My one pain point was state flapping. A service can go unresponsive for a fraction of a second under heavy load and come back right again. All to frequently my inbox would get swamped with problem…ok…problem…ok….problem…ok messages. By the time I’d log in everything had settled down. It’s not a perfect situation, but doesn’t warrant getting out of bed to repair either. Nagios has a flapping detection function but Zabbix doesn’t.

What I’ve found is that the AVG function can be used to average the status values (“1″ or “0″) over a given period and only trigger an alert if it drops below the alert value. For example

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(30)}<1

will only trigger a second alert if the web server stays responsive for at least 30 seconds between outages. Also

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(30)}=0

Will only trigger an alert if the service stays down for more than 30 seconds at a time. Further you can combine the two in

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(60)}<0.5

to only trigger an alert if the service stays down for more than 30 seconds and only trigger an OK if it stays back up for 30 seconds.

Because my current work style is very fluid, where I hop between my office and home PCs, a laptop, a netbook and an iPhone, it made sense to try and keep my data where I could access it regardless of device. I basically have 3 categories of data: email, my web browser environment (bookmarks, stored passwords, history) and unstructured data (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, JPEGs etc. files). I use a few cloud based services to supplement these, but more on them another time.

Documents: I’m fairly neat when it comes to organising data on my laptop. Everything is in the My Documents folder. I used to use Beyond Compare to manually sync my desktop and laptop but for the last while I’ve been using Microsoft Live Mesh Beta to keep everything in sync automatically. A change or addition on any system ripples around to all the rest in real time. This means I can start work on a document in the office and seamlessly pick up where I left off when I get home without having to do a thing. On the new PC I just installed the Mesh client and left it to do it’s thing over night. It pulled my data from the online copy and placed it just where I’d expect it.

Email: POP is for noobs; IMAP is king. Seeing as Google are generous enough to give away 7GB+ of email storage I’d be a fool not to use it. A few years ago (pretty much as soon as it was available) I created an @garypigott.net Google Apps account and shoved all my email up there. Right now there are 118,527 emails, occupying 2298MB of space, and vitally, it’s completely searchable in exactly the same way you’d search the web using Google. I access exactly the same data using Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, and the iPhone mail client.

Web Browser Environment: My browser of choice is Firefox,  which is handy a) because it’s multi-platform and b) because of Weave. Weave is an add-on that moves your bookmarks, history and passwords into the cloud. You can install the add-on on each of your computers, regardless of OS and everything is kept in sync. Weave is open source, so surely some enterprising and generous developer out there will churn out a Weave add-on for IE, Opera and Safari…

I dug out my old order confirmation email and clicked on the link to Macromedia’s web store. I got redirected to the Adobe store login, where my old Macromedia login worked, and could go straight to my order history and not only re-download my purchase 4 years later, I could also view my license key! If only all online stored operated this way I’d shop online for software more often.

He (or his advisors) is exhibiting a strange naïveté about the ways of internet business for someone so successful in other areas. Geography is immaterial and operating costs are minimal so there’s lots of competition for eyeballs and wallets. Your business either needs to be either new, better or cheaper; and preferably at least two of the three. Bendunne.ie or his previous attempt tenderme.ie (also launched in the same way) is none of these.

Adverts.ie, an offshoot of boards.ie, crucially realise that the buyers don’t come unless there’s a large volume of sellers. The only way to get a large volume of sellers is if you have a large volume of buyers (like eBay), or you make it cheap enough that they’ll list there products on the off chance… Crucially by charging a fee bendunne.com are reducing the volume of sellers as who’s going to pay for a listing on a site with no track record? Adverts.ie makes it’s money by embedding Google AdWords advertising in the listings and allows anyone to list for free. They’re listing 1000+ items each day and generating serious traffic, and traffic = money.

title Ubuntu
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

This has the effect of kicking off the bootloader on /dev/sda3 (i.e. the Ubuntu one) when selected, booting Ubuntu!

It’s an old joke, but frequently true. The Irish Internet Association are electing a new board at the moment and each of the nominees get a quick paragraph about themselves on the site. There are twelve nominees but only Trinity College alumni Clare Dillon and Catrina Sheridan see fit to tell everyone about their degrees and diplomas.

go play

Aaaagggghhh

Why is it that VMware hide their VMware server downloads behind a password?

