New updates coming

November 27th, 2011

Hard to believe I have not posted anything in over a year. Lots going on in life that have not provided me with time to update this blog on a regular basis. I hope to post more frequently, even in a shorter fashion. I do have some good articles in the works, including Kaltura CE install scripts and kickstart files that will work with CentOS 5.7. Stay tuned!!

Top Gear USA WTF?

November 23rd, 2010



My family and I have been a long standing Top Gear UK fan since day 1. My wife and two daughters (7 and 17) watch it religiously. We were quite excited to try the USA version of the show. What a drag and complete waste of time that was. Let me explain.

The UK version stars Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May and “The Stig”. It mixes humor and cars that everyone would and can enjoy.

The US version stars Tanner Foust, Adam Ferrara (John Boy Walton), Rutledge Wood (Steve Wozniak) and “The Stig”. It mixes just about nothing entertaining and cars that no one is ever going to enjoy.

Watching the first episode was about as entertaining as a Jeremy Clarkson cooking show. Actually, I have seen Jeremy cook on TV and that was more entertaining!! The USA version of Top Gear misses everything that makes the UK version awesome. The in your face attitude of the Brits is sorely missed in the US version.

The cast of the US version…. who in the heck did the casting? Tanner is by far the best host, but he has had quite a few years behind the camera. But the other two d’bags, Adam Ferrara (John Boy Walton), Rutledge Wood (Steve Wozniak), are a waste of air space!! I don’t think they even know how to drive a car, let alone host a car show. Get rid of John Boy and The Woz and replace them with someone with a more in your face nature. I say get Paul Tracy, with his take no prisoners attitude, he would be a perfect fit and host. He already has a history with Tanner and we all know he is already “The Stig”. Just make Paul pull double duty. This show was written for my third host, Jay Leno. If NBC could ever get someone to replace him. If not Jay Leno then get anyone, and I mean anyone, with a spec of talent. How about Steve Buscemi, he is better looking then John-boy and The Woz and has a hell of a lot more talent. He would be a perfect 3rd host.

I think there is a good future for Top Gear USA, if they can get the kinks worked out. However in its present form, it is about as entertaining as a crushed testicle!!

Help Find Kyron

June 10th, 2010

Please take a look at this and call the number (503) 261 2847 with any information.

trixbox 2.8.0.4 xen image available on xenforge

May 24th, 2010

I finally put together a xen image for trixbox 2.8.0.4 This is fully updated and is current as of today, 5-24-2010. The xen image for trixbox and others can be downloaded from XenForge.org here I have not tested this image that thoroughly.

Thank you,
Engineer Tim

reapercrew.com LIVE!!

February 23rd, 2010

Decided to create another new site. This one is loosely based off of the hit show Sons of Anarchy. reapercrew.com
it is a work in progress, but it was fun to put together and gave me many ideas of other sites. I hope people enjoy it, love it or hate it post something on the site.

Engineer Tim

Kaltura CE install on CentOS 5.4

January 14th, 2010

I wanted to share this info on how to install the KalturaCE media server on CentOS. I saw that a lot of people were having issues getting it to work. Follow along, it is pretty easy to do. This should be a cut and paste article. I did this install in Xen with 32bit. I have not tried this in a 64bit environment yet. It should work the same, except the part where you have to get some php rpms below.

Ensure that your system is currently up to date.

I like always do my installing from /home/install/ Feel free to choose any directory you want to store your software in.

mkdir -p /home/install/rpms/
cd /home/install/rpms/

We need to install the EPEL and rem repos.

