Ugo's Blog

Part of my job is to open support tickets, issues, cases, etc. to get help with hardware or software problems.  The quality level varies.  Here is my satisfaction level depending on the vendor (alphabetical order, with the products I've created tickets for in parenthesis): BSD Perimeter (pfSense): Excellent.  Very knowledgeable and their support contract is an hourly rate, so they don't mind working for you and they'll help as much as they can.  Always provided suggestions or solutions up to now. APC (UPS): Well, when you discover that your UPS needs a replacement under warranty and they only promise that they will ship it tomorrow (it took about 5 days to reach our office), you don't really care about how good the support may be.  At least they do make good products. Dell/Compellent (Storage Array): Very good.  Good knowledge base, helpfull techs, quality products as well (meaning we don't need to call them except for firmware updates, for which they...

I was looking for a way to reduce my VoIP bills.  I only use my VoIP lines to make long-distance calls and my provider forced me to spend at least 50$/year, which I never really used.  Someone recommended me voip.ms and I did the move.  I almost did the move for my home phone but when I called my home phone provider, they agreed on giving me a 15$/month rebate if I'd stick with them. voip.ms is very good because: Their prices are really good They offer a broad range of products For the price of a VoIP line, you get all the functions of a whole PBX Voicemail Ring Groups IVR DISA Multiple phones on the same account Callback Etc. Up to now, 100% reliable.

Here is my personal backup plan for my Ubuntu home desktop: I use Dropbox for my small files. I use mondo for bare-metal recovery.  I exclude from mondo backups /home so it doesn't take too much time and hdd space For /home, every user on the computer has backintime configured I put my mondorescue and backintime backups in an external, USB hard drive.  I own two of them, so I always keep one of them at my father's house and I swap them about every two months.  When I do the swap, I use rsync -aHv --delete /media/Backup2/ /media/Backup1/ | tee rsync.log to sync the "old" backup drive with the "new".  The -H is important because backintime uses hard links and if you don't use this option, you'll end up multiple copies of your files, which will take way too much hdd space on the backup drive.  Thanks to Vivek !

It's been some time that I want to start using a password manager.  Yesterday I looked at the keepass software.  However, I was wondering which versions were compatible with each other, as on linux, keepassx seems to be compatible only with version 1 of keepass for windows.  Finally, I found out the recipe: Android: keepassdroid Windows: keepass (version 2) Ubuntu: keepass2 (apt-get install keepass2) They all seem to be compatible.  In conjonction  with Dropbox to sync the database, it is fairly easy to use and the DB is always available on all my devices, up-to-date.

I used to be able to right-click on a cacti graph, copy the image, then simply paste into Outlook or Word.  However, I don't know why, but it stopped working. I did some research and found this post: http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=46420 stating that using Alt+Ctrl+V, then choosing "Device Independent Bitmap", it works.  It works.

We recently moved away from Blackberry mostly for cost savings. We went with Samsung's Galaxy S Infuse 4g (why such a long name???). Here is my analysis after a few months of use: Pros of the Samsung: Nice touchscreen A real screen I'm almost as fast on the touch keyboard than on the BlackBerry's physical one A lot more applications 15$/month less expensive on the data plan compared to the BlackBerry What I dislike about the Samsung Bluetooth voice dialing not working with my car radio anymore Poor battery life Poor antenna Calls that cut on the highway Calls getting very bad voice quality once in a while, for about 20 seconds GPS signal losses are very frequent I just talked with a support rep at my provider and he says that most problems can be solved by shutting down the phone and starting it at least daily. I'll try that. What I miss from the BlackBerry: BlackBerry Traffic More robust Better 4g signal Easier to find holsters The red LED that let us know that ther...

I had a challenge this week.  I never played with Exchange's  Recovery Storage Groups (RSG) and I had to restore an Exchange mailbox that has been deleted.  The user left the organization a while ago and I don't know why, I couldn't find the .pst that we usually create before deleting the user and mailbox. We use EMC Networker for our backups, but it cannot restore a mailbox if the mailbox has been deleted.  The answer from EMC: The user has to restore the information store (IS) to the RSG and from there, contact Microsoft to find how to export the mailbox out of the RSG. Of course, I didn't contact Microsoft, but I found that: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795895.aspx So here is what I did: Following the EMC Networker module for exchange admin guide Created the RSG in Exchange Management Shell (EMS) Created the Mailbox Database in the RSG (in EMS Restore the Mailbox Database using Networker (which restores it to the RSG) Then, I just...