Like many I run headless Linux servers without a GUI installed. I’d like to be able to download VMware Server (700MB+) using wget via an SSH session, but I can’t because you need to log in first, and it’s not a vanilla HTTP login that I can work through wget either! I’m expected to log into the site on my desktop, download the installer and then SFTP it up to the Linux box. That would be OK if the server was on the same LAN, but it’s in a data centre and I’m on the end of an ADSL line with a 672Kbps upload. Surely controlling access to the serial numbers is good enough as the installer is useless without it. Still, at least I could use w3m in the end.

Version 1 had a web UI for day to day management (starting & stopping VMs, tweaking networks etc.) and a separate Windows application for console access. VMware tried to make an all powerful web UI for version 2, and integrated the console functionality.

There must have been a backlash during the beta, because they’ve included VMware Infrastructure Client at the last minute. It leads to an odd division of capabilities. On the VMware Infrastructure Client I can create a new VM or import an appliance, but I can’t open an existing VM. On the Web UI I can create a new VM or open an existing one, but I can’t import an appliance.

What’s happened is that in version 1 you had a web UI for management and a console application for maintenance. Now both functions are split between interfaces, which is a pain in the rear.

Clouds are cool ‘n all, but what ever happened to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid!). Simple architectures go wrong in simple ways which are easy to understand and quick to fix. The team in MediaMax obviously didn’t fully understand what they needed to do to safely move all their customer’s data over, and everyone is out of a job as a result.

There are two elements to online security: data encryption and identity verification. If your data encryption is good enough it doesn’t matter who gets hold of your data. Being sure you’re sending the data to the right server adds to the security. Online backup typically deploys two layers of encryption: the data is encrypted using a key, and then the data is transmitted through an SSL tunnel that encrypts everything again. The SSL tunnel uses a digital certificate to verify the server is who it says it is. These certificates are issued by a trusted source, (Thawte, Verisign, Geotrust etc.) and provide the sender with a key to encrypt the traffic (the public key). Data encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with a matching private key, and vice-versa. Only the owner of the certificate has the private key.

Software on the user’s end should throw up a big fat warning if the certificate isn’t issued by one of these trusted sources. Unlike Carbonite and Mozy, Ahsay doesn’t throw up a warning and just sends the data anyway. A determined individual can create their own certificate and keys and trick your PC into mis-routing your backup to their server (DNS cache poisoning is easier than you think). This gets them through the first layer; the SSL tunnel. They then have access to the username and password (which are transmitted unencrypted, because the SSL tunnel should be secure enough). This in itself isn’t a huge deal except for one thing…… To make things simple Ahsay’s default behaviour is to use the password as the data encryption key! They can then log in to your account and download all your data and decrypt it with your key. Carbonite & Mozy also use the same password/key shortcut but at least Mozy throws up a warning and Carbonite refuses to go any further if the key isn’t genuine.

I decided to use him as a guinea pig for Restore, and open source client-server disk backup platform. He has a reasonably powerful server in the office (I bought it for him) and a web hosting account with 10GB of space (also thanks to me). I wanted to set it up so it would backup the desktops to disk on the server, which I’d then rsync off-site. I’ve used VMware Server a lot, so the plan was to take Restore’s “VMware Appliance”, drop it on the server as a totally self contained virtual server, spend a 1/2 hour configuring it and I could go back to the day job.

It didn’t work out that way. The VM was created using VMware Workstation 6, whose VMs are incompatible with VMware Server 1.X. All they needed to do was click “VM” > “Upgrade or Change Hardware” before publishing the VM and everything would be fine. Now my 30 minute favour for a friend will balloon into a 3 hour job because I need to install it the old fashioned way. Grrrr!

