IT Support Small Medium Business

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 »

a few light-to-medium thunders later last night, main power to my house and the neighborhood was cut around 7:40pm. The power was restored only after 11:40pm. I reached their IVR, when I called the power company at 8:10pm. My wife scoffed the to-the-minute accuracy when the power company projected to restore power by 10:27pm.

I suspected the projected restoration time of10:27pm was just a WAG or SWAG added onto the time when the repair team was dispatched. From our past experience (6+ years in the neighborhood), power usually gets restored a lot quicker than projected.

This time, it took a lot longer, a full four hours, to restore the power. The APC UPS for the blog server stood up two hours after the outage. However, its WAN connection served by Comcast went offline with the main power too. Our modern life was cut short by four hours tonight, Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people of my age, I graduated from RCS, to CVS, then to Subversion. Recently, a friend of mine implemented bazaar on  production servers at work and urged me to check it out.

I did.

• It is written in python. some modules are written in C for speed.
• functions are pretty much complete, yet the control of publishing is more of a P2P model.
• Bazaar’s notion of personal branch is appealing. Any user can just start a branch and the repository database is stored in a directory named ‘.bzr’ right there, in the working directory.  This sounds scary, for sys admin and release manager alike who are more used to centralized RCS (revion control system). Yet, such a concept is really similar to what you do in the old RCS, you make a directory named ‘RCS’, then start to check in (ci) and out (co) .  If you don’t make a directory named RCS, the revision db file will coexisting with your working copy.
• I don’t like the fact the revision db is right there with the working directory.

Finally, around lunch time today I subscribed to a free monitor service by SiteUptime.com. Early July, this blog went inaccessible for nine days due to IP address change on my Comcast connection. I was caught off guard, since I had had the same IP for years since 2000. All cache and links were purged from Google Search’s cache, while the site was unacccessible.

I vowed not to have this happen again. With the free monitor service, alerts will sent to me from SiteUptime.com via email should this blog become inaccesible again. If you are serious about your web sites and their readership (your customers, clients, prospects, investors, etc.), you need to maintain uptime and SLA with decent monitoring against services and applications. Monitor Your Web Site 24/7 is a must! Read the rest of this entry »