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This is the First Part of a Multi-Part Installment of Clonezilla.

Almost every tech has been in this situation, How do I copy this hard drive to another machine? and How do it do it for more than 5 PCs without taking my whole day?

Regardless of how many machines you have to image, Imaging systems takes time. Time that you would rather spend doing something else, like browsing digg, or wired. :)

However there are instances where one must get a project done on time and on budget. So for IT shops who may not have Fortune 500 IT budgets which typically include software packages like Acronis Enterprise or Norton Ghost may be prohibitively expensive to be used in Small to Medium Business. While you can purchase the consumer class software, it may not have support for things such as One to Many HDD imaging, or may lack hardware specific support.

So what is a tech to do? Well if you’re handy with Linux and Open Source software, I would recommend you try Clonezilla. Clonezilla comes as a package from DRBL which was created by the National Center for High-Performance Computing in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

What is DRBL? DRBL is Diskless Remote Boot Linux. A software collection that uses other open source software to achieve a few features:

• Boot a Shared Linux Installation
• Network Install Linux
• Broadcast Install an HDD Image
• Save/Record an HDD Image

There a few more features, but for now I want to show you how to copy a source HDD and install it on many workstations. I will be using windows as the source. Think that linux cant work with NTFS? :)

Excited? Good. Now let me tell you the jucy details on how it works.

When you install DRBL it asks you questions on your environment, and how you want to run DRBL, once it has sufficient information, it will build the necessary software configurations to achieve what you want to do.

DRBL Installs/Configures The Following Servers & Software:

• A DHCP Server (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)
• A TFTP Server (Trivial File Transfer Protocol)
• NFS (Network File System Server)
• Your linux distribution’s install files (RPM, Deb, etc,.)
• Custom scripts located in /opt/drbl
• NAT Server (As needed)
• and iptables rules (Note will overwrite your previous config, but saves them for you)

In my example setup; I will be using CentOS 5.1, VMWare Workstation 6, and a Dell Optiplex 755 w/ WinXP SP2.

Just do you know, DRBL works best using the network boot method, but remember to set the network boot as the first boot option in your BIOS.

Example Start Up Process: Running memtest86+

1. DRBL server is ready to dish out DHCP addresses & TFTP files
2. Target PC boots up, and uses PXE Boot to ask for a DHCP address, and also receives a boot file from the DRBL server.
3. Once the PC has the pxelinux.0 file it boots a small boot loader asking you what you want to do. In this menu memtest86+ is listed, just select it and hit enter
4. The server sends it the code to run memtest86+ and now your machine is testing its memory.

So this seems like a good point to end the post, Ive explained what DRBL is, and what it can do for you. Expect part II next week with detailed install guides.

 

 

After a rather long hiatus, iLPhotos.com is back.

Go on take a look, let me know what you think! :)

http://ilphotos.com

One command, only a few characters long has been causing me grief for such a long time now, almost three weeks. :(

See and watch what happens, if you can figure out what it means and how it made me pull my hair out.  Post a comment, and youll win a bag o crap!

[root@spyux01 scripts]# diff 10.5.1.1-config ./voicenetwork/10.5.1.1-config
3c3
< Current configuration : 8049 bytes
—
> Current configuration : 8047 bytes
47c47
<  hunt-scheme sequential both down
—
>  hunt-scheme sequential both up
[root@spyux01 scripts]#

I was at the datacenter today.  While I was chatting with one of the Linux techs there a customer of theirs came in asking what would be a simple question in say, an ubuntu forum, but wholly inappropriate when youre essentially at the core of the internet.

 ”Hey, just the guys I wanted to see, I cant get my gnome working, I did a yum update on gnome, but when I login all i see is the failsafe desktop”

OMG… are you kidding me? Why are… dear gawd, do you… oh man you must.  To my horror this man must have read, “Linux webhosting for dummies.”

This guy is running a server that is connected to the public network that he feels compelled to manipulate in a solely GUI fashion.  I tried to help the guy, but I had to attend to my own problems.  When i left about 2 hrs later, the guy was still trying to badger the Linux guys at the DC to get it running….

