Holiday 1 - update 2

The second half of the holiday went very well. Go-karting was popular as was when we hired a minibus for a day and took a tour up to Los Gigantes and then on to the fantastic moonscape of mount Teide. On Friday we took a trip on a 90 year old pirate ship to watch whales. All the kids decided to up my heart rate by jumping off the boat and swimming in the sea, before scaring everyone else with their piloting skills at the wheel.

The boy and I left Tenerife yesterday, a day earlier than the rest of the party, to travel to Madrid. We arrived on time and pulled up next to the aircraft that was going to take us on to London - a 10yd transfer! The second leg went well too and, once our bags turned up, our chauffeur and my sister whisked us up the M1 to home.

Time zones have been a bit crazy. Tenerife was GMT, Madrid GMT+1, London GMT, Home GMT+1 (BST) and this evening we'll be on GMT+2 in France.

This morning we've been frantically repacking for our onward trip to Tignes for a week's skiing. It's time to hit the road. :-)

Holiday 1 - update 1

Already on day four, we're now properly installed in our holiday accommodation in Playa Las Américas, Tenerife. All the travel went well and our hotel is just as expected, not too far from anywhere and with all the facilities. The evening entertainment has been a little on the bizarre side but great fun nonetheless.

Restaurants have generally been good, save for the first night in the (utterly predictable) Aberdeen Steak House on Avenida Santiago Puig. Subsequent meals in the Pompei and Tora Grill, both in Little Italy further down the same street, and lastly the Hong Kong Chinese buffet, just across the road from the last two, were all big hits. The kids have been eating loads to fuel all the running around, shouting and general trouble-causing that is required of them in the sun.

The rifle shooting was fun (I'm told my superior upbringing must account for my apparent innate prowess) and today has seen me swim for the first time in 20 years(!) in water that was just 20°C, certainly cool enough to persuade me to keep moving. The weather has been very pleasant, not too hot but plenty warm enough for the beach and to cause some pink bits.

Best of all, the talk around the poolside is of the snow in the UK. Let's hope some of it makes its way to the Alpes!

Size matters

In preparation for our imminent departure I have been adding the final touches to my holiday laptop. Whilst the pre-loaded software is comprehensive and very easy for the family to use, I was keen to have access to a less dumbed-down system that could be used for remote admin and more complicated stuff. Adding the Xandros repositories was an easy task and 'apt-get' does a great job of package management. A couple of cheap 2GB SD cards means I've got plenty of storage too.

The only significant thing that was missing from a connectivity point of view was Bluetooth. I stumbled across this last evening on t'web and managed to buy one of these today in a local shop for a bargain £9.95. It really is an 'ultra small Bluetooth USB adapter', hardly any bigger than a 20p piece, that pretty much disappears into the side of the Asus. In fact it almost looks like someone's snapped off a memory stick and left the metal plug in the socket!

Unfortunately, unlike its yet-to-arrive 4G big brother, the Eee PC 2G Surf doesn't come with the 'bluez-utils' preinstalled. Getting these up and running wasn't too much of a stretch (this detail helped a lot, and there's a GUI start/stop to be had here) and now all is good. If I manage to find anywhere that doesn't have a Wi-Fi hotspot, I can connect using the data service on my mobile phone. :-)

LAN renovations

With bluebells and daffodils already in flower, Spring must nearly be sprung. It certainly seems I've an (almost) uncontrollable urge to tidy and replace things that have been working perfectly well for a number of years. :-)

Now I've got voice traffic running on my LAN I thought it was high time to practice what I preach and to introduce some management. Up until now I have been employing unmanaged switches and wireless access points to provide the necessary number of Ethernet ports. The move to fully managed switches and the added functionality they can provide has simply not been worth the investment. Unfortunately, that's pretty much still the case.

However, with recent product announcements I believed there was a compromise to be had. I decided to do half a job (yes, unusual for me I know) and procured a few Linksys "Business Series" devices. I understand this product range to be somewhere in between the Linksys SOHO products and their big-brother Cisco entry level equipment, the real proper stuff.

A Linksys SRW2008MP 8-port PoE managed switch and a pair of SLM2008 8-port "smart" (managed-lite?) switches have replaced the erstwhile unmanaged switching. The former is described as "fully managed" whilst the latter two offer "entry-level management at a cost-effective price point" only via an "easy to use" browser-based interface. Between them they have all the bits I'd like; PoE ports (on the "MP" device), 802.1q VLANs, port mirroring, basic QoS suitable for voice and, as a bonus, gigabit performance.

Now that I've lived with them for a couple of days, I'm happy to report I have not yet regretted my investment. Unusually, one of the little switches was DOA but obtaining a replacement was no trouble. The new boxes look very handsome, run cool and quiet and their metal cases give them a quality feel. I'd be happier still if the power plug was a little harder to pull out, not very well thought out IMHO.

Having PoE is great. The bigger switch powers the two smaller switches, a camera and a couple of IP phones, keeping things nice and neat (and remotely rebootable!). Things are much neater after the IP renumbering, better segregation has greatly improved security and all the documentation is up to date. I even took the opportunity to finish populating a suitably sized patch panel so I won't need to crawl around the back of anything any more.

Having the ability to "shut/no shut" ports remotely is a welcome relief and performance is lightning fast for the devices that can take advantage of the gigabit line speed. The web management is very adequate for most tasks although I'm going to have to look at how I get some better reporting.