I finally had time to upgrade my home firewall (running on a WRAP) to 2.0.  The current release is 2.0.1, but I didn't want to run a FreeBDS liveCD to alter the image, so I used the premodified images available at  http://zhaw.ch/~maym .  Up to now, everything is running smoothly.  I just installed 2.0 on another CF card, then booted from it.  I had to configure the interfaces manually (using serial port), then I could log on to the default IP address, then restore my backup config.  Then it rebooted and everything was fine except that the DNS forwarder service didn't start automatically, I had to start it manually.  I'll eventually reboot to see if that was just this time.  Thanks to the pfSense team!

Up to now, the No Support Linux hosting seems to be all well.  I just got a newsletter from them, stating some facts: It has been an exciting time for No Support Linux Hosting. We were recently mentioned in Web Host Industry Review Magazine as a company with a Killer Business Model. We linked to the magazine article on our Online Buzz page: http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/OnlineBuzz.html We recently added new blades into our Xen Cloud Platform cloud hosting environment. The new blade servers each have dual Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs and 96GB of RAM.  Storage continues to perform nicely on our ZFS based SAN units. http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/ServerSpecs.html Performance and uptime have been outstanding at No Support Linux Hosting.  The average uptime since we launched No Support Linux Hosting has been 99.99%.  That is not bad at all for a $1/month web hosting service.  We have definitely managed to outperform many of the more expensive web hostin...

I was looking for a folder comparison tool for Windows this morning and I found FreeFileSync .  Open-source, free, and quite instinctive and easy to use.  You select 2 folders, click "Compare" and it shows the the difference and the suggested action: Add this file on this side to the other side Replace this file on this side, overwriting the other side  By default, it compares by date/time, but it can also compare by file content (hopefully doing a md5 on the file...).  It is a lot slower, but can be useful in some contexts. It quickly gives you a good idea of what has changed on one side or the other.

We are using OTRS as ticketing system for support requests, and since it is an internal system only, we wanted to give the opportunity to our employees (requesters) to state their ticket's priority.  The OTRS client interface allows that, but can't add a CC: address, which is wanted by our users, so we decided to try to develop an Office Add-in that would do the job. I know that we could have used the built-in prorities (Normal, Low, Important) in Outlook, but we wanted 6 levels.  Priorities are important to us because we wanted to have escalation and reports to monitor if the agents are answering and solving tickets in an efficient manner.  So we made 6 SLAs and postmaster filters in OTRS, and the form adds text at the bottom of the message (i.e. SLA=1).  The filter recognizes this text and sets the appropriate header, so the SLA is present in the ticket when it is created.  We also made a GenericAgent job to match the OTRS priority to the SLA of tickets. F...

At work we have been using Borland's Starteam for a while for our SCMS (Source Code Management System).  I don't know it is good or bad, as we have simple team, but when I asked for additionnal licences, I found out that their prices are very high: 1 Named user: 750$, 1 Concurrent user: 3900 (discounted by 50% at the moment I asked for a quote).  And add to that 22% yearly maintenance cost. As we already started using Subversion for other projects, we decided to move from Starteam to Subversion for all of our projects, but our concern was of course how to import all the project versions from Starteam to Subversion.  Thanks to a nice company named Polarion, it is possible with their svnimporter tool http://www.polarion.com/downloads/svn.php .  This tool is available to migrate from other SCMS to Subversion with support for CVS, PVCS, VSS, ClearCase, MKS and Starteam. It took me some time to figure out how to run the tool (which is java-based).  At first I jus...