SiliconRepublic.com: Irish Stock Exchange firms not tracking web visitors

While push IMAP worked perfectly fine with our previous service, it’s a bit flaky on Gmail. We tend to see random disconnections without warning and the phone’s “reconnect every X minutes” function seems to be a bit of a crock and isn’t fixing it……

Outsourcing to a managed service provider is the only thing that makes sense if you’re small and have these functionality requirements. I could sign up with someone like Intermedia on a syndicated Exchange server for $125/month. ActiveSync (mobile device synchronisation) is another $2.95/inbox/month, and there’s loads more optional, but essential extras, like additional storage. Basically at the end of it you’re looking at €150/inbox/year, which is a big improvement, especially when it means that I’ve no hardware to manage, and no housekeeping to do.

Google have had their Google Apps for Domains suite out for a year or so now. You get Gmail with your own domain name instead of @gmail.com, a calendar app, a basic browser based word processor, presentation & spreadsheet app that allows multiple users update the same file simultaneously, and a Wiki. We started using it informally when they launched the “Team Edition”, that gave you everything but Gmail, so you didn’t have to move away from your email provider. The Premier Edition gives you 25GB inboxes for $50/inbox/year, and the standard edition, with conventional Gmail adverts and a 6GB inbox is free!

We went with Google and threw the switch last Tuesday and it’s bedding in nicely. Over the past week though a couple of “wouldn’t it be nice if…” things have come up:

• Full contact information, and not just name & email address would be good.
• Proper contact sharing would be nice. Contacts are shared, but only in as much as the auto-complete function can pull addresses from other employee’s address books when you’re composing an email on gmail.com.
• The ability to sync contacts with Outlook and mobile devices would be a huge step forward.

RSS was a lifesaver for me. I went out and bought FeedDemon and for a time I was happy. It would fetch all the headlines for me and display them in a list. I could click on the ones that interested me and they’d open up in the built-in browser, and I could mark everything else as read.

A short while I bought a laptop wanted to read my feeds there too. Fortunately FeedDemon had an answer. As well as using an internal database to store your list of feeds and what was read and unread, it could connect to Bloglines, a web based feed reader. Now I could read my feeds using a web browser and on my desktop and laptop PCs where I had FeedDemon installed. It wasn’t 100% perfect. Adding feeds was clunky, and it had issues if more than one location was accessing the data simultaneously (i.e. if I forgot to close FeedDemon on my desktop PC when I was on the road), but it was better than nothing.

Then Google Reader came along. It was entirely web based, and had decent hotkey support, so I could read stuff almost as quickly as with FeedDemon, and a lot faster than the Bloglines clunky interface. It was also 100% bulletproof. Being an AJAX application, activity was communicated back to the server in real time, rather than at the end of the session, so I never had to mark the same headline read twice. I preferred FeedDemon’s way of displaying feeds, where each feed had it’s own folder, and it was easy to go back to read headlines for review, but Google was overall an improvement, but still slower than FeedDemon.

FeedDemon have since been bought by NewsGator, who are another web based feed reader service in the same mould as Bloglines and Google Reader. The software can pull it’s subscribed feeds and read article data from your NewsGator account, so you can install it anywhere and view the same feeds, and what’s marked as read in one location gets marked as read everywhere, and more importantly, it does this reliably, unlike Bloglines. It’ll do nicely for the moment…..

Nick Bradbury: Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader?

Three things have ben brewing over the last few years, and have now formed a perfect storm. 1. You no longer need a big expensive studio to record music. You can do it on a laptop with the right software. 2. Internet distribution has opened another route to market for the bands to get their music into the hands (well onto the iPods anyway) of their fans and form closer relationships. 3. New products, such as phone ringtones, lucrative stadium concert tours and product endorsements have eclipsed the CD as the principal source of income for the band.

I no longer need a large dedicated studio to record music. I would still need talent behind the mixing desk, but that mixing desk is now an Apple Mac running GarageBand. A €2,000 laptop with €100 of software is all you need to make your masterpiece.

Back in the day a band would play local gigs and build up a fan base in the hope of being spotted by a music publisher. They’d get a “deal” and make some money. If you weren’t spotted a life of playing in a wedding band awaited. Now a band in outer Mongolia with 5,000+ MySpace friends could easily get noticed and signed by an A&R rep in a Los Angeles.

