SHELDMANDU

Redmine and ChiliProject Installation Problems

admin — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 07:45:52 +0000

I have to say, Redmine (and ChiliProject) has got to have one of the absolute worst applications to install for anyone who isn’t a RubyOnRails ace. As nice as the applicaiton is, the installation should be enough to turn anyone away. Redmine and ChiliProject have probably the absolute worst documentation I’ve ever seen. When I tried to install Redmine on Windows I encountered all sorts of problems with Ruby on Rails MySQL connectivity and when I tried to install Redmine on Linux I found the so called installation guides to be wrong, outdated, incomplete and all over the place. Surely it’s not that friggin hard to write a decent installation guide for getting Redmine running with Passenger/mod_rails on Apache. Why on earth would you tell people that using webrick in production is bad and then not give them decent instructions on how to install the basterd with something that should be used in production. Or the CentOS installation guide is all over the place as well, it’s friggin bullshit when it tells you how to install using CGI and yet has steps for installing with Passenger. Complete and utter bullshit.

Cisco SRP527W Mozilla Firefox 9 Issue – Not a Bug Apparently!

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:35:39 +0000

We just bought a newly realease Cisco SRP527W Modem Router (or Services Ready Platform as Cisco likes to call it) (part number SRP527W-U-E-K8 and the first thing I tried to do is get it setup. Like many people I use Mozilla Firefox and like many people I have the latest version which happens to be 9.0.1. I had no problem access the Web Based Configuration Utility by going to the default 192.168.15.1 IP address of the router, but when I started trying to browse around I noticed some really really strange stuff going on. When I clicked on the tabs in teh SRP527W Configuration Utility it would go to the wrong screen and when i clicked in the panel on the left the top heading in the content area would not change, but the content would! I found this behaviour really strange, so I decided to try Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. I tried both and it seemed to work fine. I also tried Firefox 5 which I had running on another machine, that also seemed to work. This to me seemed like a bug or incompatibility that Cisco should know about, so I called Cisco Small Business support and after waiting for over an hour on the line I was put at the start of the queue again so I hung up and called back to finally get a person by selecting Managed Switches as the option (even though my issue had nothing to do with managed switches). The lady was very nice but when I explained the issue and asked if she could record it as an issue with the Cisco SRP527W and Firefox 9 compatibility she tried to convince me it’s not an issue at all and that I should install the Firefox IETabs extension. Seriously? I told her that it’s friggin year 2012 and it’s Cisco, not some no-name brand that we purchased because we expected the product to just work and not have configuration or performance issues (which is why we bought it in the first instance). The other IT guy in the room almost pissed himself laughing as I was trying to explain to her that it’s in Cisco’s interest to record this as an issue and not ignore and at least make it clear in some online doco that there’s currently a compatibility issue with Firefox 9 and that as a workaround people should use a different browser. The lady told me she’ll let the engineers know, but when I asked her to give me a case number she said she can’t… which basically means she hasn’t logged it and probably won’t. So, I figured the next best thing is to write a blog post so that anyone having issues with Cisco SRP527W with Firefox 9 will know that there is in fact an issue and the workaround is to use Internet Explorer, Chrome or an older version of Firefox. Perhaps it’s a Firefox issue, but as the product maker Cisco should at least acknowledge the issue and make it clear to customers what to do, but I guess they like wasting their time and money on customer dealing with incompetent support staff who try to convince seasoned IT professionals that an issue isn’t an issue or not an issue with their product.

WAMP Install Apache Service on Port Different to 80

admin — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:42:30 +0000

Sometimes you want to install more than one webserver on the machine. WAMP Server is great for running an Apache, PHP, MySQL stack without installing each component manually. However when you try to install Apache as a service WAMP tries to install it on port 80. Luckily WAMP is very flexible and it’s easy enough to change so that it installs on a different port (or rather you don’t even check what port you’re installing on).

To do this, simply go into wampmanager.tpl and find the tag [ApacheServiceInstall]. Below it you can see what actions get executed when you run the icon. The simples thing to do is to comment out the first action, which runs testPortForInstall.php located in the scripts folder. Alternatively you can modify the php script to test a different port.

Then modify your httpd.conf file and run the Install Apache as a Service from within WAMP.

SBS 2008 Backup Exec 12.5 Live Update Error LU1812 installing Service Pack and Hotfixes

admin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 08:29:32 +0000

When you try to install Service Pack 4 or Hotfixes using Live Update in Backup Exec 12.5 on SBS 2008 you might find that you ge tError LU1812 and if you click the link you are lead to believe that the issue is with msxml3 or something along those lines. In relality the issue is actually with the fact that you didn’t run Backup Exec as an administrator when you started it and stupid UAC kicks in and prevents Live Update from installing the updates. All you need to do to work around this issue is to “Run As Administrator” when you start Backup Exec with the intention of running Live Update to install any service packs or hot fixes. It’s certainly annoying that you are led down the wrong path by Symantec but at least there’s a simple solution, which in hindsight seems rather obvious. Hope this helps someone.

