Matt-J.co.uk : Ramblings

*Rant Warning*

Since moving into my new house last week, I have been spending a fair amount of time in the lounge, on the questionably comfy sofa’s in front of the TV with my laptop, and today, between the countless (but enjoyable nevertheless) reruns of Top Gear on Dave, something irritated me.

The same thing then irritated me on another channel, same irritation, different company. Then again, on the same channel, but again a different company!

And this irritation is:
‘Come train to be an IT/Networking expert and make lots of money, you don’t need any previous experience and you could be trained and working as a system admin/network admin/IT consultant within months’

If you have seen these adverts, you will probably know what I mean, but if not allow me to explain my annoyance:
It’s not really the fact they are herding people by the masses into an already crowded industry (although that is quite annoying)…

It’s the people they are bringing in ‘No previous experience required’, ‘Qualified within a few months’. Some of the Jobs they are suggesting these people move into would make me question weather I knew enough to fulfill the role and yet, I have had a real interest in IT since as long as I can remember, have spend countless days researching and tinkering with technologies just because I wanted to understand them and better my knowledge in my chosen field;

Yet these people are expected to gain knowledge amounting to years of reading and practice, countless weeks of late nights trying to get something to work not to mention years spent honeing linux and networking skills, and be unleashed onto some poor company as their computing saviour within months??

No wonder the ‘IT Department’ has such a globally bad and unappreciated reputation.
So thanks, overadvertised ‘We’ll Take anyone’ IT training companies, thanks for lowering the worth and reputation of IT roles accross the industry.. Tossers.

</Rant>

OK. This is the first in a number of ‘update posts’ covering what I have been upto in the past few months.

A while ago (Jan 4th I think) While searching for a new server to replace my Dell poweredge (huge, heavy, and pretty slow) for something with a little more horsepower, I noticed a server on E-bay, that was going for stupidly cheap, with not long to go.

In the description of the auction, it said the system would not boot, and powered itself down within 5seconds of startup with what was basically fan error. I pulled up the specs/hardware docs for the server and decided at worst it would be a broken fan module, and at the following specs, it would be worth taking the risk of 100 quid (would usually go for at least 500).

Specs:

• 1U compaq server
• Redundant hot swappable PSU’s (2)
• 2x 2.8Ghz Intel Xeon CPU’s
• 4GB ECC DDR RAM
• 2 x36GB Ultra320 Hot swappable SCSI Drives
• Hardware Raid for scsi drives
• Integrated LOM (remote on/off/IP KVM console)
• 2X inbuilt gigabit ethernet ports
• 1X quad port intel/pro PCI-X

I Won the server (bidding via a friend as I was in the pub at the time ;) ) for 113 quid, and the next day (sunday) embarked on driving through central london to pick it up. (which although slow moving, was actually nice to familiarize myself with driving into the capital / where things are :) )

Picked the server up and drove home (1.30 hrs each way I think) I got it home, plugged it in (loud!!) and yup, the error message was still there.
But all of the fans I could see were spinning, so I tried to reset the error, or mask the error in the bios / LOM.. No luck.

Next I took the fan module out that the system was complaining about (PSU / System board fan modules at LHS of unit) and tried turning each of the six fans (3×2 configuration) manually… One was stuck!

Looked inside it.. and there was a tiny bit of muck/wood chip/plasterboard/something wedged between the fan blade and the outside casing of the fan. Removed it with pliers… and put the fan module back in..

System instantly booted, right into RHEL5. Fast as foobar!

At this point, as you can imagine, I was damn chuffed, and proceeded to put Vmware on it (as this is going to replace my old Vmware server, for running a few basic vm’s (more later))

Anyway… Before we proceed, Pictures!

Not bad for 113 cashmonies!

Anyway, The next task was going to be moving all my virtual machines off the old VMserver onto this one (and then take the old one offline) However, As I am using different versions of Vmware.. That didn’t turn out to work.