But not getting signed by a major label is not the end of the world. A small band can record their album on their MacBook, promote it on their MySpace page and sell it on one of a hundred websites dedicated to selling music unsigned bands online and you’re making money. The costs of entry into mass distribution are now so low that the bands can finance it themselves. All it takes is a computer and some low end software to manufacture it. Because the website sales process is totally automatic they can afford to charge a % of the sale, rather than look for up-front money. Once you’re up and running you might even be able to get your music offered on iTunes, where you’re mixing it with the big boys.

The other thing that has happened is the realisation that there are other ways for musicians to make money. Nobody under thirty has a ringtone on their phone that was there when they bought it. Everyone now has either an amusing sound clip, or a 15 second clip of their favourite chart hit which they’ve paid €3+ for. You can now buy video ringtones, where your phone display plays the music video at the same time.

At the height of his fame Michael Jackson made a staggering amount of money endorsing Pepsi, but it now there are specialist brand agencies pairing up products with stars. Everyone of note is endorsing cars, drinks, shoes. The Police made $142,000,000 touring this year. They haven’t released music in two decades and they still raked in $3m for a nights work! I even paid my €138, plus a €35 t-shirt when they came to Dublin!

Most of these new, non CD related activities do not require the help of a record label to pull off. In fact unless they all work in concert (i.e. the ringtone being in place when the single is released, along with web promotion, and a tour ready to go…), the band’s income will suffer. In recognition of this Madonna has famously signed a “360 degree” contract. A single company will manage all her activities for the next 10 years across CDs, touring, TV, movies, ringtones etc., and vitally, this company isn’t her old record label, who she left after 25 years, it’s a concert promoter.

The Year The Industry Broke – News Story | Music, Celebrity, Artist News | MTV News

It would be nice to have a body representing native industry for a change. The only companies in this industry getting any mind share from government are the foreign ones, who may provide lots of jobs and pay lots of taxes, but they take their profits home at the end of the day.

Ireland Inc. Let’s just do it!

3 Skypephone FAQ

As long as you top up with €20 a month, even the data transmission is free. In theory you could use up the €20 on Irish mobile calls (where 3 are about the same price as SkypeOut) and use SkypeOut for everything else, thereby getting very close to the absolute cheapest call rates anywhere….. on a mobile!

It seems that 3′s Skype client is actually a bit of a cheat though. These guys say that the software actually makes a standard local voice call, and it’s only at a central hub that the call gets routed over the Internet/Skype network. It makes sense, seeing as the Skype clone (IM+) that actually does a full Skype implementation has fairly major lag, due to the weedy CPUs in most smartphones.

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Testing out the 3 SkypePhone

Backups should be automatic. If a human has to do something to ensure your backups happen, then once and a while that human will do it wrong, so your backups are not 100% reliable.

Backups should be redundant. There’s no point doing a backup to a local disk, because it’s possible that the event that causes you to lose your data will cause you to lose your backup. he uses the example of Francis Ford Coppola, who had his laptop stolen earlier this year. Much of the data was irreplaceable, including a script for the movie he was about to start work on. He had a backup alright, but it was a USB hard disk. the thief stole the disk at the same time. A similar scenario I came across before was the company who instructed their sales reps to backup their laptops to CD-Rs. Unfortunately the reps had a habit of storing the backup discs in the laptop case….

Backups should be restorable. It’s an obvious one, but often overlooked. People diligently follow their backup procedure, but fail to ensure it actually works. With tapes this means frequent test restores, but tapes by their nature have a finite lifespan. The verification puts more wear on the tape and can damage the data while it’s being verified. Basically, even after you verify the tape you’re never certain that the act of verification didn’t damage the backup, so you need to verify it again, and again, and again…….

To be honest, it makes me feel a bit warmer in side that the solution my company offers ticks all the boxes….. Our online backup platform is a pure software solution, so there’s nothing to interact with. It just works in the background, and is monitored by the service provider, so it ticks the automatic box. Data is immediately transferred off-site over the Internet, so a theft or natural disaster isn’t going to take out your server and ours at the same time, so that’s redundancy taken care of. Hard disks can take a lot more read and write cycles than tape, RAID and high end storage technologies prevent data loss, and built in continuous integrity checking mean that backup data is difficult to corrupt and is spotted and corrected immediately if it happens, so data on our service is always restorable.

