usefulgeek

Why use ZFS with FreeNAS?

jonmoore — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:43:29 +0000

I recently started using FreeNAS again after exploring other options that existed, such as openfiler, and now that I’ve returned, ZFS seems to be the cool thing to do. After reading, watching videos and playing with ZFS I’m sold on all the features it offers. However, I must ask, is there a compelling reason to use ZFS over UFS for a single disk? I’d really like to see some comments on this.

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Rewrite incoming CallerID

jonmoore — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:38:27 +0000

We’re using asterisk, and as part of the dial plan, a 9 is required before the number to make calls out to the PSTN. Since our phones have a incoming call log, it would be very convient to have asterisk rewrite the CallerID value on calls from the PSTN to include this leading digit. I found this was rather easy to accomplish. Adding something similar to the following to whatever extension handles your incoming calls, all CallerID numbers will have a 9 added to the front.
exten => s,1,Set(CALLERID(num)=9${CALLERID(num)})
And proceed with your normal call routing logic. Change the preceding digit to whatever matches your system. If you have several extensions this is going to be used with, you could benefit from using a global variable for the leading digit.

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Share list of files in DropBox Public folder

drale — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:45:53 +0000

For Windows DropBox users. Here is a simple way to share list of links for your Public folder. This script doesn’t show files in sub-directories.

1. Create a makefilelist.bat file with script to list all files in directory.
2. Use Scheduled Tasks to run the .bat file Daily or Weekly, etc as needed; depending on how often you update files in DropBox Public.
3. Share the list file with “Copy Public Link”.
4. Open Public Link in a browser. You know have a list of all public files that is up-to-date.

You can see an example and download the makefilelist.bat file here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4355901/index.html

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Asterisk GotoIf Application

jonmoore — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:12:20 +0000

The description from asterisk for this is GotoIf(condition?[labeliftrue]:[labeliffalse]), however for me (being somewhat new to asterisk, and not fully understanding all the little bits, this was a bit confusing. A better way of describing this, at least for those of use new to asterisk, might be GotoIf(condition?[context,priority,labeliftrue]:[context,priority,labeliffalse]).
I have not used labels in the dial plan before, and when starting out with this application I read label to be a context. This lead me to write my dial plan similar to this..

[default] exten => 100,1,GoToIf(condition?true,false)
[true] exten => s,1,... [false] exten => s,1,...

In retrospect, it’s obvious what the documentation is saying, but as I said, not being familiar with labels, I was a bit lost.

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Remote packet capture

jonmoore — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:52:43 +0000

Had a need to capture some traffic on the remote machine and analyze it in Real Time ™. Found to solutions to this. The first, involved just sending the output of tcpdump across the ssh session.
ssh host.example.org tcpump - eth0 -w - > capture.pcap

The other method, picked up from the wireshark wiki allows for the captured traffic to be viewed as it’s being captured in wireshark. This is done using a combination of ssh and a fifo pipe. The exact command can very slightly, and I suggest reading the relevant man pages, but something similar to the following (taken from their wiki) should do the trick.
mkfifo /tmp/pipe ssh user@remote-host "tshark -w - not port 22" > /tmp/pipe wireshark -k -i /tmp/pipe

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Unable to use pvmove

jonmoore — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:50:25 +0000

I needed to remove a physical volume from a LVM volume group, and found this is done using the pvmove command. However, trying to run this, resulted in an immediate, and suprising error

# pvmove /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
Required device-mapper target(s) not detected in your kernel

After some quick google’ing I found on this list a cause, and a fix. Appreantly, pvmove uses something provided by the raid1 module to do it’s magic. So, loading loading the dm-mirror kernel module fixes the issue and pvmove works as expected. Thanks debian-user list

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Quick install of Tomcat5 on CentOS

jonmoore — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:19:27 +0000

At the office, we’re in the process of doing some work where we need a tomcat server. Without having to get into things to much, I found this simple method for getting tomcat5 up and running pretty quickly. I’m sure I’ve left out some important things, and I’m doubtful as to how production ready this is, but for our testing, it’s working out fine.

I’m using CentOS 5.3 for all of this, but I’m sure it will work with CentOS 5.4

yum install tomcat5 tomcat5-admin-webapps tomcat5-webapps

After this, you need to edit the tomcat-users.xml file to create a new user.Using the above, this file ends up in /etc/tomcat5/tomcat5-users.xml and all that needs to be added is a line similar to the following..

user username="admin" password="p@ssw0rd" roles="admin,manager"

I can’t get wordpress to work with me on this, so you’ll need to wrap the above in angle brackets, the same as all the other lines in that file.
You can set username and password to whatever you’d like. After this, restart tomcat (not sure if this is needed) with service tomcat5 restart and off you go.

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Burn ISO from command line in Linux

jonmoore — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:00:20 +0000

Quick and simple way of burning an ISO image from the command line in Linux. First, find your devices with wodim, the use the cdrecord command to burn the ISO image.

$ wodim --devices
wodim: Overview of accessible drives (1 found) :
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 0  dev='/dev/scd0'	rwrw-- : 'LITE-ON' 'DVDRW LH-20A1P'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ cdrecord -v dev='/dev/scd0' Download/archlinux-2009.08-netinstall-i686.iso

Then, you’re done.

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Launch Google Chrome and external links with incognito mode.

drale — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:19:50 +0000

The instructions floating around are to place the --incognito switch (single – works fine for me) in your desktop shortcut. But sometimes you may be in an application like Tweek Deck, etc that links to webpages. These pages don’t launch in incognito if you only fix your desktop shortcut. Here is how to do both. Google Chrome is set as the default browser in this case.

(These instructions are based off of Windows XP)

Right-click on your Chrome shortcut. Choose Properties. Add -incognito to the end:

chrome.exe" --incognito

To launch all web shortcuts and links from your system:
Control Panel > Folder Options > File Types
Select the File Type URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol and choose Advanced
Select action open and edit.
Just like before add the switch to the end like this:

chrome.exe" --incognito -- "%1"

Edit: After more digging in Google I found this tip mentioned in Google Code Chromium issues (Comment 3).

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Remove bonded interface in OpenFiler

jonmoore — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:45:42 +0000

I decided to try and use NIC bonding in OpenFiler and while things seemed to go well at first, I did run into some issues over time. I’m still in the process of testing, and I think most of the issues are “user error” and not so much problems with NIC bonding or OpenFiler itself. More on that later.

I was able to configure a bonded interface, and add both interfaces to it. However, after the issues started, I wanted to remove the bond. There is no way of doing this from within the Web UI it seems. Easiest solution, login to the console, and delete /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 if you’re using the first bond interface.

After this file is deleted, service network restart should get you going again.

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