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
rpm -Uvh *.rpm

Now we need to install some needed software, we also enable the remi repo.

yum install memcached httpd mysql mysql-server gmp libedit t1lib sqlite2 libXpm libXmu libXaw --enablerepo=remi

We need to grab the older php-5.2.10 rpms from remi with wget. These are the i386 rpms. The path for x86_64 is going to be different. This path might work if you are wanting 64bit.

http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/x86_64/

wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/i386/php-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/i386/php-cli-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/i386/php-common-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/i386/php-gd-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/i386/php-mysql-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/i386/php-pdo-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/i386/php-pecl-memcache-3.0.4-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/olds/i386/php-pecl-memcached-0.2.0-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm

Now we need to install the rpms we just grabbed. Don’t install the php-pecl-memcache* ones yet. These will be done at a later step.

rpm -ivh php-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm php-cli-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm php-common-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm php-gd-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm php-mysql-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm php-pdo-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm

We need to install some more pre-reqs for memcache stuff.

yum install php-pear libmemcached --enablerepo=remi

Now we get to install the last 2 rpms for php-pecl-memcache

rpm -ivh php-pecl-memcache*

Need to double check that short_open_tag is enabled for PHP. This is done in the /etc/php.ini

short_open_tag = On

Edit /etc/httpd/con/httpd.conf

Find AllowOverride for the directory /var/www/html/
Change it from
AllowOverride None
to
AllowOverride All

Now lets start up the services.

service memcached start
service mysqld start
service httpd start

Now comes the MySQL stuff. We need to setup the database we want to use for kaltura. You can change the following two lines to match what you want to use. I use kaltura as the database and the name, and katura123 as the password. Again, these can be set to whatever you want to use. These will need to be known when you go into the kalturaCE installer.

echo "create database kaltura;" | mysql

It is recommended that you create a user for the kaltura database. Below is a simple create, please adjust to your liking.

echo "grant all privileges on kaltura.* to kaltura@"localhost" identified by 'kaltura123';"  | mysql

Now we need to get the current kalturaCE code. The URL below will more than likely change, so make sure to goto the kaltura download site and copy the most current download URL.

 wget http://www.kaltura.org/sites/default/files/releases/kalturaCE_v1.5_linux386.tgz

Now we need to uncompress it and put it in the /var/www/html/ folder. The -C tells tar to uncompress into that folder.

tar -zxvf kalturaCE_v1.5_linux386.tgz -C /var/www/html/

Now open a browser and point it to

http://IP_OF_YOUR_SERVER/kalturaCE/install/

Where IP_OF_YOUR_SERVER is the actual IP address of your kalturaCE server.

Click begin installation

Should be all green check boxes.

Click on Continue

Database connections.
You will need to have the database, database user, and password. You should know this from a previous step.

Click Save and Continue.

Set the server url, if it is not already done so.

Set the Administrator Account with the info it asks for as well as email…

You should be done.

You can then goto

http://IP_OF_YOUR_SERVER/kalturaCE

You can get to the management interface using,

http://IP_OF_YOUR_SERVER/kalturaCE/index.php/kmc

Start adding your own media. :)

If there is enough interest in this, I can put up a Xen image on XenForge.org. I would also be willing to create a distribution that would install everything, again if enough interest is shown.

****update to libmemcached issue*****
If you get this
error: Failed dependencies:
libmemcached.so.2()(64bit) is needed by php-pecl-memcached-0.2.0-1.el5.remi.x86_64
libmemcached.so.2(libmemcached_2)(64bit) is needed by php-pecl-memcached-0.2.0-1.el5.remi.x86_64

or this
error: Failed dependencies:
libmemcached.so.2 is needed by php-pecl-memcached-0.2.0-1.el5.remi.i386
libmemcached.so.2(libmemcached_2) is needed by php-pecl-memcached-0.2.0-1.el5.remi.i386

For those of you having issues finding the libmemcached rpm, I think I found them. Damn remi removing rpms!! Try this link to a mirror of his rpms.
32-bit
wget http://cobbler.int-evry.fr/cblr/repo_mirror/el5-i386-remi/libmemcached-0.31-1.el5.remi.i386.rpm
file location http://cobbler.int-evry.fr/cblr/repo_mirror/el5-i386-remi/

64-bit
wget http://cobbler.int-evry.fr/cblr/repo_mirror/el5-x86_64-remi/libmemcached-0.31-1.el5.remi.x86_64.rpm
file location http://cobbler.int-evry.fr/cblr/repo_mirror/el5-x86_64-remi/

Hopefully this helps!!
Thank you,
Engineer Tim

Oyster Run 2009

October 8th, 2009

What a blast!!
Official Site

Teliax billing issues strike again!!