The Pirate Backup System – Network World

From Web Worker Daily

We’ve started to grow, both in head count and sophistication, so now we’ve got a lot more documents to manage and a lot more people wanting to manage them. Our documents are usually authored by one person, but in many cases require review and comment by sales, marketing and technical people prior to release. What would be great is something that would manage the workflow, with notifications and audit tracking, and integrate with our website to make the final result available to clients, all in a controlled manner. We need a Document Management System. Our company likes to use open source software wherever possible, so my first port of call was Google, which gave me the following:

• xinco
• contineo
• KnowledgeTree
• Epiware
• Alfresco

Most of the above are Java applications, which I really don’t like, and I’ll cover in a later blog post. KnowledgeTree is written in PHP and ticks all the boxes. Alfresco is a Java app, but it’s functionality is too good to dismiss straight away. Let the testing begin!

A professional wouldn’t even take your phone call if he heard your budget was only a grand, and nobody in the business is going to spend the time it’d take to do it properly on spec. I’ve been paid more for nixers!

Don’t these people realise that web design these days is a serious profession what takes a lot of talent, knowledge and experience to do well? A good website is not something an enthusiastic amateur can pull off. Blanchardstown SC haven’t cottoned on to the fact that an amateur-looking website reflects poorly on the company it represents.

Link via Irish Retailers Don’t Get The Web

They’re also going to have phones with wi-fi, which, in conjunction with a free hotspot, will avoid one of the calls, instead connecting directly to their international SIP infrastructure.

Irish firm launches ‘global’ mobile phone | The Register

Marketing execs are seeing Second Life, the leading “virtual reality” world online, as a new way for large corporates, such as Dell, Cisco and IBM to have a “presence”. They spend big money to design, construct and maintain showrooms that people can wander through and virtually examine their wares. Many argue that the volume of people using SL right now isn’t great enough to make the numbers add up, but the companies are seeing this as a long term thing. IBM even use it as a private colaboration tool. Rather than travel to meet face to face, or use teleconfernecing, they’re meeting virtually in a SL boardroom. Cisco are even using it to hold new employee interviews!

The RSU are going to picket the IBM building in SL on the 25th September. They’re giving out strike kits that include avatars with slogans on their t-shirts, and placards. It should be interesting….

From New World Notes, via Boing Boing

Update: John has posted a comment to say that the 25th is just the start of the public campaign. The actual protest will be a flash mob event, at a future date. Sign up at uniglobalunion.org to find out when the flash mob will form.

There is an optional second argument that will connect to a specific connection, but if I force it to use this new remote database, all the other queries after it will connect to the wrong database, unless I modify them to force them to use the correct database. Aaaaaggghhh!

The logical option is to modify the other bits of code, but it’s already been tested and verified, so I’m not touching it if I can avoid it. What I’ll end up doing is separating this new function out into a separate PHP script, that I’ll call with CURL and pass the necessary data in the query string. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only way to integrate the new function without making radical changes.

I think I might put together a Google Maps mashup site, where visitors can maintain a list of petrol stations that stock E85 ethanol and maybe biodiesel. It’ll be quick to put together, I’ll learn something (I’ve not used Google’s AJAX APIs before) and not cost much to host, so very minimal Google Adwords should cover costs.

But why rely on the colo to do all the hard work? Some people put their own UPS equipment in their racks, but if the colo’s power dies, then the aircon goes too, so personally I’d have the servers drop suddenly rather than slowly cook themselves. Besides, the power to the meet me rooms will go too, so you’re going to be without connectivity in many cases too. Fires, floods and earthquakes happen, so all the power, server and storage resilience in the world won’t help with that.

What we’ve had to do is setup a remote warm site. If we lose Dublin totally we use BGP and a few cooperative bandwidth suppliers to route the traffic to our London site where we’ve got replicated data and servers powered on and waiting in the racks. In theory the changeover is instant, but in practice some customers could see up to 5 minutes of an outage, but most are back connecting again within 90 seconds. It’s not cheap to operate this way, but surely Craigslist & Co. have the cash.

