Latest FreeSWITCH, PennyTel and Billion 5200N development

November 28, 2009 – 5:27 pm

For a while now, I had not being using FreeSWITCH for my VoIP, but just logging into PennyTel directly with my Nokia E65. It worked OK, but the voice quality wasn’t as good as going through FreeSWITCH.

A month ago my old ADSL router died, so I bought a Billion 5200N to replace it. Since then, I’d been having weird problems with VoIP not working, and the Wifi to LAN bridging stopping dead whenever there was a bit of traffic over it.

It took me a while to sort out all the peculiarities of the Billion.

1. A change of ethernet ports on the router fixed the bridge locking up problem. It took a lot of time and weird theories before I fixed that.
2. When setting up the router from factory defaults, I have to save the wireless interface twice when I change the SSID before it will allow my wireless devices to authenticate.
3. UPnP was interfering with FreeSWITCH, and probably my Nokia. Turning that off on the router fixed FreeSWITCH.
4. Selecting some settings on the router made the routers wireless interface disappear, and the only way to get it back was a factory reset.

So, FreeSWITCH is a breeze to set up for PennyTel now. It takes editing two files.
conf/vars.xml and conf/dialplan/default/000pennytel.xml.

In conf/vars.xml I changed the following

<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_password=whateveryouwant"/>

That password is used for phones authenticating to FreeSWITCH, it has nothing to do with PennyTel.


<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="domain=switch.gruntnet"/>

What the phones use as their realm, it should be in the DNS with the ip pointing to FreeSWITCH.


<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider=sip.pennytel.com"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_username=61281955555"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_password=55555/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_from_domain=sip.pennytel.com"/>
<!-- true or false -->
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_register=true"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_contact=1000"/>

All the PennyTel setting goes above, I use 1000 to receive incoming calls, my only phone on the network.

Then in conf/dialplan/default/000penntel.xml


<extension name="pennytel">
<condition field="destination_number" expression="^(.*)$">
<action application="set" data="effective_caller_id_number=61281955555"/>
<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/sip.pennytel.com/$1"/>
</condition>
</extension>

By chesty | Posted in FreeSWITCH, LA, OSIA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Snow Leopard Resolver

November 19, 2009 – 5:57 am

I recently upgraded to snow leopard and noticed some DNS weirdness. I couldn’t ssh to hosts defined in my local DNS, it wouldn’t resolve, but I could resolve them with the host command.

Turns out Snow Leopard made quite a few changes to the resolver, it no longer uses /etc/resolv.conf but mDNSResponder, at least for apple supplied applications.

Unlike every other OS I’ve come across, including Leopard, Snow Leopard doesn’t use the order of DNS servers as first listed, first used. It swaps which DNS it’s going to use around, seemingly at random times. Some sort of load balancing miss feature?

I had two DNS servers configured, the first one, my local DNS server, the second, my ADSLs DNS server as a backup. The simple fix is to only have one DNS server configured.

There’s more information here Snow Leopard Resolver.

I’m not unhappy with OS X, but lately I’ve been pining to return to a linux based laptop. I think this will be my first and last Mac.

By chesty | Posted in LA, OSIA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Nice File Server For A Small Office

October 23, 2009 – 10:46 pm

I had a job come in last week for a linux file server to connect a few windows machines together, and a few printers. The client was exposed to a linux file server in a previous job, and wanted something similar.

It was a small business, with not much money to spend, and the server was to be located in the office, no server room. This is the type of job I love doing.

I sourced an ex corporate desktop for about $150 including shipping, I think they can be had for a little less, but this was convenient. It was a P4 with SATA, which is what I was looking for. The ugliest case you could image, but had space for two hard drives. DVD writeable drive, 1 gig memory, built in gigabyte ethernet. It was perfect.

I bought two new 500 gig green SATA drives for RAID 1 configuration, $70 each, and an external 500 gig drive for backup, which ran $100. So about $400 in hardware, but a really nice set up, should be very reliable, and the data should be very safe.

I was a bit of a cowboy when it came to the operating system, with karmic about to be released, I chose it over jaunty or LTS because it had a newer Samba. Turns out the Samba version wasn’t very important as most of the PC’s were running XP home edition, which doesn’t even do domain logins.