September 15th, 2009

I got wind of a billing issue with Teliax and Canvas Dreams on twitter. They had their phones shut off for a $.08 billing error. This interrupted their phones for 12 minutes and potentially cost them customers. How does something like this happen these days. Come on Teliax!! I dropped you for the same reason. Teliax has had the same billing problems for years. Learn from your mistakes and keep your customers going. I could understand if a customer was behind on their bill, but to shut them off for $.08 is appalling.

I would like to know if there is a top 10 or top 20 SIP providers list out there with reviews. Does anyone have links to something like that. I would like to see where Teliax stacks up on such a list.

Engineer Tim

Rainforest Run (Forks Wa.)

August 17th, 2009

Just got back from the Rainforest Run. What a ride. I also wanted to thank Bob and his crew at Cycle Camp for allowing the “New Canadians” or “Canoregons” to stay. If you are ever in the area and on a bike, you have to stop in at Cycle Camp. The atmosphere is friendly, we truly felt at home. You also have to check out the Hoh Rain Forest and hit some of the trails. We took the Hall of Moss trail and it was amazing to see all the colors and shapes hanging from the trees. A trip up there would not be complete without a stop in to Forks, home of the Twilight books, so I am told by my 15 year old daughter who planned the trip. You will see signs everywhere for Twilight in the town as well as vampire boundaries and treaty lines.

Here are some pics for your pleasure.

Engineer Tim

asterisk bfd (brute force detection) rules for sip and iax

July 21st, 2009

Edit: I have uploaded a .tar file of the rules that can be downloaded.
rules.tar

Thank you to a couple users who pointed out that my bfd rules were a little less than perfect. They worked great for me on a older version of bfd, but I believe a update to the bfd application caused them to stop working. Either way, new rules have been created.

This one is for SIP wrong passwords. Save this as asterisksip

# failed logins from a single address before ban
# uncomment to override conf.bfd trig value
TRIG="5"

# file must exist for rule to be active
REQ="/usr/sbin/asterisk"

if [ -f "$REQ" ]
then
LP="/var/log/asterisk/full"
TLOG_TF="asterisk.sip"
TMP="/usr/local/bfd/tmp"

## ASTERISK: SIP wrong password
ARG_VAL=`$TLOG_PATH $LP $TLOG_TF | grep -i "wrong password" | grep chan_sip | awk '{NF=NF-3} {print $NF}'| tr -d '\'\' `
fi

This rule is for wrong or non existent extension. Save this as asterisksip2

# failed logins from a single address before ban
# uncomment to override conf.bfd trig value
TRIG="5"

# file must exist for rule to be active
REQ="/usr/sbin/asterisk"

if [ -f "$REQ" ]
then
LP="/var/log/asterisk/full"
TLOG_TF="asterisk.sip2"
TMP="/usr/local/bfd/tmp"

## ASTERISK: SIP no extension
ARG_VAL=`$TLOG_PATH $LP $TLOG_TF | grep -i "No matching peer found" | grep chan_sip | awk '{NF=NF-5} {print $NF}'| tr -d '\'\' `
fi

This rule is for IAX. Save this as asteriskiax.

# failed logins from a single address before ban
# uncomment to override conf.bfd trig value

TRIG="5"
# file must exist for rule to be active
REQ="/usr/sbin/asterisk"


if [ -f "$REQ" ]
then
LP="/var/log/asterisk/full"
TLOG_TF="asterisk.iax"
TMP="/usr/local/bfd/tmp"

## ASTERISK: IAX2 auth failed

ARG_VAL=`$TLOG_PATH $LP $TLOG_TF | grep -i "failed MD5 authentication" | grep chan_iax2 | awk '{NF=NF-8} {print $NF}'`
fi

Special thanks goes to Ioan Indreias and Gonzalo Gonzalez.
If it looks like the code is missing, try to highlight it all and copy/paste it into a text document. Hopefully this will show the entire rule without issue.
Make sure these rules are stored in /usr/local/bfd/rules/ Then rerun bfd with bfd -q and see if the new rules are in place by checking for the files in /usr/local/bfd/tmp/ .

Thank you,
Engineer Tim