Small Business Server SBS 2008 Applying Computer Settings Long Time

admin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:48:55 +0000

There is nothing more annoying than waiting for hours while Small Business Server is Applying Computer Settings and you don’t even know if its going to work or not because you’ve just installed some Windows Update which will in all likelyhood break just as many things as it will fix. Luckily a search for SBS 2008 Applying Computer Settings quickly revealed that SBS 2008 is having an cow because IPv6 is disabled. Any normal IT person would consider disabling something they’re not using, but Microsoft doesn’t seem to think of that and doesn’t warn you about it or anything else. It turns out half of SBS 2008 seem to be dependent on IPv6. How bloody stupid is that when hardly anyone was using IPv6 in 2008 when it came out and it’s still not very widely used now. If you want your SBS 2008 to apply computer settings fast you just need to make sure IPv6 is enabled or is completed disabled using a registry hack. You can re-enable IPv6 by going into safe mode with networking and your network cable unplugged.

You can find more information here: http://achugh.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/small-business-server-2008-and-applying-computer-settings-message/

You can also find some more here: http://achugh.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/more-on-sbs-2008-issue-applying-computer-settings-message/

Hope this helps.

Once you have this working you can try work out what else is wrong with you piece of shit SBS 2008.

Engin Business VoIP Service Issues

admin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:51:20 +0000

If you are looking for a Business Grade VoIP Service Provider I would recomment that you avoid Engin unless you’re looking for a very basic level of support and don’t care much about your service. Their resources seem to be overstreched as is and when it comes to public holidays in Australia their support is simply non-existent. Today I’m having issues with my Asterisk PBX being unable to register to Engin and when I called Engin there is just nobody there competent of helping me. They have a call center somewhere overseas for level 1 support and apparently for a connectivity issue like mine, which to me seems to clearly be an issue on their end, they have nobody there to look at the issue. The level 1 support guy simply told me to call back tomorrow. This is all well and good if you don’t care much for your phone but it’s just not good enough for a BUSINESS VOIP service. It seems that Engin are not quite capable of distinguishing between consumer and business telecommunications needs. Perhaps if anyone from Engin reads this they will find out that businesses cannot afford to have downtime just because it’s a public holiday because they still work on public holidays. That means there needs to be a competent support person available to resolve critical issues. The level 1 support guys seem to treat everyone including highly technical users as idiots and are completely useless themselves other than to read out scripted answers. My advice if you’re looking for a business voip provider, avoid Engin and ASK whichever service provider you intend to go with as to what their support is like on weekends and on public holidays. Unless you just don’t care about that.

Windows could not start the SQL Server on Local Computer Error Code 3417

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:06:29 +0000

I havn’t been using SQL Server on my development machine for a while so to speed things up I changed the service startup to manual. Recently I’ve needed SQL Server but when I tried to start the service I got an error saying Windows could not start the SQL Server on Local Computer with the Error Code 3417. This was rather odd, so I started doing some google searched but with no direct answer other than people saying that there are issues with the master DB. As it turned out because i havn’t been using SQL Server (and hence the DB files weren’t being used) Windows has compressed these files to save space (They were coming up with blue colour in the file system). So I selected all DB and Log files in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA folder, went in Properties -> Advanced and unticked the “Compress contents to save disk space” checkbox. After this all files have turned black and I had no issues starting the service

RocketRAID 640 Base System Device Driver Problem due to PLX PEX 8609-8A50BC

admin — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:39:34 +0000

I have recently bought a High-Point RocketRAID 640 card so that I can run some SSDs in a RAID. After installing the card by following the instructions I found that the system started getting a driver issue with Base System Device. After considerable searching on the internet I have found a post on a forum about this issue (RocketRAID Base SYstem Device Driver Problem). The issue is basically that there are no drivers for the PLX PEX 8609-BA50BC bridge chip that is used on the RocketRAID card. So, what I have done is emailed HighPoint and asked them to send me the drivers (which is apparently what they did to resolve the issue for the guy at Tweak Town who tested their device). I’m not sure why on earth they don’t just publish the driver or stick it onto their CD that comes with the card. I will update this post if I get the driver from them.UPDATE… I have received a reply from High-Point in relation to the issue with my RocketRAID 640 installation described above. Their exact answer was:

Dear Sir or Madam,

No worry,it’s just designed like that and won’t affect the card functionning.Just leaves it.

