I was working on an issue being experienced by someone remotely attached to my asterisk machine, and found an abnormality.
I use a realtime implementation to allow for easy addition of users and to have the data I want in MySQL (makes it easier to monitor activity in CDR, etc). The problem recently was as a [...]

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Looking into the docs for Asterisk 1.6.0 for a solution to a NAT issue, you can find that asterisk reinvite has improved significantly in the later versions.
Previously, you had to turn it off for peers stuck behind NAT, this is resolved in newer versions of Asterisk which attempt to determine if a peer is behind [...]

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Recently, I have been toying with Asterisk 1.6.0 to work in some new internal features that I want to leverage.
One of the key features I took advantage of is the context option for each SIP peer. It is possible to exclude one group of users from calling another group by using contexts.
Let’s say I want [...]

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After my last post, I attended the interview, and have remained on the edge of my seat waiting for a result.
Then, after a short week wait, a response. It’s not a disappointing reply, but it’s not successful just yet.
I made the short list for the second round of interviews, which being very soon now, to [...]

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Recently I’ve put a lot of progress into completing my studies for the course I’m studying (Diploma in IT - Sys Admin).
Much of the items are as I described several months ago, mindless paperwork describing something that you have done countless times already - but of course, in this day and age, certification is not [...]

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I don’t find the end of a day providing client support rewarding. It’s actually quiet tiresome. It’s more fun providing support than it is assisting with product selection and sales enquiries, but client support doesn’t really leave one feeling the raw feeling of acheivement at the end of a day.
I have just completed an accounting [...]

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I’m currently developping an application, to allow for fast import of data, which is going to stem from a larger project to allow for better online service delivery.
The accounting application used is one of the known brands of accounting applications - there’s only two in Aus, and it’s not MYOB.
The company who develops or on-sells [...]

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Today I was fixing a credit card gateway issue with someones website.
What seemed to be the case was that a cart system was purchased, and just on the fly someone decided to break away one of the existing payment modules and slap something together which would work with eWay.
The system was passed back to them [...]

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One of the reasons I can see spammers continually trying to connect to a server, is because they get rejected quickly, and have more than one bot to go and retry.
I think the better solution to this issue (and issues related to SMTP auth attacks, and 550 errors), are having an error counter in the [...]

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At the end of last year, I concluded that I would want my Diploma in IT, and was certain to acheive that.
I enrolled into the course then, and have found that I have a total of 800 hours (in TAFE terms) of study to complete to get my Diploma in IT.
The hours are a little [...]

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We took the car to the auto electrician today, and low and behold, the parts recycler gave us the wrong dang size electric window mechanism.
So, tomorrow is going to be spent tracking down the right part, and then seeing if they can supply, if not, venturing a little further south to find one!
The auto electrician [...]

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I host a trivia room (well, two) on an IRC network, it gets a few visitors, and has a host of regulars and is a great room.
I don’t have much involvement in it, it’s just running there, my partner does more with it then I do.
The trivia room runs off a MySQL database (primarily due [...]

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Google Analytics is a great Google service (from the company of “Do No Evil”), but, how useful is it really?
They don’t seem to have much in the way of Adwords integration with Analytics for testing a complete visit from click on search engine through to complete sale, and even then, they don’t report adequately on [...]

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I’m amazed when I see this sort of items appear in front of me.
Some one paying thousands of dollars for a ‘web site’ and getting what amounts to automatically generated rubbish, or unplanned scripting errors and the like.
The business today I spoke to had an issue with a website they paid $3,500 for, and over [...]

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I fixed my virtual hard drive . Now has a brillant (yet imaginary) 116GB of Free Space. Fantastic.
The fix was to simply run resize2fs with it mounted in read/write mode, I kept assuming it’d need them not mounted, so was trying to resize it, when it wasn’t existing.
I got some sweet speeds on the Exetel [...]

