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Scheduled Maintenance for TPIA Users on Shaw Cable’s Last Mile Network

This just came in from TekSavvy’s e-mail list altering users of upcoming maintenance by Shaw on their last mile network:

Scheduled Maintenance and Upgrades

Date

Window

Expected Duration

March 9

Midnight to 6 a.m. Mountain (like Calgary)
11 p.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific (like Vancouver)

Up to five minutes

March 14

Midnight to 6 a.m. Mountain (like Calgary)
11 p.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific (like Vancouver)

Up to 15 minutes

March 15

1 a.m. to 7 a.m. Mountain (like Calgary)
Midnight to 6 a.m. Pacific (like Vancouver)

Up to 30 minutes

March 21

Midnight to 6 a.m. Mountain (like Calgary)
11 p.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific (like Vancouver)

Up to two hours

March 22

1 a.m. to 7 a.m. Mountain (like Calgary)
Midnight to 6 a.m. Pacific (like Vancouver)

Up to one hour

During those times posted above, you may experience temporary loss of connectivity until the maintenance has been completed. As for users that are on other third party internet providers that uses Shaw for their last mile connection, the maintenance can also potentially affect subscribers that is also a third party, but not TekSavvy themselves.

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Seriously friendly scanners…

Here’s my word to friendly scanners out there:

Why are you even spoofing the SIP User Agent Cisco-SIPGateway/IOS-12.x anyways? Because doing that will eventually get that UA added to a hot-list.

Of course, I can always do a fail2ban with FreeSWITCH, but seriously?

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Making WordPress Domain Name Agnostic

When I was migrating this blog over to my own server at home reverse proxied at a VPS sitting somewhere, I ran into an issue where I could not figure out how the heck does one force the WordPress administration page to have a different subdomain from the where the site was installed to. Gave up on fixing it for a month or so and therefore, blog posts became… somewhat limited… Well it was limited anyways to start off with 😛

After trying out various solutions that mostly ended up in breaking the site, I’ve came across this idea:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-site-url

The thread’s OP wanted a few different domains to point to his site regardless and not have WordPress further molest the URI’s being generated on the page. TL;DR the main idea was to use this:

$url = "http://".$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];

…inside the wp-config.php file.

And in turn:

define('WP_HOME',$url);
define('WP_SITEURL',$url);

Dang, lesson learned here – wp-config.php can be treated like a PHP script where you can call all sorts of variables, including the $_SERVER ones.

Of course, additional work is required on the nginx side to have the proxy to pass on the HTTP Host value as-is to the said internal site.

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VMware and their FUD

I’m talking about a post on VMware’s “Virtual Reality” blog detailing on how their solution is cheaper than Microsoft’s Hyper-V offering and how hard it is to “administer”.

The post in question is here.

Let me tell you this: Personally speaking, I find Microsoft’s Hyper-V v3.0 platform a pleasure to learn and toy with. Sure, Microsoft’s Hyper-V 3.0 is free, but we all know that free has a cost attached to it right? Yes there is. It’s called read the fine manual. Not to mention the cost of reading the manual, for the price of free you get the following features I can list off the top of my head for free:

  • Live Migration (Can also be done in a shared nothing setup)
  • Native 512e/4K sector disk support (also known as Advanced format)
  • Failover Clustering
  • 4TB of RAM on the host, 1TB of RAM per active VM

Do note the last part of where I’m making it a selling point. VMware’s free vSphere (aka ESXi 5.x) offering has an artifical limit of 32GB and some DIY desktops/workstations are getting to that limit, potentially higher when we finally see DDR4 platforms hitting the market anytime soon. Now the features above are also offered by VMware, but for how much? Certainly not free. Just go grab a free ESXi license key and plug it in, you’ll see what I mean pretty quick.

Unfortunately what VMware’s trying to convey here is that Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution is much more expensive than what their offerings are. What’s funnier is they also referenced to a post on Microsoft’s TechNet forums where a bunch of people complained that standalone Hyper-V Server is quite painful to use.

In reality, from the feedback I’ve gotten with one of the potential employers at career fairs, one of them said that VMware is probably the best out of all the virtualization solutions, but is the most expensive one out of the solutions they’ve looked at. We’ve made mention of other solutions such as KVM, but overlooked Hyper-V. Then again, this was a few months ago when nobody really bothered to look into Windows Server 2012’s Hyper-V solution as it wasn’t RTM’d yet.

Fast forward to GA, Hyper-V Server 2012 has been released for general consumption earlier this month for a price tag of free. But the issue with the free Hyper-V is due to the security bulit around it. This problem really is about people using the standalone offering in a Workgroup environment. In Hyper-V Server 2012, this really is a non-issue. If a wise person did read the manual and does know how to use PowerShell, administering it remotely or locally shouldn’t be a huge issue. Also, Hyper-V Server 2012 was meant for administrators who have a strong background in Windows administration. It wasn’t really meant for people who just want a virtualization solution, but have no prior experience with administering a Windows Server machine.

I may be leaving out huge amount of details and scenarios above, but I’d like to keep things as simple as possible 😛 It all comes down to this: If you know what you are doing and have already planned an Active Directory system, you’ll enjoy administering Hyper-V Server 2012 boxes in no time. But if you just had poorly thought out plans and no patience or will to learn new things, you’ll find administering anything foreign a nightmare. This is true for any system that you or me may come across in the future.

The point of my “rant” is – Open minds help understand things much better. And much more resistant to FUD launched by anybody. 😛

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Tony of FreeSWITCH… Very Funny…

Ha Ha very funny of you…

In case if you’re wondering, yes Tony of FreeSWITCH did add that colorized banner in fs_cli.c with the effect of advertising that ClueCon is coming in a month…

For people who are getting annoyed at it, I’ve reverted that and you can use my patch to get rid of that banner:

From 23526fe0cbd306c9e993e31e679ff8f8f185f14b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jeff Leung 
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2012 23:28:07 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Haha very funny...

---
 libs/esl/fs_cli.c         |   11 ++++-------
 libs/esl/src/include/cc.h |    3 ---
 2 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 libs/esl/src/include/cc.h

diff --git a/libs/esl/fs_cli.c b/libs/esl/fs_cli.c
index 8532e23..408c946 100644
--- a/libs/esl/fs_cli.c
+++ b/libs/esl/fs_cli.c
@@ -916,18 +916,15 @@ static const char *banner =
        "* Paypal Donations Appreciated: paypal@freeswitch.org *\n"
        "* Brought to you by ClueCon http://www.cluecon.com/   *\n"
        "*******************************************************\n"
-       "\n";
-
-static const char *inf = "Type /help  to see a list of commands\n\n\n";
+       "\n"
+       "Type /help  to see a list of commands\n\n\n";

 static void print_banner(FILE *stream)
 {
-#include 
-
 #ifndef WIN32
-       fprintf(stream, "%s%s%s\n%s", output_text_color, banner, cc, inf);
+       fprintf(stream, "%s%s", output_text_color, banner);
 #else
-       fprintf(stream, "%s%s\n%s", banner, cc, inf);
+       fprintf(stream, "%s", banner);
 #endif
 }

diff --git a/libs/esl/src/include/cc.h b/libs/esl/src/include/cc.h
deleted file mode 100644
index 573a7f7..0000000
--- a/libs/esl/src/include/cc.h
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
-

*Note: This patch isn’t meant to offend anybody. If it did, well there’s not much you can do about it 😛