Very nice tool for database queries: http://dbeaver.jkiss.org/ .   Freeware Multi-platform Supports any database having a JDBC driver No install needed (java-based)

During the week-end, the server on which I'm hosted at nosupportlinuxhosting has been compromised using a known security issue with Cpanel.  The staff at nosupportlinuxhosting reinstalled all the software from scratch, which is good.  However, all data was deleted in the process, including the backups.  The staff told me that in such an exploit would have compromised the backups anyway.  They told me to have local backups, saying that we should not rely on server-side backups and to take a backup of my site every time it changes using the cpanel interface.  But... when you're hosting a forum, the site changes everytime someone add or edits a post. So I though that I would give up trying to make them give me a solution to automate the backup process.  It was quite easy because rsync is available in the shell they provide.  And SSH.  So what I did is to create a cronjob in the cpanel' interface that looks like this: /usr/bin/rsync --include="...

We did a lot of research to get Joomla! CMS to work behind an Apache httpd reverse proxy.  It looks like Joomla! needs to know how you called the site in your browser's address bar, so this directive must be used: ProxyPreserveHost On There might be othe tweaks that I can't think of that were necessary, but I do remember that this one gave us a lot of headaches.

My laptop will celebrate his 7th birthday in a few days (Dell D800).  It is not very powerfull, but has been quite reliable (I change the hard drive once, that's it).  I've always used Kaspersky to protect this computer, but I knew it was expensive on resources.  Since this laptop is limited in cpu power, and, especially, memory (1 GB RAM), every upgrade made it worse.  And I recently updated Kaspersky Internet Security to the 2012 version and it killed my laptop.  Well, not totally, but made it almost unusable.  And I had a few problems in the upgrade.  I think I had problems with all my Kaspersky upgrades.  This time, it cut my network connection (Wow, now it's secure, but useless!), so I had to uninstall it and reinstall.  Once this problem solved, my laptop started hanging for no reason.  So one night I had enough and decided to uninstall it and try Microsoft Security Essentials.  I don't like Microsoft that much, but this solve...

I just started using No Support Linux Hosting .  It is cheap, but you must have a minimum of knowledge to be able to use this hoster.  Since I don't need hi-performance, redundant servers or super support staff, I thought I'd give it a go.  It looks nice up to now.  Here are the details: It is 1$ a month and that gives you access to the cpanel control panel One domain name hosting (you have to register it, though) 1 GB of disk space 10 GB of monthly bandwidth transfer 25 mail accounts 1 mailing list 6 sub-domains 3 MySQL databases Daily backups DNS management 2 easy-install packages: phpBB and Wordpress Shell access via SSH! Just for the shell access, it is worth it for me, as I often have to do some http or smtp testing from "outside".  I'll probably post again in a few weeks or month to comment on this hoster.

Plutôt comique... Je viens de recevoir un appel d'une personne anglophone (# Privé), qui voulait me parler de mon ordinateur Microsoft Windows. Elle voulait parler au propriétaire de l'ordinateur, disant que son entreprise est certifiée en tant que techniciens professionnels par Microsoft. Après quelques questions, elle commence son processus (qu'elle lisait, évidemment): Saviez-vous que votre ordinateur pourrait être infecté par des virus, des trojans, et d'autres programmes malicieux qui ne sont pas détectés par des anti-virus conventionnels, blablabla...? L'ordinateur en question est-il allumé? Oui Je vais vous fournir des directives que vous pourrez faire avec moi qui vous permettra de vérifier l'état de votre ordinateur et constater à quel point il est infecté. Ahhh, là ça commence à être intéressant. Je décide d'inverser les roles... cette dame n'est pas tombée sur le bon gars cette fois-ci: D'où appelez-vous? Elle a marmonné le nom...

Very funny... I just got a call from someone (Unknown #) who was interested about our Microsoft Windows computer. She wanted to talk to the owner, saying that they were certified Microsoft Technicians. After a few questions, she entered in her process (that she was obviously reading): Did you know that your computer could be intected with malware, virus, that can be undetected by conventionnal anti-virus... blablabla , then a series of questions/answer: Is the computer on at the moment? Yes I'll give you directives to scan your computer and you'll see how infected your computer is Ahhh, now, it's getting interesting! At this moment, I decided to switch roles: Where are you calling from? She mumbled the name of the company, I could't understand even after two repetitions What is your phone number? We don't have one, we operate on the internet Well, you're talking on a phone, you must have a phone number right? Our phone number is for our technicians on...

I got my results for both RHCSA and RHCE exams: pass! I've done the RH300 training earlier this months and it was a great experience.