Regards
Global Support Center
HighPoint Technologies, Inc.

Besides the really poor English, it is extremely concerning when a card manufacturer tells you that their card has been designed in a way that has your system looking for drivers and not being able to find them and their solution is to just leave it as is and have the system keep complaining about a missing driver. I have replied to the High-Point Support about this problem, which I suspect doesn’t just effect RocketRAID 640 but also RocketRAID 644 and other cards that use the same PLX chip. I have asked them to provide the driver which they apparently provided to Tweak Town.

At this stage I would recommend that anyone looking at buying a High-Point RocketRAID 640, RocketRAID 644 or any other High-Point RocketRAID card that uses the PLX chip wait for this issue to be resolved or look for an alternative, as in this day and age it’s simply unacceptable for a manufacturer to be releasing half-assed products that result in driver issues on the system (usually a production server) and suggesting that one simply leaves it as a solution. Particularly when they know about the issue but don’t make it well known to the users before purchasing. Unless I get a resolution and a driver I will be considering returning the 3 RocketRAID cards we bought to the supplier and will let them deal with the manufacturer. I’ll also be making sure people are well aware of the issues with the RocketRAID cards as people need to know this kind of stuff before purchasing. My suggestion at this stage (pending any further replies from HighPoint is look for a more professional RAID card manufacturer (preferably with an engineering department that knows how to design cards that don’t result in driver issues on the system).

ANOTHER UPDATE… After I replied back to RocketRAID and asked them to provide me with the driver I still havn’t heard anything back. That is, besides having poor english, their support is incompetent or non-existent. I have also contacted the guy from Tweak Town who did the review of the RocketRAID 640 card before it came out. He told me that he informed High-Point about the issue with the Base System Device driver, but they didn’t provide any adequate response, so he actually went and found the driver from some old ASUS motherboard that he had and that used that same chip one time and another time he went and got the driver out of the SDK on the PLX website. He also said that they no longer deal with High-Point because there were just too many issues with them, which he didn’t want to go into. I suspect there were at least communication issues and High-Point saying stuff like “don’t worry about a missing driver, it’s fine”, when it’s clearly NOT FINE! I will contact High-Point again to try to get the driver out of them. At present my recommendation remains… Steer clear of High-Point products if there are other alternatives from more reputable vendors even at a higher price.

FINAL UPDATE… I got sick and tired of waiting for the useless people in High-Point support and decided sort out the driver issue myself. I ended up downloading the PLX SDK from the PLX website, installing it, grabbing the appropriate files out of and making some minor changes to the driver inf file, so that the driver would install on 32-bit as well as amd64 and em64t architecture machines. I have then installed the driver on both Windows Server 32-bit and Windows Server 64-bit (both running on hardware with dual Xeon processors). I’m happy to report that the drivers worked a treat on both the 64-bit and 32-bit machines and I no longer have an issue with the Base System Device driver missing. In fact I now have it listed as PLX PCIe 8609 DMA Controller under Other Devices. If you want you could also hack up the inf file to call it something else like RocketRAID PLE8609 Controller if you want.

Here is the file you will need… Simply unzip it, find the Base System Device in your Device Manager, go to Update Drivers, say Browse and point it to the folder where you unzipped the files Enjoy and I’d love to hear comments from you on whether it worked.

RocketRAID 640 Base System Device Drivers

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook Book Review

admin — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:29:24 +0000

It seems like a few other people looking for information on Yii Framework, the folks at Packt Publishing have also stumbled across my blog and thought it was worth reading… As a result they have asked me to review their new book by Alexander Makarov called Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook. I only got the book today, so havn’t yet even had a chance to open it, but I already think it’s a great thing that the folks at Packt Publishing recognise the potential of Yii Framework and it’s quickly growing community and the need for good quality documentation and learning material. After all, as nice as the online cookbook is and as good as all the tutorials are, I personally usually prefer to pick-up a hardcopy (or softcopy) and go through the new topic in a more structured way with someone who has experience on the particular topic guiding me through.

My experience with the last Yii Framework book by Packt wasn’t that great as I found that it focused too much on methodology of agile programmign with too much focus on testing instead of a more in-depth discussion of Yii Framework features, but this book looks a lot more promising. Also, I’ve asked Packt Publishing to send me the equivalent books on Zend and CodeIgniter so that in the spirit of comparison (which is what folk are usually looking for) I can not just review the book but also compare the books side-by-side to pass some judgement on the quality of the latest books available for each of these frameworks (with which I’m quite familiar without the need for the books already). One initial observation already is that the Codeigniter book is a bit outdated as CI has moved on to release 2.0 now with quite a few changes including ditching PHP4 support.

