Technology

There are 43 posts filed in Technology (this is page 4 of 5).

ground rules for success in a dynamic, new media environment

In the previous entry, I made the statement that many of us working in new media don’t have a clue about what’s going to be successful and what’s not. I wanted to expand on this topic with a few key points. At first glance, you could interpret these as being pet peeves. My intention, however, is to set some basic ground rules for success even in a space where tools, technologies and strategies change at the drop of a hat. Continue reading →

Red Hat upgrade complete!

Those of you who have been following my journal closely know that I’ve been working on a project at work to migrate our main web and Java cluster from SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Well, we did the cut-over tonight and I’m pleased to note that everything pretty much went according to plan. Netcraft will now tell you that CBC.ca is running Apache 2.2.8 on Red Hat. Continue reading →

VAX/VMS on Linux using SIMH

Some of you are aware that I’m into vintage computers. Sadly, my basement cannot hold all the computers I wish I could actually have – and some of them are forever going to be too big to fit in any man’s house (not to mention “make it past a man’s significant other“).

But why would one actually need a VAX when, these days, one can emulate one on a Linux PC using SIMH? Not only can one emulate a VAX (take your pick: MicroVAX or VAX 11/780) but also a PDP-11, Data General Nova, some ancient Honeywell mainframes I’ve never heard of, or a bunch of other old mainframes or minicomputers.

I have a special nostalgia for the VAX, since I accessed my first real e-mail account at the National Capital Free-Net via a VAX in my dad’s office. On the anniversary of my Dad’s retirement, I’ve decided I’m going to try to get a VAX running in emulation under SIMH – running OpenVMS, no less. Do I know anything about running OpenVMS? Nope, I do not – but I’m going to find out. Yes, I know it’s a nearly obsolete operating system, and DCL is not the most intuitive. But hopefully it should prove to be a little bit amusing at least – wish me luck!

(On a completely unrelated note: People are still writing in to comment on the blog post where I got yelled at by Drew of Toothpaste For Dinner for offering an RSS feed. Haha! I’ve moved onto reading xkcd these days … that fellow seems far less uptight, and his comics are more reliably funny. And yes, xkcd has an RSS feed, if you had to ask.)

recovery procedure for VoIP PBX

My VoIP PBX (built on an embedded Linksys NSLU2) blew up tonight with a bad hard disk. Here’s the cheat sheet on how to recover it should it do the same next time.

  • Replace the hard disk and reboot the NSLU2. Since the network settings are stored in flash, it will come up on the old IP even if the hard disk has failed.
  • Format the new hard disk and partition it using fdisk. Swap space is recommended. Format it using mkfs.ext3.
  • Run turnup disk -i /dev/sda1 -t ext3 to move the rootfs to the disk.
  • Reboot NSLU2 and install Optware as follows:

    cd /tmp
    wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/slugosbe/cross/unstable/ipkg-opt_0.99.163-9_armeb.ipk
    tar -zxvf /tmp/ipkg-opt_0.99.163-9_armeb.ipk
    rm /tmp/debian-binary
    rm /tmp/control.tar.gz
    tar -ztvf /tmp/data.tar.gz
    cd /
    tar -zxvf /tmp/data.tar.gz
    rm /tmp/data.tar.gz
    cd /opt/etc
    sed -i “s//stable//unstable/” ipkg.conf
    /opt/bin/ipkg update

  • Restore old packages – namely, xinetd, net-snmp, asterisk14, tftp-hpa, esmtp, and all the things that asterisk recommends you install
  • Reconfigure /opt/etc/xinetd.conf to allow connections from the local LAN.