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There are 3 ways to do things.
Homer: The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way.
Bart: Isn’t that just the wrong way, but faster.
Homer: Yes.
I’m reminded of that episode of The Simpsons each time I hear of someone trying to do something where something else is already available to do the task at [...]

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Virtual Machines are a great way at hosting multiple services, and keeping your overall costs low.
Computers have become very much so beefed up that the grunt they have spends a lot of time idle, and only peak loads when you are doing intensive tasks, even then, they generally keep within 50% of the processors full [...]

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There’s a few ways to do things.
The first is the right way, the second is the wrong way, and the third, is perhaps a combination of both in a more interesting combination.
When the right way doesn’t (or can’t) work, and the wrong way is not an option, you then need to figure out a way [...]

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I spent a bit of today RAIDing through the internets and digging for RAID info.
Specifically what I want to do is upgrade the physical disks on my RAID array.
Unfortunately, I can only have 2 physical disks, and both are used by my RAID setup, which mirrors data.
So I sorted through some Google posts on RAID. [...]

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That was a question put to me today. Well not exactly that, but a version of it.
I got thinking.
Do I code simply because its ’something to do’? Nah. Not really. There’s plenty of other stuff I could do. Locally, I could do more and earn more, surely.
So it’s not “something to do”.
Maybe it’s because I [...]

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I decided it was time to stop writing out 5 lines or more per MySQL query and instead, create a function to encapsulate that query, and run some tests on the result to determine a result to be returned back.
The query is multi purpose, just like the original mysql_query. But, instead of, after the query, [...]

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Seeing the site run more today, has revealed that the accuracy of the monitoring is increasing considerably, to the extent that outages are at new lows.
The outage log shows that in the last 24 hours, there have been just 3 outages in total, with the most notable being VitalTel, who went down at 9am today, [...]

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The excellent part of having identical (or near identical) hardware is when something cops a nice drink of Sprite, you can simply swap the components over, and power it up and your good to go again.
You can’t generally do that when swapping between say an Intel 865PE chipset, and an Intel P35 chipset, simply because [...]

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Unfortunately (and its very unfortunate), the update I planned to release tonight isn’t going to go ahead as planned due to an issue with a particular provider.
The particular provider issue wasn’t determined until just recently, but has been fixed.
The reason for the delay? Well, I was investigating that issue and the time it took to [...]

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Recently, we had a item of hardware fail in my internal server (my in house server).
Essentially that was just my older 2 year old machine, which unfortunately, had an accident. It wasn’t the servers fault however.
Unfortunately, a Pop Top bottle filled with a bit of Sprite came into contact with the Zalman fan after being [...]

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I’ve been in the process of setting up a Windows Hosting setup. The idea here is that I can host a few sites of people I deal with seperately so that they aren’t affected by NetLogistics email issues and so forth that seem to infest their windows hosting operations using Plesk.
I’m not sure whether Plesk [...]

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I’ve finally been able to set up my new Windows server, and it runs fantastically.
I’ve actually not done much in the way of Windows in a hosting setup when it comes to establishing DNS, and POP3 and SMTP.
I’m amazed at how simple it is to setup DNS, Mail and Websites under windows.
I mostly focused on [...]

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It’s not every so often you go shopping for higher priced items, such as new servers, or cars, but well, both of our new purchases are both coming together at around the same time!
1. A new machine
I’ve got myself my new machine up and running in the last 2 weeks, and I’m still loving it!
It [...]

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At long last, Skype returned back to normal operation today, and has been stable.
Why on earth it took so long is a question that only the developers could answer, or why on earth the issue came up to start with after a long period of reliability, and no significant changes occurring that are obvious to [...]

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I’ve finally done the big move.
It took 2 weeks of on again, off again configuration, installation, and migration, but at last, I’ve migrated to my new system!
Hardware:
* CPU: Intel E6750 CPU (Dual Core 2.66Ghz / 1333 FSB / 4MB Cache)
It has some great grunt! I don’t remember seeing Windows take 10 seconds to boot. [...]

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