Then, when the customer was out of earshot, the Linux guy said to me “Man, that guy should not have this thing on the public internet.”   But what can you do?  When you make something easy, you make it easy for people to mess up… :(

I got my camera today.  It rocks. 10.1 Megapixels of glory.

New Pictures soon.

:)

Recently the company I work for deployed a Cisco Unified Communication system. The goal is to replace our old PBX, which was an Inter-Tel Axxess system.

Simple enough right? Replace the pickup-and-dial function of our old PBX with Cisco Unified Communcations. The installation went well, however our deploying partner failed to stress the fact that CUCM 6.0 does not have any native paging software. About 3 days before go-live I scrambled to find an appropriate solution.

The problem: CUCM 6.0 does not have native paging, however CUCM Express does, so it is possible with our phone platform. We have only about less than $5k to drop on this 3 day project alone.

After googling for 30 minutes we found three vendors who provide Paging functions to Cisco AVVID. They are:

• InformaCast by CDW-Berbee
• IPSession by IPCelerate
• and Aptigen [Hard to find, any relevant info]

I really should remove Aptigen, I could not find any real relevant info on it, but its here for posterity.

I only evaluated two products: Informacast & IPSession.

Informacast by Berbee is really affordable, however IPSession by IPCelerate is way too expensive for a small deployment. IPSession was about 5x as expensive as Informacast, it requires its own Xeon class server, and I would not have been able to deploy as quickly. CDW-Berbee’s solution however was the best on all fronts. Downloadable software, great service/support, I got a trial key in a few minutes, and lots of informational posts on their support forums. It was around $50-60 a seat (any IP Phone).

IPSession has its place however, its used for maybe a multi campus situation, a large userbase, and has tons of features that maybe a school or a large company will be able to use.

However for our purposes it was out of our league.

Once we decided to use Informacast, we had to test implment it before we purchased the actual licenses. One thing I want to make clear, make sure Informacast sits on the same VLAN as your voice traffic will be. Otherwise you will see behavior such as only text paging will work, but Canned Audio or Live Audio paging will fail.

 

The reason for this is that the Informacast application makes assumptions that any sane application developer would do, assumes that the traffic its sending out will get to its destination if the network admin has done its job. Granted.

Informacast uses a multicast stream to send out the pages, while your phones can connect an interact with informacast, it may not be able to hear the Multicast audio stream, hence causing the problem above.

My issue was that the Informacast server was on the default vlan (VLAN 1), and the voice traffic sat on VLAN100, any multicast streams will not be heard unless the generating device tag’s it as for VLAN 100.

Once you identify that problem, and solve it, Informacast works great. Setup was easy, and the interface seems simple enough. One caviat, follow the install guide to the letter! Sometimes the instructions are not clear.

In order to enable Live Audio Paging one must create a quick page URL in the informacast webservice, then create that as a IP Phone service, add it to a phone, and page away.

There are additional modifications you can do, like paging groups, either define them on the IP Service or SURL (Service URL button), or in the XML browser itself. You can also shorten the prompt for paging by replacing the WAV file with a shorter sounding one.

All of these mod’s can be found here: http://phone-xml.berbee.com/forum/.

The entire project took about a day to deploy.

This is my first Enterprise related post.

Do you have a Cisco VoIP installation? And are you looking for Call Accounting software like your old PBX had? Try Metropolis Officewatch. I have not reviewed other software just yet, but I will be sharing my experiences with it, and the downfalls with the deployment.

Take this Network Diagram:

Click to see more details.

 

OfficeWatch is a application from Metropolis software. It is built to run as a desktop application, and not a background processing server. The application must be run by a local administrator, and there is a variety of methods to get PBX data to the software, either a TCP/IP (UDP&TCP) connections, or a Null Modem Cable, or a file dump. Cisco Unity uses the file dump method. The CUCM Publisher uses FTP or SFTP to deliver the call data (now known as CDR: Call Detail Records). The CDR files are comma delmited files that describe the call that is made. Officewatch will; given a directory and a file pattern, will watch for any new CDR files and processes them. The negative is that the software will not process the calls without running 24/7/365. Heres the overall steps you need to do to get OfficeWatch running.