So I used this as an opportunity to move the VM’s away from gentoo and do a full re-install of the services from scratch.
I wanted to move them away from gentoo for two reasons:

• Keeping 6 gentoo boxes upto date (including desktops/servers) / error free was taking up way to much of my time, especially since they were only running things like DHCP / DNS / Hellanzb
• I wanted to give my new Solaris skills a try (and I would have felt bad NOT using solaris, as it rocks :P but that’s for another ramble)

My old VM server had the following:

• DHCP/DNS - Gentoo 2007.1 VM, running dhcpd and maradns
• HellaNzb - Gentoo 2007.1 VM, running hellanzb for usenet and IRCD for an internal IRC server
• Centos4 - Running a test Scalix Mail install

I also had other servers (Old desktops) for:

• Trixbox (asterisk and freepbx) VOIP PBX server - Headless Desktop, 512Mb/ram, 40Gb IDE HDD, 1Ghz Athlon CPU
• Old compaq server, Dual 500Mhz Xeons, 1GB ECC Ram, 36Gb Scsi disk. Running pfsense for house firewall.

So, I slowly started to install new VM’s on the new server to replace these old systems. I have now ended up with the following:

• Solaris snv_78 - running Bind 9 and solaris dhcp server (bind rocks! it’s not complicated at all, as some people make out)
• Pfsense - 2 NIC’s from the server provided exclusively to this vm, allowing me to virtualise the house Firewall, keeping it separate from the internal network.
• Ubuntu 7.10 Server- a ‘general server’ vm, for testing bits of stuff out on (chose this OS due to the ‘hands off maintenance’ and the power/speed and ease of apt-get. this runs internal webpages and also HellaNZB and IRCD
• Trixbox (centos5) - Installed the newest version of trixbox onto a VM (even though it says it dosnt get on with virtualisation) and it works fine (NTPD was needed to adjust for clock skew… but you should be running this anyway) We were having some stutter problems in calls, but this seems to be Martin’s IAX softphone (zoiper, used to be idefisk.. and now sucks soooo many balls!)
• Centos5 - This runs Scalix mail services, which I will eventually use as my main mail system (currently using it for the amazing web interface and calDav calender stuff for centralised todo lists / calendars) (Installer for community edition is now completely pain free)

The new server has taken on these tasks without a problem, and it’s also interesting to see how many resources are used by each of these OS’s at idle. (Centos looses, hands down!.. solaris and ubuntu (without gui’s) Pwn!.. 50 - 300mhz, and around 100-200mb ram for solaris (less for ubuntu))

Old server has now been taken offline, and will be flogging it so that I dont have to move it when i move house!

Here are the systems made redundant by this new system and the new server in it’s place:

After such a geeky post… is anyone up for a Saturday afternoon pint or twelve?

I MUST promise myself to update this more than I am doing at the moment!

Another month has passed, and Ive done quite a lot, the majority of which will dissapear from my memory as soon as I start trying to write about it.. *Wait for it…. there it goes*

This month things have started to heat up at work, As all but one of last years interns have now left (and lamsey (the last intern) is here mainly to continue some in house development of our day to day lab management tools) I, along with 2007’s other interns are picking up the tickets, and dealing with the majority of problems on our own, which feels pretty good. It’s also amazing how much we are helping each other, as some of us will have spent a day over one peice of missbehaving hardware, and then the next week can provide knowlege to another person in the same boat.

On a social side,

We had a BBQ sometime last month (told you i’d forget things when i started writing) as a late housewarming and early leaving do for the 2006 interns. Lamsey, James, Kim and Charlotte came (from the 2006 bunch) and most of 2007’s guys were there (except fraiser and mike c)

Much alcomahol was enjoyed, the music was loud, and the party went on till 4 with much merryness! (also, the specticle of a drunken Robin trying to tell his girlfriend the differences between Vi and Vim :P)

A few weeks later (beginning of this month when we had all been paid) we headed out to a club in farnborough called quarantine. Was a pretty good night, with most of us not remembering the later hours (and it was also nice to get out of the house, as fleet is a pretty quiet place, and no-one seems to be up for going out that much…)

James crashed on our couch that night, and spent most of the saturday in the same position recovering!