Edit: This would have to happen on the very day that they issued a press release boasting about 2 years of 100% uptime for one of their major customers who closed their redundant site because they didn’t need it

I moved servers recently, so this site is now running on a web server VM in my attic. One thing I noticed afterwards was that I stopped receiving spam, or more accurately, Akismet stopped listing spam. Either the spammers forgot where my blog was, or it was borked. I don’t want to risk loosing valid comments due to a false positive, so I need to change my comment spam prevention method. Hmmm…

Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or IMAP servers running on Linux (my preference right now is Postfix & Dovecot running on Debian).

Now days you can’t easily get away with the DIY approach. E-mail is has to a large extent replaced voice & fax as the prime business communication method. We need to support huge inboxes, instant delivery of messages, access on the road, and near perfect uptime and backups. Most of these things can be achieved with any modern email setup, however some require a little help from outside.

Remote access is a major requirement these days. An executive feels naked on the golf course unless he’s got a Blackberry, a Treo, a Symbian or a Windows Mobile smartphone on his hip (mine is a Nokia e61). You’ve got three options if you want to get email onto these things:

1. Scheduled checking of a POP/IMAP server: It works, but there’ll be a delay because the message doesn’t get pushed to the device as soon as it comes in.
2. Blackbery Enterprise Server: Native support for Blackberry units, and add-in support for other platforms. It only supports Exchange, Notes, or GroupWise servers though
3. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push: Native support for Windows Mobile units and add-in support for other platforms. Only supports MS Exchange servers obviously.

The other major issue is how to back them up. You not only have to worry about DR backups, but also compliance. A nightly backup isn’t good enough any more. You either need to run a continuous backup or run a parallel archiving solution.

At issue here is that the remote access and backup requirements require 3rd party support. 3rd parties target their efforts where they’ll get the most business, so There’s no support outside the big three (Exchange, Notes & GroupWise). Nobody’s deploying new Notes or GroupWise installations anymore, so as much as I hate to say it, Exchange is the only option if you need to provide effective remote access and require effective backup.

So far some of the cooler ones are:

• A possible drug deal
• A 1950′s Ferrari (maybe a 410 S) parked on the side of the street
• Scooby-doo’s van

I came across OpenPsa recently and it seemed perfect for what we do. It’s a CRM tool with heavy project management and document repository tools that could be perfect. It runs on a LAMP stack, so I don’t need to dedicate a server (or VM) exclusively to it, like I would do if it was a Java app.

The one thing I always look for when choosing an Open Source product is the commitment of the developers. I’ve been burned in the past by committing to platforms only to find that the lead developers have no interest in improving the product or fixing the bugs. The most recent posting on the news page was a link to a blog entry of one of the lead developers on a Saturday stating that the 2.0 release was coming out the following Monday….. That was last May. He has updated his blog since, but no mentions of OpenPsa in any of them. There is no updates since about developers falling out, selling out or dropping dead. It’s the software equivalent of the Marie Celeste. Too bad. I’d have loved to play around with it.

Asigra supports Fedora Core, Red Hat ES and SUSE ES. I don’t like Fedora for a number of reasons, and this is for home use so I’m not paying for RH or SUSE, so I’ll use CentOS, the free clone of RHES. I’ve allocated a 4GB disk file for the VM. The OS itself should fit under 1GB, but the Postgresql database can hit 2GB, so I need the space. I’ve allocated 256MB RAM to the VM, but backups will run a lot faster with more.

At the OS “Installation Type” screen, you select “custom” to keep the disk footprint as small as possible. Disable the firewall and SELinux. On the Package Group Selection screen, tick the box for minimal install and complete the installation.

The application requires Postgres, so firstly you install it with:
yum install postgresql-server postgresql-jdbc

You need to run it once to build the database and create the config files
/etc/init.d/postgresql start
does the trick.
To make postgresql launch at boot, I use “chkconfig –add postgresql“, “chkconfig –level 345 postgresql on” and to confirm “chkconfig –list postgresql“. Postgres needs some minor tweeks for Asigra. you must add the line “tcpip_socket = true” to postgresql.conf and “host all all 127.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 trust” to pg_hba.conf. You then need to restart postgres to load the new config by running “/etc/init.d/postgresql restart“.

