problem. Didn’t find much. I then arrived in to work this morning and finally realised that I hadn’t started with the basics. Never mind the software, is the hardware good? Five minutes later we had Seagates diagnostic CD running performing a thorough scan of the disks. Within 30 seconds we had bad sector error messages. Bingo. Problem solved, faulty disk. But no…
We removed the disk and tried re-installing to one of the other disks, same problem. As the problem was still present we decided to strip the system down and rebuild it, piece by piece, to find the offending piece of hardware. Five hours later (keeping in mind we had 4 disks, 2 PCI SATA controllers, 4 SATA cables, 2 power splitters and 4 power->SATA converters) we discovered one of the SATA controllers was faulty. Now the machine is running, albeit with only 2 of the 4 disks, i’m very impressed with SATA. This is my first outing with the technology and i’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on SATA 2, II or whatever else you want to call it. SCSI performance and features at IDE prices… can’t wait..
Since February this year my work place has been working on a new web site. Or at least it should have been working on a new web site. Our web designer has just handed in his notice, leaving myself and Carl, our DBA, the task of writing the website pretty much from scratch. Thankfully we also have the very capable help of a web designer, Martagnan.
The current site is a vomit inducing nightmare consisting of entire pages in flash and page content (complete with HTML tags!) held in a database table called TABLE1. Scary stuff. The new site will do away with just about all the old site.
From the very beginning of the project i’ve made it clear that we shouldn’t use any Flash, at all. Period. In fact, it shouldn’t require any plugins at all. Unfortunately i’ve not quite achieved this goal, our marketing manager still wants a small animated bar on the page to ‘grab attention’. I still have to look a bit deeper into this, personally I would like it converted to an animated .GIF file, or removing altogether to get rid of the Flash requirement.
One of the key goals of the new site is to allow everyday staff to maintain and update the site. A common requirement these days. To this end i’ve started to look at handling of images on the site. The frontpage will have 4 images, that change on each refresh. Instead of building our own backend to allow staff to update the images, i’m looking at using the PHP based Gallery application, or more specifically, Gallery v2. It’s still in beta but it seems pretty reliable and also uses a SQL backend, an absolute requirement for our needs. The idea goes like this:
* Staff member wants to put a new picture in to rotation for the front page
* User logs into Gallery and uploads the picture (dead easy, even for our staff..)
* Our PHP scripts that generate the front page pulls out, at random, four pictures from the Gallery
It seems like an ideal solution and so far I haven’t thought of any drawbacks. We’re looking at using Albums as well to group pictures for specific parts of the site. Has anybody else done anything similar with regard to image handling on sites you’ve worked on? I would be interested in hearing your comments.
With an open mind I attended a seminar on Windows Server 2003 today. Our site is currently based on Novells Netware, v6.5 after a major upgrade 3 years ago from the 15 year old Netware 3 platform. (Quite an experience I can tell you!) The problem we have is that Novell seem to be lacking in the support department in recent years. Or to be more accurate, its been non existent. And its not just Novell, its getting harder and harder to find application vendors that are writing software that’s compatible with Netware. So it’s with some hesitation that we’re looking at our options for the next 5-10 years. Obviously, one of these options is moving our network to a Microsoft Server based solution.
Back to the seminar.. Its the smallest ’seminar’ i’ve ever attended. A speaker from Microsoft, 2 sales guys, a RnD guy and 4 delegates, including myself and my boss. This made it considerably less formal and oeasier to interrupt and ask questions more specific to our particular situation. It also let us have a very interesting discussion with Microsoft regarding Open Source and the current market. (Although I cannot comment as it was all off the record. What I can say, is that is was fair and unbiased, unlike the ‘get the facts’ FUD site.) The presentation was faultless and suprisingly unbiased although I could distinctly smell bullshit when one of the sales guys told us that at one particular site, they had reduced the number of servers from 30 to 7. When I questioned him further he had to admit that this was 30 old servers to 7 new servers, devaluing the claim that Windows 2003 is considerably faster than other platforms (Netware/Win2k). Of course its fucking faster. The hardware is faster, not the software. Apart from that one blemish the presentation was very thorough and well presented. Unfortunately, for me anyway, it also made a solid business case for moving our entire site to Microsoft technologies and unless Novell pulls something really big out the bag in terms of support, my site will be moving to a Microsoft solution in the not too distant future.
My views on this are mixed. I strongly oppose any closed software. I like to have the freedom to fix software myself. Or if I don’t have the skill to fix it myself, I can pay someone (of my choice) to fix it. With a proprietary solution, you have only one choice, to ask the provider to fix it. The cars hood is welded shut to coin a famous phrase, from Bob Young, RedHat CEO. To be selfish for a moment, I would also be concerned for my job. I’m good with Netware, i’m very good with Linux, i’m not good with Windows (at a technical level). I also have very little enthusiasm to spend my time getting up to speed with Windows at a server platform level. I fundamentally believe that the Open Source model is superior, both from a technical point of view and from a moral stand point. Unfortunately, due to the very tight integration of Windows XP and Windows Server, we have little option but to go down the Microsoft route. The Linux desktop is simply not ready. Period. Its a few years off yet, IMO. In five years time, the situation might be very different but for now Windows Server is the only option… Comments welcome…
Our existing phone system at work uses two big Meridian (now Nortel I believe) switches. I have very little idea how it works as we have an excellent phone guy, Alan, that does all the hard work. What I do know is that it uses a green screen dumb terminal and very cryptic (assembly looking) language. Nasty. Thats not the main problem though. The main problem with our Meridian switch is that its full, or very nearly full and so we’re unable to add more extensions on to the system. The end result is that we’ve started looking at Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions. One such solution is Asterisk. From the homepage:
Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.
Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). Check the Features section for a more complete list.
Sounds nice. I also spotted this blog about using Asterisk at home. I’m very tempted to give it a try although the usual restrictions will be imposed by partner, kittens, etc. I would be cautious however about using Asterisk on a greater scale at work. We currently have about 30 outgoing PSTN lines and around 300 extensions. I’ll be spending some time looking for case studies on a similar scale roll out to try and learn from their experience. In the mean time, has anyone given Asterisk a try themselves? I would be very interested to hear how you’ve found the package..
I’ve finally found the time, while SWMBO is sleeping, to switch my blog over to WordPress. WordPress looks very comprehensive, compared to the bblog tool that I tried originally and i’m hoping to make more use of my blog now its easier to make formatted posts. I’ve felt more and more guilty as time has passed regarding the amount that i’m learning from reading other users blogs, yet I haven’t really given anything back to the community. This will be changing now as i’m determined to blog more about what i’ve learned. Whether it will be of any use to anyone is another matter.