On the techy/geeky/whatever side, I moved my routing box to gentoo this month, and got all the services back up and running. It also gave me a chance to neaten up my firewall /routing rules and FINALLY work out a way to fix a reverse path routing problem I was having when performing static routing + DNAT up a openVPN tunneled interface.

(The jist of it was a packets journey through IPTables looks up the destination interface in the kernel routing table too early for what i wanted to do, before it has been un-dnatted, and so rules to send matching data up a certain tunnel never got matched)

I now have a much more customisable platform for starting my next projects (QoS, Ldap auth etc)

Mike also got himself a VOIP Deskphone, supporting the IAX2 protocol (a ‘better-than-sip’ SIP protocol that only requires one UDP Port) and a voiptalk.org account, we linked his phone upto my asterisk pbx, and now calls from his phone use his voiptalk trunk, and mine use mine. Icoming calls also work perfectly, with excellent call quality even if we are both on the phone at the same time. (Using usenet dosn’t help call quality much though! I think some QoS traffic shaping may be on the cards)

Talking of VOIP, this brings me neatly onto my new toy! I finally got fed up with my windows smartphone, chucked it out (well.. look the sim out and permenantly installed it in my car as a tomtom) and got myself an N95 on a shiney new T-Mobile contract (winged so much about how crap my windows smartphone was that they let me end my last contract nearly three months early)

Got the new phone two days later, and I have to say, unless something MAJOR changes in the phone industry, i’m ONLY buying nokia’s from now on. They just always hit the nail on the head, nice phones, decent weight, feel well built, sensible connectors, good interface (everything is really nice and integrated) and it JUST WORKS! even the software, for backing up my phone and all the settings (even what shortcuts i have assigned to my softkeys on the idle screen!) syncronising my messages (+ sending and receiving messages from the PC)

If you don’t yet get the picture, I am VERY impressed with the phone. UMTS 3.5G (HSDPA), WIFI, GPS, Bluetooth (and seems to have a sensible bluetooth stack that scans pretty fast too), decent size screen, 5 megapixel camera, nicley laid out buttons, cool sideways slide gally viewer thing… and TV OUT!! yup.. comes with a nifty little cable (that plugs into the standard size 31/2mm headphone jack and gives composite out plus audio onto a PAL or NTSC TV (looks pretty damn good for watching a movie (has a 2GB microSD card) or showing photo’s you have taken to your mates)

Also the software on the phone is really nice too, its still running on symbian S60, but with cool things like a SIP VOIP client, properly integrated (so everywhere there is a number and you can click call… you can just as easily click options>internet call instead to route through to your SIP provider)

I hooked it upto my internal WIFI and asterisk PBX, works perfectly, can make and receive calls via wifi with excellent quality and hardly any latency. I then tried setting the phone up to connect to my asterisk PBX via the internet (lots of port forwarding later) and I still could not get the SIP protocol to live with my NAT (it really, really dosnt like nat) I was getting the RTCTP packets, and so my internal phone rang when I called it from my n95 (via t-mobile web and walk) however I got no audio.

I even tried the new (beta) SIP_conntrack and SIP_nat modules which should dynamically sort all the SIP Nat problems out for me by changing the IP info stored in the realtime audio control section of the egress packets, but to no avail (I am still planning to have another bash at this sometime. I was going to cheat and VPN in. however no-one has made an openvpn client for S60 phones (I’m already missing it as a feature :( )

Another feature I found out about today, is that it has built in functionality in the photo gallery to ’send to flickr’ as well as ’send via mms etc etc) which I tested out, and it worked great! both with a wifi point I was near the first time, and through UMTS 3G the next. (May have to get flickr tied into this blog now it uploads pics so easily)

The only thing I have not really played with is the GPS yet. I am waiting for tomtom hackers to get the internal GPS chip working with the symbian tomtom software.

There is other stuff I want to ramble about (such as plans for the next solaris ZFS fileserver running xen to virtualise some other stuff) but I think that requires a little more research first :)

That should have made you leave one page open long enough to make your browser feel loved again! Night!

