Matt-J.co.uk : Ramblings

Evening all,

Over a month since my last post, and a lot has happened; however, There is a simple reason why I have not posted for so long;

This was always meant to be a technical blog, covering cool stuff I have been working with or pondering, or a place to write down reminders of how to config something, more of a random splattering of technical know-how more than anything. I don’t want it to become an oh-so common blurb of personal life crap, where I am, why I am there, what I ate for breakfast, with little or no juicy tech.

I don’t have time to be keeping that kind of blog and so, If I have nothing particularly blog worthy, I won’t just be posting for the hell of it to keep my post count up.
There will always be a couple of life related posts that slip through, and so I will be tagging all past and future posts with (at least) ‘tech’ or ‘life’ to allow readers to filter out what they do not want :)

So now, to a very short update to bring us into the present.

Well, I have left Sun Microsystems, my placement ended and I moved out of our amazing house and back to the more livley north :) Once again a big thanks to everyone at Sun, truly amazing people to work with and I have gained so much hands on experience with more cool equipment than you could shake a reasonable sized datacenter at.

I spent two weeks back living back home with my parents, catching up was nice (so was not cooking my own meals every night or doing all my washing :) ). Saw a few freinds from home and enjoyed a few visits to the pub.

Then another move, this time to my new house share in salford, for the final year of my degree. So after two house moves in two weeks, I have now been in my new uni house for a week, finally got everything unpacked, set up and the house is looking pretty good. I’m living with Martin Dave and Sam from uni, so it will be good to chill out with those guys again over a good few beers.

This year promises much more technical bloggery I feel, you should see the house networking config already!

Anyway, so right now, I’m in my new house, and currently trying to find a new job for the year, if anyone know’s of an ISP that needs someone to play with BGP4+ for a year (for a decent wage ;P) let me know ;)

Thanks for still reading after such a drought of input ;P

//Matt

First off, Please don’t ask me to correct my pseudo French in the title.

Secondly, I’m In sweeden! for 10 days, working for sun to help them with some things going on in the swedish lab.

It has been a weekend of fail’s and denied’s though!;

First of all, on the Sunday (when I was meant to fly) ATC’s computers crashed at the airport, and my flight was cancelled.. typical!
So.. Commence the four hour queue, (all the way from Heathrow T1 to T2) to rebook for the next flight. When I got to the booking’s desk, the next flight available was at 10.30am tomorrow (Monday 26th, today).

At this point, I was given a list of hotels with free rooms, which I was told I could claim back off B.A. for any costs. These hotels were all (by this time, 8pm or thereabouts) charging around 200 quid a night, so I got a taxi back home to fleet (50 quid) under the idea of getting another taxi back in the morning (and i’ll be charging the taxi faires to B.A. instead.. after all, I’m saving them money :P)

So, 5am this morning, I was up, showered, sleepily tripped over our beer bottle art as I walked out of my room (Sorry Mike!) and ready for my taxi at 6.

Checked in, through security (two laptops in one bag confuses the hell out of the X-Ray security staff :P) and into the departure lounge.

The flight went without a hitch, got to sweden arlanda airport, and then, the second problem hit!

Wrong hotel booking :P
I was MEANT to be staying in the Scandic star hotel, however, there are apparently two scandic star hotels in sweden, and lucky me, I picked the wrong one… so wrong, it’s a whole days drive away!

So, from the airport, got a taxi directly into sun’s office, where we sorted new hotels out and cancelled the old booking.

Hans (Who run’s the lab over here) then gave me a lift into the centre of Stockholm (to my newly booked hotel!)
Finally! Hotel! can put my bags down! shower! change of clothes! Lot’s of free exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then it was off down to the local pub to meet Hans again, and grab some food, and many tasty Swedish ales!

Now I’m back in my hotel room (which looks out over the central street in Stockholm) chilling out before I get some kip.
I get free broadband too, which is an added plus.

Would like to have spaced this post with pictures, but inside the airport looks like any other airport, the photo’s I took from the plane are (understandably) crap, and there’s been much too much to do since I got into Stockholm to take pictures. (Maybe later this week)

Anyway, I’ll keep you all updated! From Sweden, night people!

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

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

Hihi Again,

It’s Sunday, And I’m Codeing looots of java, and probably will be untill the early hours of monday morning.. (uni work deadline tomorrow).
Other than that, Our new guy started in IT on thursday, and so I was in on Thursday and Friday to show him around;
Seems like a decent guy, and definatley knows his stuff, so all in all im happy with it, should releave a lot of IT related load off me, allowing me to cencentrate on server and network development. Still need to set him proper permissions up and deligate the parts of the AD tree I want him to use… But all in time.

Went home for a family birthday last night, Had a few beers and crashed at mine. Woke up this morning, ready to drive back to uni, to find a flat tyre :P (biig screw was the culprit) luckily the spare was in good nick and its got me back to uni after stopping for air and petrol.

Still have not heard from SUN, were meant to be calling me on Friday evening.. Hopefully i’ll hear something tomorrow *fingers crossed*

Anyway, back to the java!

//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 :(

Woo, exams are finished. Life is good, cash is good, work is good (but more about that in a bit!)

Got my speakers replaced from richersounds :) (didnt argue at all, just gave me a new pair) Which are both sounding much much tastier, and came with the correct stands and spikes, so thats tightened the bass up.
Sitting here typing this, totally immersed in tasty audio!

Anyway, yesh, last exam this morning (Data structures) went ok I think, not as well as the other ones, but it was mainly java so shouldnt have done too badly i hope.

Went into work to sort a few things out, now just back chilling on the irwell!

As for work.. Well that went damn well too! Had a meeting about the companies IT roadmap.. and they have decided we need an IT helpdesk type person to handle the little user problems side of things.. Which is FECKING GREAT!! as I can concentrate on what I’m meant to be doing instead of piddling about with little user problems :)

Also, a new works phone contract and laptop may well be in the dealio!

Got my SUN interview coming up on the 24th, so need to get the old suit out, and book some travel. Then just got my java project to finish and were good to head into the next semester.

P.S. I want a paint ball gun.

//Matt

And this FANTASTIC day continues…

‘If I cannot connect in remotley within 12 hours, please consider your contract terminated’ Read the E-Mail from my MD, as I got into bed at 11pm’.. a techies work is never done.
Ahh well, 5 mins, one PEBKAC later, and he’s on.. wooo…
Note for today, never underestimate people accidentally minimizing things to throw your step by step ‘for staff’ howto’s off course.

GRRRR! Thats all I can think of right now. AND!! I wanted to get all my stuff back upto uni tomorrow but instead ive got the guy comeing round to look at the car in the morning.. Then need to go into work due to mikes continued problem.

There is hope in the form of a maintenance release with some bugfixes for our e-mail server…. hopefully!!! *fingers crossed*

//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

Whyyyyy am I still up.

Anyway, still have a full bottle of coke left so i’ll continue..
Just a tech update really. If you install OCS and none of the clients ‘Report in’ with their inventory’s.. Don’t go scratching around your linux box for something broken. There probably is nothing wrong, It’s just the default update interval time is 24 Hrs after installation. Test it works properly by manually running this command on a client:
(from the ocsInventory program files folder) ‘OCSinventory /debug /server:ip_to_server’

You should see an entry now in the admin interface for that PC. Time between updates can be changed with the prolog_update setting in the web config settings page. Hope that helps someone

//Matt