1) Pick and Deploy a server that the CUCM Pub & Sub can access.
2) Setup an FTP server (if your deployment requires that the communication to be secure use sFTP!)
3) Create a username / pass & directory for the CDR data
4) Install Metropolis Officewatch & Register
5) In the CUCM CCM Administration goto “Cisco Unified Serviceability”
6) In Tools -> CDR Management; add a Billing Application Server, this is where you add the FTP server. My recommendation is to add two servers, One for the real data, and another for Archival data. This can be the same ’server’, but just two Directory Paths.
7) Once added, go check the System -> Service Parameters under Cisco Unified CM Administration.
8) Select your Publisher and your CallManager service.

9) Then, switch to your Subscriber and set the CDR flags the same. Otherwise you will have your AutoAttendant calls recorded, but not your Direct or Outbound calls.

The system should work like this.

 

At this point, everything should be ready. What you will want to do to confirm settings is make a few outbound calls to and from a specific phone #. Then see if the numbers show up in the CDR files that are delivered from the CUCM. If they do, great. Youre half way there.

Metropolis has 24/7/365 support (if you bought it, so use it). Call them up, tell them you have CUCM X, and my CDR files are writing here at X path.

Remember, Metropolis cannot help if the data seems to not appear in the CDR files. This is why its important to check the files before hand AND the subscriber settings. In some deployments all of the IP devices are registered to the Subscriber only, and backup to the publisher if one fails.

I was not able to understand until a few weeks of calls to Cisco TAC when we figured out after a few traces that, hey the Subscriber isnt sending CDR data to the Publisher. One stupid flag setting had kept this deployment from 100% for two weeks! So check your flags!

Also: You will want to enable Zero Duration CDR records, in some Cisco deployments people will invariably call 911 or 9911 (depending on your translation patterns). They will freak out that it starts ringing and they hang up. Some people however dont realize that the damage has been done already, the CUCM has already locked in a circuit and the call is connected! Hanging up makes it WORSE. HR might want to know who is calling 911, enabling this flag to TRUE will allow you to have the CDR records to find out who is doing it.

Please post if you have any concerns or questions. I hope this helps people deploy Cisco AVVID successfully.

So I broke down, I bought a new PC (or at least parts for one).

I figured since Im getting a new camera, I would need a better machine to keep up.  My previous machine had an Intel Celeron 2.66Ghz w/ 1GB (2×512mb) RAM.

This machine is simply a Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2Ghz, w/ 2GB (2×1gb), and an ECS Mobo. I walked out of fry’s for a little less than $200.00.

Once I got the parts home, I just reused some of the other parts I had, case, PSU and found an HDD in a pile I had.  Booted it up, installed XP, drivers, and all the apps I wanted.  Took about 3 hours, but it was worth it.

-Israel

So, My lease officially ended at 6PM today.  Now if they deposit my March rent check, my lease agreement stipulates that the lease will convert into a month-to-month agreement with the option to cancel the agreement 30 days prior to vacating the premises.

What does that mean?  I means I get to look for a new place, and hopefully not next to a bar!  Just now I had to call 911 because some asshat decided to crank-up his farad powered, probably 1kw amp with 16″ subs.  The vibration this thing caused was making the whole house vibrate and resonate.  I heard things vibrate in the walls I never knew existed.

Ill be glad to leave.

After breaking my Camera in January. Ive been saving up to $60 a week so I can have enough to buy a new camera.

Well… the time has come, my deposit from my ING Direct account has cleared. I went online and bought my XTi (body only) off Amazon for $536.00. I cant wait for it to come.
Jake just left my house, we were chatting up about the sort of photo things he has been doing. Hes actually had two cover shots on CycleNews.

Nice work Jake.

Its been two months since ive been seriously in the photo scene, and its time for me to get back in. Once I get the body, Im planning on getting the Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens.

I’ll start posting some new shots soon. Jake also gave me some ideas for iLPhotos.com (which has been dormant for awhile), so expect that to come back.

keep looking »