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Maybe driving and using a laptop is a bad idea, but the traffic today is horrendous.

So I guess i will try to get some work done while i got the sprint card online.  Albiet there isnt much work we can do… :(

-Izzy

I good one too!

http://www.fmtconsultants.com/ms_case_study_spyoptic.html

:)

Its a little past 10 o’clock now. Ive been working at my computer trying to finish up some online/radio coursework for saddleback college.  I knew what happened today, I just did’nt want to think about it.

I knew that the headline contained just a bit of information that may just as well have been me.  A 20yr old male travelling eastbound on Hermosa in San Clemente, was killed in a fatal motorcycle accident when he slammed into a light pole after hitting a stopped truck. No details of who is name is yet, but everyone on facebook knows.  Details spread a lot quicker on Facebook than traditional media.

I knew the second I got home, and a friend sent me a link making sure I was ok.

His name is Marc Russell a SCHS Alum of 2005 (I was 2006), Saddleback Alum of 2007, and Alum of Mesa Community College.  I never met the guy, Ive may have seen him in passing, but apparently we have 5 friends in common.

His page on Facebook  has a few friends already paying their respects to the equivalent living digital memorial, his online profile.  He looks like every average college student; California tan, smiling friends, and the occasional beer pong shot.

Online statuses of his friends read like tragedies:
“life is soooooo UN FUCKING REAL.”
“ is sick to his stomach, rest in peace Marc.”
“ is RIP marc russell the brother i never had.”
“is rip marc Russell.”
“ is crying, RIP MARC RUSSELL. I love you guy. I made a group to remember him by.”
“rest in peace marc russell, i will never forget you.”

 Remember Marc Russell - Facebook Group

At a minimum 137 people is affected by Marc Russell, a whole community of San Clemente is mourning by such a young loss.

Since the internet loves lists of anything… I arbirarily created 5 reasons for why scribd sucks.

1. Overuse of Flash - Now, Flash for video is great, circumvents problems with video decoders, standardizes the layout and almost anyone can use it. Flash for text? Umm, who doesnt have a PDF Reader like FoxIT Reader?
2. Possible Copyright Infringement - Ok, so the internet exists for original content right? So what about the content owners who might have their stuff copied onto Scribd? Go google original source documents like manual pages for software and you might find Scribd at the top of the google search, since their site cites tons of new documents, what kind of protections do they have to prevent copyright infringement?
3. Duplication of Data - Again with the original source, why does a document need to be copied twice on the internet? Honestly, adds overhead to something that doesn’t need to be there.
4. Dubious Methods to Growth - Ok, so an anonymous user can just add content? Note: http://www.scribd.com/people/view/13422-anon-655923 This was added to digg earlier this week: http://digg.com/comedy/Why_I_fired_my_secretary_today_3 - Note the tons of diggs, its a great story, however… why not link to the original text?
5. The I Just plain don’t like it reason - Honestly… I could be the grumpiest young adult ever but let me explain; I love technology, its been a big part of my life for awhile. So I get to see a ton of new things here and there and for the most part its really cool. But Scribd? What MBA thought this one up? (No Offense) It seems to be a solution in search of a problem, or at least Ad Revenue.

*Sigh*… Technology in the wrong hands can be such a pain….

BUT! Don’t take this blog post the wrong way.  I do not intend to discount web projects that are dedicated to preserve documents on the web (who maybe using Scribd). But honestly, how expensive is web hosting, even for text, you could serve a lot of text on 50GB a month of web-hosting.

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.

keep looking »