  • Restore data from backup – namely, the contents of /opt/tftpboot and /opt/etc/asterisk
  • Create a startup script for Asterisk because it’s missing in the default package:

    #!/bin/sh

    if [ -z “$1” ] ; then
    case `echo “$0″ | /bin/sed ‘s:^.*/(.*):1:g’` in
    S??*) rc=”start” ;;
    K??*) rc=”stop” ;;
    *) rc=”usage” ;;
    esac
    else
    rc=”$1″
    fi

    ASTERISK_DAEMON=/opt/sbin/asterisk

    case “$rc” in
    start)

    echo -n “Starting asterisk: ”
    $ASTERISK_DAEMON 2>/dev/null &
    echo ok
    ;;
    stop)
    if [ -n “`pidof asterisk`” ] ; then
    echo -n “Stopping asterisk: ”
    $ASTERISK_DAEMON -qrx ‘stop now’
    sleep 1
    echo ok
    fi
    ;;
    restart)
    “$0” stop
    sleep 1
    “$0” start
    ;;
    *)
    echo “Usage: $0 (start|stop|restart|usage)”
    ;;
    esac

Nokia N800 Internet Tablet and WPA2-PSK

A few weeks ago, my friend Brian lent me his Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, because he has gone and purchased an Apple iPhone and no longer needs it. I was hoping to try and use it as a SIP client on my VoIP network, so that I could wander about the house and still make calls. (Unfortunately, the N800 isn’t actually a phone, which makes it somewhat limited in functionality.) For the life of me, though, I can’t get the damn thing to talk WPA2! Continue reading →

on hacking the Unisys ICON

Some time ago I had promised to reminisce a little bit about the Unisys ICON terminals that I used through elementary school and high school, and some of the fun things we did with them (not all of them sanctioned by the school, of course). After reading in ;login: magazine about Dru Lavigne’s efforts [USENIX members only] to catalogue old protocols, I’ve been inspired to add a few words about the trusty old ICON.

Continue reading →

visiting the Canadian Clock Museum

Today I’m going to digress a bit from modern IT topics and talk about an aspect of turn-of-the-century IT that many of us have forgotten about: the venerable analog clock. It was less than 100 years ago that a wall-mounted, spring-driven, windup analog clock was still considered a major appliance. Salesmen used to go door-to-door and sell clocks; sometimes they would loan one to a household for a month to see how they liked it, and many times a household would find that they couldn’t do without it and would purchase it.

How do I know all of this? Because I recently visited the Canadian Clock Museum in my home town of Deep River, Ontario. Both Meredith & I expected to be underwhelmed, as many small-town museums are poorly-lit, haphazardly organized, and with little regard to proper museum cataloguing and preservation techniques. However, we were duly impressed with the clock museum, which has over 1000 artifacts, bootstrapped by more than 600 clocks from owner Allan Symons’ personal collection. The story goes that Allan retired from the local AECL research facility after 27 years, and once he hit 600 clocks his wife made him move the collection out of the basement, and so the museum was born.

The $5.00 admission fee includes a tour by Allan himself, which is well worth the money. Allan’s visibly passionate about the clocks that he has collected, preserved and/or restored, and it shows — he stayed over an hour past closing time to answer our questions and lead us through the museum. He has an intimate knowledge of clock machinery and clock history in Canada — he has an extensive collection of clocks from the now-defunct Western Clock (a/k/a Westclox) company based out of Peterborough, among other artifacts.

The museum also has a handful of other interesting artifacts, such as a collection of windup gramophones. Among them is an original Edison wax-cylinder gramophone with a number of four-minute (!!!) records. For a device that’s over 100 years old, the sound quality is actually surprisingly good.

If you’re ever in the Deep River area or even just driving through Deep River along Highway 17, I highly recommend dropping into the clock museum for a tour to learn about this fascinating piece of our history.

home router replaced!

I finally decided to replace my FreeBSD-based Sun Ultra 10-based home router. There were a couple of reasons for this:

  1. I was running FreeBSD 5.x, which meant that the keyboard wouldn’t work — I could only control the system remotely over SSH or through a serial console. This was fixed in later versions of FreeBSD 5.x but I didn’t want to bother upgrading, since the box isn’t the fastest machine
  2. Using a desktop workstation for routing and running ppp consumes more power than it’s worth, and makes a fair amount of noise
  3. Using an 400 MHz UltraSparc III-based workstation with 512 MB of ECC RAM for a simple firewall and router seemed like a bit of overkill 🙂
  4. I want to free up the Ultra 10 for testing out Solaris 10 and possibly upgrading my Solaris 9 SCSA designation.
  5. I want to (finally!) equip my home with wireless… yes, I’m a little late getting on the bandwagon.

Continue reading →