The client has some other dependencies that get resolved by installing “yum install compat-libstdc*” The client installer must be run with the “-console” switch unless you’ve installed X. Agree to the EULA and accept the default install path of “/usr/local/DS-Client”. We’re only going to install the DS-Client on this box, with the Java DS-User UI to be installed elsewhere. We’ll select a normal installation. The self contained install is an evaluation mode where everything is stored locally. We enter “localhost” for the DB host, and “postgres” as the username. We can put in anything for the password. We also want the service to start at boot time. It is normal for the client to give a warning about a missing database during an initial install. At this stage you get prompted for username, client ID and server location. These would be provided to you by your service provider.

The next thing is the encryption level. Asigra supports everything from DES (very weak, avoid) right up to military grade AES256. AES is slow, and the higher the key length, the slower the progress. I usually go for AES128. It’s significantly faster than 256, and it will take millions of years to break, rather than trillions, so it’s still good enough. Asigra uses two encryption keys; a key specific to the PC and an account key shared amongst all backup clients on the WAN. This enables common files to be encrypted and stored once, with this common key, rather than multiple copies being stored with individual keys (inefficient), or all sites sharing a single key (insecure).

Installing it on Debian is a 2 liner if you read this page. “apt-get install procmail” and adding “mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -a “$EXTENSION” DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/ MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir” to the postfix config file and it’s done! Now all I have to do is dump my old procmail configs back in and I’m in business.

My next option was to try VMware’s new free VMware Server application. It installs as just another application on a base OS, so if the OS supports the wi-fi card, VMware will. It’s a fully virtualised solution, so stock OS kernels interact with the VMware server application instead of the hardware. It takes 10 minutes to install and it works just like having VMware Workstation installed on a local PC, only with the additional benefit of the VMs staying running when you disconnect from the server.

The server is now up and running (it’s a Dell PowerEdge 400sc, with a 3.4GHz P4 CPU and 2GB RAM) and is running 2-4 VMs. A Debian Etch email server (Postfix/Courier-IMAP) and a Debian Etch web server (Apache/PHP/MySQL) are running constantly, and I run a Windows 2003 and/or CentOS VM when I need to.

You cannot blame Eircom. They’re no longer a state owned company with responsibility to the national good (another government fuckup). They’re a private company whose sole responsibility is to use every means at their disposal to make the greatest amount of money for their shareholders. The near-universal response from any Eircom customer who sees how much they’d save by Moving to Smart is disbelief, so Eircom must be doing a very good job milking their customer base for the benefit of their shareholders.

ComReg, the “regulator”, has no powers to regulate! They directed Eircom to speed up LLU and allowed Eircom to come up with a process that the new operators had to follow to get access to the lines. This process involved a the new operator emailing a spreadsheet based form for every customer they want to transfer. Eircom would then print out this form and have one of their clerical staff hand-key it into their order system. Because this process was so cumbersome, they could only handle a limited number of line transfers per week.

When the regulator would try and push Eircom into an action that would ease the transition of customers between operators they’d try to appeal the decision. When their appeal failed, they took the regulator to court and tied it up for years.

This didn’t sneak up on the regulator and the government who defined the regulator’s powers and responsibilities. It’s been obvious for a long time that the regulator would need the powers to impose sanctions and more importantly, an appeals process that would ensure that any disputes could be resolved quickly, fairly, and without possibility of escalation to the Irish court system. There is just way too much money to be made in the Irish telecoms business to expect everyone to play nice. Adherence to a stronger regulatory regime needs to be made a condition of every telecoms operators license in this country, and the regulator need to be able to impose sanctions up to and including suspension and revocation of their licenses.