Anyways, stay tuned for the full book review, which will appear on this same URL, so feel free to link to it, so that by the time the review is up, folks will be able to easily find it.

Also, you can Buy Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook Book by following the link to the Packt Publishing website and if you’d like a sneak peak here’s free chapter on Extending Yii Framework

AsteriskNOW vs Trixbox vs Elastix

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 05:06:16 +0000

Anyone who looks to install an Asterisk based PBX will at some stage probably ask themselves as to what package they should go with as it just doesn’t make sense to install everything manually unless you’re super-hardcore. Some research reveals there are qute a few options being: AsteriskNOW, Trixbox, Elastix, PBX In A Flash (PIAF) and a few other small less popular releases. Now deciding between which one to install is not that easy and requires a bit of research, unless of course you have come across this blog post because I’ve done the research and now sharing it with you. One of the problems with doing the research is that much of the information out there is quite outdated and can give you the wrong impression of what you should go for. I’ll go through each of the distributions and then give a conclusion.

AsteriskNOW 1.7.1 (at the time of writing)

AsteriskNOW is distrubution created and supported by Digium, the company behind Asterisk. Although some older versions were not based on CentOS, version 1.7.1 is based on CentOS 5 so you get all the benefits of CentOS, being one of the widest used linux distributions that just works with plenty of info around if you need to do something with it. One the one ISO disk that you download you have the option of what to install. You can install v1.4 or v 1.6 of Asterisk and you can choose to either install the barebones installation OR the installation with a front-end management interface being either FreePBX or AsteriskGUI. Personally, because I prefer to modify the config files directly without a GUI and because my configuration is more complex than either FreePBX or AsteriskGUI can support I chose to install the basic version of 1.6 wihout either FreePBX or AsteriskGUI. This is not something I could coose to do with either Trixbox or the others (not sure abotu PIAF). The installation only took like 5-10 minutes and was as smooth as you could dream of. So if you don’t or need a GUI then AsteriskNOW would certainly be the package you choose. Also, if you do want a GUI but don’t want to install all kinds of extra stuff or if you want to have a GUI but still make quite a few changes to the files directly then the installation option with AsteriskGUI could be the way to go for you. This is what I did initially before I got so comfortable with the asterisk config files that I found the GUI to be more annoying and constraining than anything else. The one downside I found to AsteriskNOW is that there is very little in terms of documentation, but then again you don’t really need any as such. Also another thing to note which I personally think is an advantage is that you only get the OS, Asterisk and the GUI when you install AsteriskNOW. There is no other rubbish like vTiger or some other CRM and other crap. A PBX is a critical part of any business infrastructure and personally I don’ t feel you should have all other kinds of rubbish installed on your PBX that is not directly to do with the PBX itself. Chance are your business already has a CRM system so you don’t need to install and run one on the PBX itself. And even if you do need a CRM system or some other stuff you should install it on an Application Server, not on your PBX. If you don’t run all kinds of rubbish on your PBX you can get away with a pretty light spec in terms of hardware and let the PBX do it’s job of being a PBX and not an application server. If you do want to install other rubbish on your PBX despite best practices then you can but at least you’re not forced to!

Trixbox

With Trixbox the only option you get is a pre-packaged solution with FreePBX and all kinds of other rubbish pre-installed. The operating system is also CentOS. The setup is nice and simple as well, but perhaps is not as nice as with AsteriskNOW. If you know you’re going to be running your PBX with FreePBX (which uses an intermediary mysql database to store the config before writing it out to the config files, unlike AsteriskGUI which just reads in and modifies the config files) then Trixbox is an option for you. I personally found that Trixbox had nothing to offer me over and above AsteriskNOW perhaps with the exception of better documentation and a larger community, but the reality is that most of that is FreePBX anyway. Another drawback of Trixbox is the fact that you don’t have Digium behind it so when new versions of Asterisk come out they don’t get bundled anywhere near as quickly with Trixbox as they do with AsteriskNOW. Trixbox made sense when AsteriskNOW didn’t exist or was in it’s infancy, but these days it doesn’t have all the benefits they it once did.

Elastix

Elastix is a similar beast to Trixbox. It comes with lots and lots of rubbish pre-installed and is more of a do-everything distribution of an application server of which the PBX is only one part

PBX In a Flash (PIAF)

I can’t say I’ve looked much into PIAF but I really don’t see the reason for going with it when you have Asterisk NOW and Trixbox as available options. PIAF doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as popular as the other 3 either.

Hope all of this helps you choose the right Asterisk distribution for you.