Jul 25, 2014 · 2 minute read · Comments
LifeMusings
It’s been way too long since I’ve blogged. And this post isn’t going to be all the impressive unfortunately. However, I recently have been running a BBS and some friends and I have been playing LORD.
We’ve been playing this for the last few months, and I think I’m going to run a tournament. Perhaps with some sort of buy in like $10 or something, winner takes all.
Going to build it out in such a way that first person to beat the dragon 3 times will win the game, and at that point that person will win the pot.
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May 16, 2013 · 1 minute read · Comments
Howdy folks,
Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I’ve recently (December 2012) started at Thinking Phone Networks as the Lead UC Systems Engineer, and we’ve been incredibly busy there. In addition, the authors and I had been working on the final touches to the 4th edition of Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, which documents Asterisk 11 LTS.
Late last week, the book went to print, and should start to appear on store shelves and start shipping from Amazon and other locations within the next 6-8 weeks I believe.
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Nov 24, 2012 · 1 minute read · Comments
Technology
Tip: If your Brother printer won’t print after installing the drivers, install glibc.i686
Today ran into an issue with my new Brother MFC-7460DN (which is a really nice laser printer with auto-feed scanner, Scan-to-FTP which creates a PDF file, and other things). I had just recently done a clean install of Fedora 17, and I could install the RPMs (which are i386 files on my x86_64 based system), add the printer to CUPS and all sorts of things that looked fine.
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Oct 11, 2012 · 3 minute read · Comments
AsteriskMusings
Today I received a couple of phones from Digium; the D40 and D70. I’ll be using these phones for testing and documentation in the 4th edition of Asterisk: The Definitive Guide (which Jim Van Meggelen, Russell Bryant and myself are working on right now).
Here is my unboxing of the phones and some commentary about my initial impressions of the hardware itself.
[caption id=“attachment_484” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Pretty boxes![/caption]
Phones arrived in some nice looking boxes.
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Aug 22, 2012 · 2 minute read · Comments
DevOps
Today I got playing around with dynamically selecting different chef servers in preparation for migrating some of our nodes away from our chef-dev server to our chef-live server (which I’m currently in the process of building and populating with data). I had been talking in the #chef IRC channel a few weeks back about making things dynamic, or at least easily switchable, when using multiple chef servers for different groups of servers in an environment.
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Aug 22, 2012 · 4 minute read · Comments
DevOpsTechnology
At CoreDial we’ve been using a lot of AWS EC2 lately for building sandbox infrastructure for testing. Part of the infrastructure is a voice platform utilizing Asterisk 1.4 and 1.8, and those voice platforms are using Zaptel and DAHDI respectively for use with MeetMe(). This hasn’t been an issue previously as our testing has either been on bare metal, or in other virtual machine systems where installation of a base image and standard kernel are not an issue.
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Jul 23, 2012 · 2 minute read · Comments
Being ProductiveDevOpsUseful Tools
Today I’ve been getting our lab environment setup with vagrant to auto-provision our lab servers with chef server in order to allow the development team to quickly and easily turn up and tear down web application servers.
Because when the server gets spun up with vagrant, it registers itself as a new node to the chef server using its hostname. Since using localhost for every node pretty much makes the chef server useless for more than 1 virtual machine at a time, I needed to figure out how to get dnsmasq to assign a unique hostname based on the IP address being provided by dnsmasq to the dhcp client.
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Jul 19, 2012 · 1 minute read · Comments
MusingsProgramming
So I ran into something kind of stupid today :) Adding a little note for anyone who might run into a similar instance.
I have some ssh-add stuff that gets run in my .bashrc file, but when I was outputting it, I was doing:
ssh-add ~/.ssh/some_key > /dev/null 2&>1 Note the 2&>1 at the end. That means to redirect output to a file named 1. You need to flip the &> into >&, so the fixed version looks like:
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Jun 26, 2012 · 3 minute read · Comments
DevOps
So for the last week or so, I’ve been tasked at CoreDial with adding our own set of integration testing now that we’re moving to a more formal deployment method using chef. After much pestering of questions to thehar of Lookout Mobile Security and with help of Google, #chef and jhansche in #jenkins I’ve finally got a nice clean proof of concept that we can evaluate and likely deploy.
I’ll come back later with another article on my installation issues with jenkins and the solutions that I solved (nothing too terribly complicated), but what I wanted to blog about was the two types of tests that I’ve been focusing on and was able to finally solve.
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Feb 23, 2012 · 1 minute read · Comments
Useful Tools
I’ve been doing a bunch of work with RPMs lately, and while running rpmlint against a spec file I was modifying, I received this error:
myfile.spec: E: non-utf8-spec-file myfile.spec After Googling, I ran into a way of finding the non-compliant characters.
$ iconv -f ISO-8859-8 -t UTF-8 myfile.spec > converted.spec $ diff -u myfile.spec converted.spec (Answer thanks to Dominique Leuenberger @ http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-packaging/2011-04/msg00005.html)