I work from home a lot and was an early customer of ADSL. At the time Eircom were the only operator in town. Because there is no way of transitioning to another operator without an indefinite outage period (anything up to 2 weeks), I’m stuck paying ???????20/month extra for my 3Mb Eircom ADSL line. There are horror stories of people using other suppliers getting the runaround for weeks in the event of line faults. Eircom won’t let LLU operators repair the lines, and won’t repair them themselves until the lines are temporarily transferred back to Eircom (with the commensurate outage period). Because of Eircom’s actions, I cannot afford to take the risk, and neither can I recommend to others who need reliable service to go elsewhere.

This isn’t a victory for the better company; this is a victory for the company with the most lawyers and the biggest bank balance, and everyone looses.

I then thought I’d combine the freebie ADSL modem and an old Linksys access point I had lying around to get up and running until I could get into town to buy a new one next weekend. Leaving something lying around in this house is A Bad Thing. It was dead as a dodo, so I had no choice but to go into Limerick first thing in the morning and buy a new Linksys one in PC World. It’s a shiny silver colour, and has green and red lights, but it violates my one requirement in purchasing replacement hardware. I don’t mind spending the money if what I buy is better than the one it replaces, but this one does exactly the same thing as my old router, in exactly the same way, at exactly the same speed An odd thing though. This unit was available in two boxes. I could get it on it’s own for €100 or with a bundled PCMCIA Wi-Fi card, as a “home networking starter kit” for €75!!!!!

It’s got me thinking though….. I’ve got enough parts lying around the place to repair or replace any other PC or PC related part, but for want of a €75 part, I lost two hours this morning that I had to spend going into town and buying the replacement, and an hour or two that I was going to spend working last night. I think I’ll be going on eBay later to find a spare. I also couldn’t go to IMDB.com last night to find out what else I’d seen the girl played Wil Ferrell’s wife in Talladega Nights before…..

I’m back with Postfix/Courier-IMAP, but I’ve still got the original problem of synchronising calendars and contacts.

Still, The Bell X1 album is imense. Thank You For Smoking is the wittiest film I’ve seen all year, I’m finally churning through the Terry Pratchett books I never read when I was in college, and I’ve been a Civilization addict since the mid ’90s.

I setup courier-IMAP-ssl, postfix, procmail, and clamAV on my Debian Sarge server, used fetchmail to pull emails from Gmail, work and a few other places, and things were good. I had the same consolidated set of virus-free mail folders everywhere, it was IMAP so I had the choice of almost every email client on every platform when it came to reading email. For web caf????s and hotels, I installed RoundCube|Mail as a web front end (very pretty interface and it gets the job done).

That was fine for a while, but I’ve begun to rely more and more on the tasks, calendar, contacts, notes functionality of Outlook on my laptop to manage work stuff, and at this stage it’s key to my daily work. It’s always backed up, but I need a way of accessing it in the same way I access my email. I need the same up to date copy of the data wherever I go, with whatever device I’m using. At one stage I was even thinking of using Exchange! Buying in a server, Windows 2003 and a copy of Exchange was overkill, so I parked it for a while. I played with some Apache/webDAV based stuff that in theory allowed multiple Outlook instances to share data, but it still didn’t fix the problems of accessing the same data on PDAs, other OSs and no OS (web browser only). There are other web based groupware products (like eGroupWare, PHProjekt, Open-Xchange, Zimbra, SugarCRM etc.) but they either don’t connect to Outlook, connect poorly/incompletely, or have a payware connector (I’m cheap!).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a mention of Scalix on a mailing list I subscribe to. It’s a commercial product, but there’s a free, virtually feature-complete version available for sites of <= 25 users. It includes an Outlook connector that provides an almost perfect replication of Exchange’s functionality. It runs on Red Hat and SUSE, so there was a ???????0 cost to me! I don’t fancy running it on Fedora, don’t like SUSE, and don’t want to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Server (they make enough out of me in the office!) so I went for CentOS, which is a free unbranded version of RHES. Scalix needed a bit of persuasion to install. It actually refuses to install on any other distros, even if all the dependancies are there, so I edited the /etc/redhat-release to fool Scalix into thinking I was installing on RHES 4.

There’s a slight wrinkle though. It may not be against the word to Amazon’s TOS, but it could be against their spirit. My interpretation of Amazon’s intentions is that S3 is for use as online storage for applications that need a centralised data store, as opposed to the storage being the product. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months…