Dell PowerEdge SC1435 and PowerVault MD1000

This is about getting the Dell PowerEdge SC1435 working with the Dell PowerVault MD1000. I bought two PEs and a PV for each of our sites, one in China, one in the US. Evidently, I should have done more research before choosing this combination, because it’s known not to work. However, our Dell salesmen (both in China and the US) still happily sold it to us. At this point, the system now does what we need, but only after quite a bit of hassle. Maybe this will save the next person some headache if they find themselves with this combination of hardware in their hands. Read the rest of this entry »

SPA3102 and FreePBX HOWTO

The target configuration

The target configuration for this HOWTO is an SPA3102 connected to the same LAN as the PBX, or at least a routed but non-NATted situation(we use this same configuration for an SPA3102 across a VPN). The SPA3102 will be connected to the LAN through the ‘INTERNET’ port, and to the PSTN through the ‘LINE’ port. Setting up the phone port is very easy, and you should look for another tutorial for this. If you decide to use the ‘ETHERNET’ port for something, that’s fine, but you’re on your own there too.

Why another howto?

Why another howto for getting the SPA3102 to play with FreePBX? Because the howtos I’ve seen just don’t work for me. There was one I found once, actually, that was excellent: It walked you through steps, just as any other howto would, but broke it up into separate sections where the user would complete a set of steps and then do some tests to make sure that particular functionality was working before moving on. That works well for a user who’s not an expert, but wants to narrow down what he has to debug at each step. I tried to follow this approach here. Suggestions welcome!

Read the rest of this entry »

bcfg2: User-Defined Metadata plugin

I wrote UDMetadata, a bcfg2 Metadata plugin, a few months ago, and have been meaning to release it out into the wild ever since. Here it is, at last!

What is it?

UDMetadata is a Metadata plugin for bcfg2. With UDMetadata, one may define arbitrary data structures on a per-host or per-group basis that are put into the client metadata ‘ud’ attribute. These data structures are used in S/TGenshi templates. The data isn’t limited to just the hostname, groups and bundles in the default client metadata object, and can be referenced more easily than the properties object (which requires calls to the lxml.etree libraries), and can be restricted with <host> and <group> tags, unlike the properties object. Read the rest of this entry »

Improving on the 5-in-1 Network Admin’s Cable

I recently discovered Michael Ossman’s 5-in-1 network admin’s cable. Before this discovery, I built serial cables with the same DB9/RJ45 modular adapters, but never with a standard pinout so they could be interchanged, never with the hardware flow control lines plumbed, and certainly never as part of a multifunction cable. Ossman’s system can even be expanded on; his article has an “Extras” section, and Jason McPherson wrote an article on building an ethernet and serial tap with the cable.

In this article, I describe how I changed the cable to meet my own needs better. I hope this is useful to others, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello world!

Just got finished installing WordPress for the first time. Recompiling the FC8 RPM for CentOS worked without modification. So, keep an eye out for some technical posts I’ve been planning for a while.