IT Support Small Medium Business

A few months back, it seemed that main page to sign on to http://www.citicards.com under linux was problematic. The page showed at first, with the desired login form shown on the top left corner as usual. Then, whole screen went blank. Using Firefox under Windows, a few splash went by then you were back at the main page. Searching by Google showed some tricks to toggle off then on ertain JAVASCRIPT options at certain point. I tried and it worked ok.

A month ago, while staring at the blank page, I right clicked on it, only to find a familar Macromedia flash player setting pop-up. I noticed that the ‘Play’ checkbox was not checked. I checked it.

Viola! A few splash later, I was back to the familiar logon page again.  What a hassle!  I am grateful that I don’t have to boot back to Windows  nor have to jump hoops to toggle them JAVASCRIPT options. Read the rest of this entry »

I was titled both as as Systems Administrator and Systems Engineer in the past. I never made distinction between those two until recently.

In a recent team project, the apparent and blatant lack of systematic approach and lack of attention to details appalled me deeply. The shared agony made me think why, why some systems administrators or engineers are better than others.

I came to categorize SA/SE people to two groups. One is SA and the other is SE. I define systems engineers as those who

• have the skill-set of a systems administrator. And, to
• consistently apply engineering principles and practices to the systems administration work. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, I upgraded WordPress Hashcash plugin for this site to the latest version 4.1, since version 4.1 advertised to stop most trackback or pingback spam. I enabled the source IP check and source link check.

Apparently, the validation code is based on the simple trackback validation plugin at http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/ Read the rest of this entry »

Recently a Fonality Trixbox soft PBX server got racked to a cheap co-lo, where it enjoys a dedicated T1 line. Chatting using softphones such as X-lite, however, is mediocre at its best in sound quality. Yesterday, I got a Polycom SoundPoint 501 unit from http://www.pcconnection.com. It costs around USD 175. I was a bit skeptical about whether it worths every penny.

Well, it does worth every penny!

1. Powered on the Polycom SoundPoint 501 unit.
2. Set it on the phone to use my own Trixbox as its PBX server.
3. Saved the config and Rebooted the phone.
4. Once it got online on the network via DHCP, it pulled down the configuration and such directly from the trixbox TFTP server.
5. An extension got assigned to it automatically. Read the rest of this entry »

More often nowadays, I found that I need to deal with something ‘foreign’ in unix/linux servers I manage professionally. One thing in particular is an increased number of files whose names have white spaces in them. Most unix/linux utilities use any white space (tab, new line, space) as their delimiter character of choice, hence the problem.

These files are either legal immigrants from the other operating systems (uploads to a CMS/wiki/blog, for example), or some native programs or utilities with “foreign” roots (vmware server).

The common way to deal with it, is to opt to use ASCII NUL as delimiter when invoking command line utilities. This capability is a built-in for  more unix/linux utilities than I knew when I started to research to resolve a problem I had.

• grep -Z
• find . -print0
• xargs -0
• cut –output-delimiter=”\0″

“find . -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ltr” does work well, while ’svn status | cut -b8 –output-delimiter=”\0″ | xargs -0 ls -ltr’ doesn’t. Read the rest of this entry »