UK caller ID, POTS and pains

I've recently been working on a project that has opened my eyes to the (apparent) simplicity, value and benefits running your own VoIP-enabled PBX. For my own business, doing this would provide some good functionality for very little money. Apart from managing phone extensions, low-cost call routing and the rest of the usual PBX stuff, this solution could allow access to the phone lines while we're not in the office, via a soft-phone or even my Nokia E61i with its built-in SIP client. Acquiring the skills and having a test facility will also be very useful.

For the PBX I've built an old DeskPro with Centos 5.1 and Asterisk 1.4.18. To connect to the PSTN and local faxes I have an ATCOM AX-400P with two FXO, two FXS modules and an X100P.com SE with one FXO. Both PCI cards are recognised by the standard Zaptel drivers, as a "Digium Wildcard TDM400P" and a "Digium Wildcard X100P" respectively.

The install of Asterisk on this hardware is well documented on the Web and no significant problems were encountered. From bare tin, the demo and echo-test applications were up and running in only a couple of hours. A little bit of jiggery-pokery had to be done to ensure the two analogue cards were recognised in the same order are each restart (by ordering the loading of modules in "/etc/sysconfig/zaptel") but other than that things went very smoothly.

However, I noticed immediately that CallerID was not being recognised on any of the lines and hangups were not being noticed properly. I'd read about this particularly UK problem on a number of forums and they'd all suggested easy remedies. None of these problems had been encountered on the project as there was no POTS equipment. When I came to make my own configuration I found things were a little less straightforward.

Poring over the debug logs for many more hours and trawling the Internet guided me to a working solution. There now follows a summary of the UK-specific config that eventually got things working reliably. These settings are required in addition to or in place of the default configs. Removing any one of these settings breaks either the CallerID or hangup detection, or both!

• In "/etc/modprobe.conf", added...
      option wctdm opermode=UK
• In "/etc/zaptel.conf"...
      defaultzone=uk
      loadzone=uk
      fxsks=1,2,5
      fxoks=3,4
  
• In "/etc/asterisk/zapata.conf"...
      [global]
      cidsignalling=v23
      cidstart=polarity
      sendcalleridafter=2 ; Setting this to 0 works too (but only     some of the time!)
      [channels]
      context=incoming
      usecallerid=yes
      hidecallerid=no
      callerid=asreceived
      restrictcid=no
      callprogress=yes
      progzone=uk
      answeronpolarityswitch=yes
      hanguponpolarityswitch=yes
      signalling=fxs_ks
      immediate=no
      channel => 1,2,5
• In "/etc/asterisk/extensions.conf", to see that things are working...
      exten => s,1,Verbose(CallerID= ${CALLERID(all)})

With this done, everything seems to be running well. Now I can develop at my leisure a mad IVR script to fox all those call-centres trying to sell me cheaper electricity.

Holiday laptop

Isn't that just typical? Within five minutes of the courier turning up with my new Asus Eee PC 2G Surf we had a power cut. At least this one only lasted for five minutes so the battery is now charging away merrily.

This laptop is going to serve as a lifeline to the Internet while I'm away from work and don't want to risk taking expensive IT equipment to holiday hotels and the like. I've also (since December) had a 4G on order with the built-in webcam and the possibility of more RAM (the 2G has its 512MB welded to the motherboard). I'll have this one when it turns up and the 2G can go to a colleague.

As all the reports have suggested, set up is a breeze, start up and shut down are fantastically quick and the size/weight is perfect for travelling. As it's so very small, hiding it away should be no problem at all. Or even carrying it with me should be OK, maybe even in shorts and a T-shirt(!).

For the first time in a long time I've got just one dead pixel. Nothing that's going to worry me and I can barely notice it unless the screen is black.

I have been using SSH on my Nokia E61i for remote support of a few customers while I've been out and about. This is great but can be slow with the tiny keyboard, especially sending 'Esc' and pipe characters. Being able to have a full-size keyboard on a laptop running Linux with me will be even better.

Bargain NAS for the masses

Yesterday a friend asked me to plug his Western Digital My Book World Editon (network attached HDD) into his work network to provide a central repository for system images and configuration files. As we didn't know the username/password, I followed the password recovery procedure. The unit appeared to reset but I still couldn't log on with the default admin/123456 combination. Speaking to technical support this morning revealed that you have to wait for "up to 12 hours" after "a number of failed log on attempts". Sure enough when I tried again I was able to get on.

I've been looking for some large, cheap and decent network attached storage to provide a central repository in my office. Another friend had a Thecus N2100 which was quite nice but slow and was fussy about the disks if would work with. Phil looked at the Netgear SC101 but didn't go for it due to lack of Vista support.

This particular MBWE provides just short of 1TB of usable storage on a single SATA HDD. Data may be accessed only via CIFS, that's Samba for Unix clients and file-shares for Windows clients. I was a little disappointed to see no NFS, HTTP or FTP support. Moreover, the "Shared Storage Manager" web interface is horribly slow and is dumbed-down far too much for my liking.

That said, the search for the password recovery procedure also turned up some very interesting information. The MBWE is cheap, runs BusyBox Linux and is easily hacked - happy days! PC World had these in stock (here) with a shelf price of £210 but their (shameful) "web exclusive" collect-at-store system meant I was able to pop down and pick one up for £177, that's £151 before VAT for a headless Linux PC with a 1TB disk!

Hacking the box was extremely easy with many well documented experiences on the web. To enable SSHd I followed the instructions found here. This site offers to show you how this works, very smart. I went on to permanently disable the clunky "MioNet" process and install an FTP server. NFS (and TFTP for IP phones etc.) is just a case of configuration. I'll have a look at an HTTPd server when I need something better than the already built-in daemon.