I tired to convince the client to get two external drives to keep one off site in case of a fire or something. But instead we are using the DVD drive to write backups for off site storage.

It was a really nice job, gave me a lot of energy and the client is happy. Can’t ask for more than that.

By chesty | Posted in LA, OSIA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged | Comments (0)

Keeping Fresh

March 1, 2009 – 9:11 am

I wanted a few programming projects to do to keep juices flowing. I came up with two twitter ones, http://twitter.com/slugupdates and http://twitter.com/cityrailupdates. Inspired by Lindsay’s bushfire project.

They are both little python programmes.

slugupdates just waits for messages posted to the slug announce list, procmail carbon copies the message and pipes it to the programme, the programme uses the subject as the tweet message.

cityrailupdates scrapes the major delays announcement page and tweets the time and title. It uses python’s beautifulsoup to do the scraping.

Both projects were fun and satisfying. I’ve still got some work to do with cityrailupdates, I want to save the whole message in a database and have a little front end to it for historical data.

By chesty | Posted in LA, OSIA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Barrang’s Official Launch

February 19, 2009 – 8:28 am

Barrang officially opens its doors on the 19th of February, 2009.

Barrang is starting out primarily as a Linux Consultancy mainly targeting local small businesses in south west Sydney.

My primary target market doesn’t have a lot of money, especially in this climate, so I intend to provide maximum value to my clients by using Open Source Software as much as possible and by keeping my rates as low as possible.

My long term goal is to be location independent, that means not being tied to servers located in customer premises. There’s a number of different paths that goal could take, and I will be developing them along the way as I go.

My strengths lie in my knowledge and experience in Open Source Software and networks. My weakness is in social networking and marketing. So if you would like to reach out and make contact, please do, I welcome and encourage it.

There’s no launch party, this post is the cutting of the ribbon.

I look forward to getting to know you more, working together, and making a living doing what I love.

By chesty | Posted in LA, OSIA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Accounting Packages

February 18, 2009 – 12:53 pm

I’ve been searching for accounting packages lately for my IT business which is officially launching tomorrow (yay me), but has sort of been running for the last few years.

My dad is an accountant, and is a wiz at MYOB. So I thought I may as well give it a go, somewhat reluctantly. I couldn’t get it to work properly in my windows VM. Text would disappear from an invoice, and the dates were in US format, even though windows was set to AU. I put it in the too hard basket, and looked at FOSS alternatives.

First stop, LedgerSMB. It was quite alien to me and took a bit to get used to, mostly because I’m not that familiar with accounting practices.

It worked well enough, and I got used to it, however, after recording on an invoice that it had been paid, I got a duplicate key error, and the invoice disappeared. I couldn’t find it in any of the reports, and digging into the backend, I couldn’t see any trace of it in the database. So I dumped it.

Next was Fivedash, which I had never heard of, but was mentioned on OpenSSG. First impressions was it’s very slick, and basic compared to LedgerSMB. But it has all the functionality I need, and has a CRM built in too.

It’s still in beta, and the community isn’t that big. But so far it’s working well, and based on what I’ve read, it can be trusted a lot more than LedgerSMB, in which I get the impression has many warts.

By chesty | Posted in LA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

How I Deal With Scrapers

October 18, 2008 – 8:09 pm

Scrapers are a part of the internet, so rather than get angry, I get even. A scraper site is a web site that copies content of other sites and republishes them as their own content. I actually don’t have a problem as long as the scraper site leaves links intact, so it links back to my site.

The other day I was checking a blog of mine on http://copyscape.com. Copyscape can check if your blog is being scraped amongst other things. It has a limited free service, otherwise the full service is 5c a search.

My blog was being scraped, by about 50 times in fact. But one site was removing links, and they actually out ranked me for one of my original articles. That is when I searched for the title of my post, they were listed number one in google, and my site was hidden from the search result behind the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link.

That’s just not cricket. I went to the article that was outranking mine, and they were running adsense ads on it, I clicked the “ads by google” link and made a complaint about copyright infringing content on their site. I got an email from google telling me how to send them a DCMA take down request, which I didn’t bother doing. It requires faxing, too hard.

I then went back to the search result page from google and clicked the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link and complained that google were ranking a scraper site ahead of mine.