//Matt

Hello hello, A few of us are currently in the kitchen battling with a centurion!

*shot 29*

(If anyone dosn’t know what that is A, Don’t come to uni, and B, allow me to explain:
Every minute, on the minute, you all drink a shot glass of beer *shot30* the idea is to get too 100 shots (100 mins) it may sound easy, as its only about 4 pints, but damn! its hard!)

So anyway, since the laptops in the living room (where we are) to do the 1 min recursive countdown, and play music, I thought I may as well get my blog upto date, as well as read some crazy new BOFH! *shot 31 and 32 somewhere in there*

Anyway, Today and yesterday (Mainly in the early morning, as iv’e been pretty nocturnal these past few days) *37* my focus has been on one of the things on my todo list.. VOIP!

(This post will be updated throughout the centurion! So thats all for now! (more on voip later, or maybe tomorrow) *38*

Back again!
im sure the ‘dings’ for each minuite are getting closer together, either way, I think we are all feeling the effects! Were now on shot 45! Anyway, VOIP, I have been looking into asterisk (*) which is a software PBX for the linux platform. It allows for all the standard pbx features (call routing, extensions, call transfer multiple trunks etc) plus voicemail, Automated attendants, queueing, and as its GPL’d there are a tonne of add in modules. It supports SIP and AIX2 Voip Trunk protocols (amongst others) and then inbound and outbound routes based on anything from caller id, to incoming line, or serial port (for POTS ‘Plain old telephone system’ lines… (you do need a seperate (80 quid) voice card for that tho))

So yeah, i’d suggest you try it out if you need a small-medium pbx. Im just using it at home, but its great, because as I will be moving out of student halls soon, my phone number will stay with me wherever I am, and I dont need to pay BT a line rental :D

Im using a VOIP company called ‘voiptalk.co.uk’ to buy the IAX trunk credit. (This gives you setting to route calls through a IAX asterisk trunk… to the POTS (ie 0161 xxx xxx - standard phone numbers
(mobiles too)) for really cheap prices (1.2p/Min UK Landline, 11p/min Mobile UK) which I didn’t think was bad.

Anyway, if your interested have a gander. (Search for ‘trixbox’ its asterisk packaged up in an easy to install Linux distro, based on CentOS, with built in web gui (freepbx) and call routing manager)

//Matt

PS. Me and Joe beat the hell out of the centurion, stopping at 138 out of sheer ‘This is getting tedious now’-ness Not really sure what the fuss is about :P good fun tho!

Back at uni again, about to goto bed (Gotta do tech for a gig at the pint pot tomorrow so can’t sleep in) martin and joe are having a friendly game of chess in the living room/box listening to music from our house’s TASTY NEW SHOUTCAST SERVER!

We had a spare pc knocking around, so thats now in the living room, with a t-amp and some speakers, on ubuntu, constantly connected to a shoutcast server which martin is currently running. This in turn is getting its content from a instance of winamp on the same server, which is running the winamp web interface, so anyone in the house can put songs on / add / change the playlist from their pc / pda. Seems to be working quite well.

Of course, anyone else in the house can also connect to the stream and listen to the same music in their rooms! (Killers - Everything will be alright) at the mo :)

apart from that, has been quite a quiet day, Although i have started putting together the pieces (based on an old laptop) for an in car music PC (made a lot easier due to the winamp web interface) that will sit in my boot, and hold my music library, connected up to my cars speakers, allowing me to then use my phone/pda as a remote (woo.. no more radio1!)

Still on my todo list are IPv6, Solaris ZFS (think i may do that on vmware with a few virtual disks, instead of having to wait till I have the money to buy new hardware) and now, BGP (cisco’s border gateway routing protocol).

Funfun!