Then I went to delicious and made a few bookmarks back to my article. A few days later, my article is number one in google when searching for the title, and the scraper site is buried deep down in the results. Job done, feeling satisfied.

I would hope google will eventually check the scraper site out and close their adsense account, but if the scraper site is making money for google, I don’t see the incentive.

By chesty | Posted in LA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , | Comments (0)

In My Spare Time…

May 21, 2008 – 4:40 pm

…When I’m not working on linux, I’ve been working on some websites. Mainly blogs, but also some ebay affiliate sites that are usually attached to blogs. I’m trying to get 30 up to start with, but I’m not very commited, I’ve got five going, oldest one is five months old. Once I hit 30, I’ll aim for 100 ;);

I got interested in SEO for some reason, and have been honing my skills with these sites with the intent to make a little money. If I can make $1/day per site, that’s $10,000 a year. Very acheivable.

The basic idea is to pick a phrase, maybe a three word phrase, that has 100,000 hits or less in google and 100 searches for it a day (there’s various way to determine search volume, such as google keyword tool, google trends, and a few free SEO type sites). That will give you a good chance of getting on the front page of google for that phrase in the first week and getting some traffic. If you don’t hit the front page of google straight away, you might have to wait six months or so. You need to be patient in this game.

So far, with one blog that was very targeted I got the seventh result in google almost instantly. With another site that wasn’t so targeted, I’m nowhere to be seen. So with that last site, I’ll build up ten articles, and keep an eye on it for six months. With the first site, I’ll try to post once a week and build a few links by submitting articles to howto sites, and directories. In five months, it’s paid for itself already with only a few hours work put in to it, it has seven articles, traffic is increasing every month, I’m getting natural backlinks and subscriptions to the feed, as well as a few artifitial backlinks I’ve made. I’ve started targeting keywords that have more search volume.

To target a phrase, put it in the title, h1 tag, and anchor text in each post pointing back to the main page. Each page should have a unique title, though. Also put it in the anchor text of external links.

What I really enjoy is on page SEO and ad placement and look, what I don’t enjoy is creating artificatial links with the intent of getting an artifically high google rank. Even though google says SEO isn’t spam, I can’t help but think it’s spammy.

But I’m enjoying creating content, and studying SEO and marketing. I made my first ebay affiliate sale sale after 50 hits, very exciting. I might have a crack at amazon afiliate links next and incorporating ebay into wordpress, rather than a separate page.

BTW, targeting internet savvy people isn’t the easiest way to make money, they are blind to ads. Best to go after non techy people. I’m running ads on this site, but it’s dragging my CTR down. I’ll give it a few more months and then turn them off.

Just got to get these 30 sites up…

By chesty | Posted in LA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Trigonometry Blues

April 1, 2008 – 12:42 am
Trigonometry Solar Funnel

I’ve been stuck on this problem for a week. It’s for a solar funnel I’m working on (no, it’s not homework) I’m trying to workout an equation that solves theta given x and y.

The idea is to have the funnel as wide as possible (smallest theta) so sun hitting the very top of the funnel just enters the oven. Any help?

I think if x = y, theta should be 90 – 45 / 2

Update

The equation is:
equation


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06nOZES084

Here’s daddy stovetop playing the blues. Nice and slow, where the silence in between the notes is just as important as the notes themselves. Spain were masters of that. Spain are one of my favourite bands.


http://youtube.com/watch?v=rn8MWBVAMhE

It’s not party music, but if you have some sadness deep down that doesn’t want to come out, Spain will drag all the emotions out, you have a good cry, maybe, and feel much better after. Or if you just need to wind down…

By chesty | Posted in LA, Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

The Power Of The Beard

March 16, 2008 – 1:13 pm

I started out listening to this tune (called Drifting), well, watching, too. Amazing technique, it struck me how relaxed he is in his shoulders while his hands are banging around. And the Beard!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ddn4MGaS3N4
I thought it was my favourite. Then I found this one, same beard.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dt1fB62cGbo
At first the melody was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put words to it. It was rather annoying. I found the original, which I like, but interesting covers are always welcome to me, and this cover rocks. It’s my favourite now. The artist is Andy Mckee, he’s a true hacker.

(It’s amazing what you can achieve with a beard.)

By chesty | Posted in Slug, ubuntu-au | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)