Later people

//Matt

Hi all,

Not really had much time to post, Uni work hasn’t really kicked in again yet, but ive got plenty of projects on with work that have been keeping me battling with command prompts throughout many nights :P

Also, it’s a good time to sort some of my own projects out, and so ive re-formatted my Linux NAS/Router, upgraded our houses backbone to gigabit ethernet (5 port netgear gigabit switches are really cheap now!) and moved my main PC’s os over to windows Vista Ultimate *i know… going with the trend, but it’s damn nice!*

Anyway, Thats pretty much it for now, just got a final few more bits and peices to tweak in my samba config then im off to bed.

//Matt

Hey, It’s quater past 10pm, Im sat in bed in a B+B close to where I need to be for my sun interview (tomorrow at 2pm) came down on the train, arrived at 7.30.
Purchased myself a new suit for the occasion, and had a haircut :P

Hoping everything goes OK tomorrow, But at the moment it’s not causing any nervous-ness.. They asked me to research into the SUN Ray thin desktop client in preparation for my interview, And its quite impressive, Tiny power consumption, more secure, easier to manage, and MUCH more user friendly than any other thin solutions I’ve seen before.

In other news, Work has decided to hire the new IT guy already, which is fine, however, looking at his CV, he’s pretty overqualified for the job we want him to do.. *shall be guarding my servers closely.. Especially since i’m not in the office much at all* .. Work better not try and screw me over after all the work and weeks worth of off the clock research and dedication i’ve put into building a reliable network over the years…

Anyway, Will let you know how everything goes after the interview.

//Matt

*PS. Moved to windows 2003 Enterprise as the OS on my main desktop, may move back to linux, just fancied a bit of a change, gonna try 64Bit Vista before I do though. All my data is stored on my NAS, and so changing OS’es on my main rig is nothing to worry about ;)

Oh, and the Laptop and company phone still haven’t become a reality… Ahh well, same old work… And I was actually expecting things to go smoothly after that meeting :(

Sat round at Sam’s with the laptop laughing at the OSM test paper, as its pretty much what we had to do for real last night to get sam’s Linux server running!

Gonna get my own NAS sorted out later tonight, and routing and IPtables set up to the rest of the house. Student loan tomorrow! Thank god! New HDD FTW!

Anyway, back to a tad of revision… Going Asda later tonight for a few bits.. Anyone need anything? lol

//Matt

Just an update, moved all my stuff back to uni friday night, was meant to be heading home for a few hours and some last bits on saturday morning, but was up late unpacking / setting up all my techie crap, and slept through the day!

JoeJoe Appeared on the irwell around 5 and we headed to the pav for a few pints with sam. Pav’s got some really good drinks deals on at the mo (cheaper drinking is NEVER bad!)

Then headed back to Sam’s for some beers, ended up setting up his new box with linux, supplying NAT Routing, DHCP, multiple samba shares to act as a NAS for his data (copying data took HOURS!! Hdd’s suck!) AND a routed VPN (using openvpn www.openvpn.org) to my room for File access between our houses NAS servers. All nicely scripted so the settings survive over reboots
Its now 8.30am on Sunday, been up all night, sorting out samba permissions.. and moving large files! Learnt a few new things about samba options, and daemonising openVPN.. Tis all good!

Anyway, gonna catch some zzz’s now! Later

//Matt

After a quick four hours sleep, (7-11am) im back in work, being efficient as f**k if i say so myself!
Untill now….

Mike’s E-mails continue to fail when sending attachments to certain people, mainly mac users. Sooo confused, and some (equally random e-mails) dont send at all..

Of course the user affected is being perfectly reasonable about it and understanding that a problem like this takes some time to work out… and that it could end up being any number of things… A complete arse about it, shouting and screaming sarcastic comments about how the server is shit, and needs to go back, and how the support people are crap (while there on the phone, working 2 hours past the time they were meant to finish… just to help me) GOD DAMN! Telling them to go soddomise themselfs with retractable battons just dosn’t have the same calming effect anymore. It is this strand of lUsers that need a good beating with a 2 by 4.

So, there goes my night, am going to end up spending it grepping through mail server logs :S

Anyway, quick shout out to Mark at linuxit. Fantastic support guy and knows his shit.

//Matt