Tag: linkedin

Irish Radio Stations on Linux

UPDATED VERSION AVAILABLE: https://www.barryodonovan.com/index.php/2013/02/12/irish-radio-stations-on-linux-2013

I’m a bit of a newstalk junky and like to have the radio on in the back ground. It’s quite painful jumping between websites and even more painful getting them all to work under Linux so I have some simple Bash aliases for VLC and RTE Radio 1, Today FM and Newstalk:

alias 2fm='cvlc http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/live/radio/2fm.asx'
alias newstalk='cvlc http://newstalk.fmstreams.com:8008/listen.pls'
alias rteradio1='cvlc http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/live/radio/radio1.asx'
alias todayfm='cvlc http://audiostore.todayfm.com/audio/todayfmIRL_64K.asx'

UPDATED 2011-02-07: 2FM added.

Database Design for Doctrine

Creating a database schema directly in the database or in YAML can be very frustrating and difficult. I’ve looked at tools like MySQL Workbench in the paste and have not been impressed – especially as I need an export to YAML function for Doctrine (a PHP ORM project which I’m a big fan of).

I recently came across ORM Designer and have quickly become a big fan. It’s interface is nice, it has excellent support for Doctrine including behaviors and I’ve ran through many update / export to YAML / create models from YAML cycles without issue.

I’d strongly recommend for anyone using Doctrine – plus there’s a 30 day evaluation without any limiting of functionality so you can examine it for yourselves.

Testing SPAM and Virus Filters

I’ve recently performed a complete upgrade of Open Solutions’ mail servers and I’ve now moved onto doing likewise for one of our ISP customers with a lot of users.

These retrofits include installing virus and SPAM filters to protect both ourselves and the ISP customers but also to stop customers who have infected computers from spewing these emails out.

When everything’s up and appears to be working, I like to test both filtering systems to ensure they’re working. Quoting from eicar:

Using real viruses for testing in the real world is rather like setting fire to the dustbin in your office to see whether the smoke detector is working. Such a test will give meaningful results, but with unappealing, unacceptable risks.

Fortunately, test files exist for virus checkers and SpamAssassin:

  • The EICAR standard anti-virus test file can be found here.
  • SpamAssassin created the GTUBE (Generic Test for Unsolicited Bulk Email) for the same purpose and this can be found here.

We’re Now Available Over IPv6!

You probably won’t have noticed but this site is now available over IPv6:

$ host www.barryodonovan.com
www.barryodonovan.com has address 87.232.16.35
www.barryodonovan.com has IPv6 address 2a01:268:3002::35

I spend a lot of my working hours doing a lot with IPv6 and, as any sys admin knows, it’s quite often the case that you get around to doing these things for yourself last. In our case, there was a bit of work involved as we had to first get our ISP’s core network dual stacked with IPv6 – luckily they’re a customer of ours 😉

Stay tuned here and over on the company blog for upcoming IPv6 posts and announcements.

In the meantime, if your ISP isn’t offering IPv6 to end users yet, head on over to SixXS where you can get an IPv6 tunnel for free. If you’re based in Ireland be sure to chose HEAnet or Airwire as your PoP as they’re both based in Ireland and members of INEX so your latency will be as low as possible.

UPDATE: Much more on this an why over on the company blog: We’re IPv6 Ready – Finally!

Asterisk SIP Brute Force Attacks on the Rise

See my article on the company blog for a discussion on this, and a how to on using Fail2ban to help stop these attacks.

Go That Way, Really Fast

In the vein of Release Early, Release Often, Jeff Atwood, CTO of StackOverflow.com, has posted an interesting article on the topic and on the huge amount of work they have gotten done in five months and their fears that they’re still not moving fast enough.

We’re going to go that way, really fast. And if something gets in our way, we’ll turn.


Continuous Integration for PHP

I stumbled upon phpUnderControl today by chance and it looks like a very interesting project which integrates:

I hope to take a closer look at it in the near future for a new project we’re lining up at work (want to help us?).

Speaking of continuous integration, for another project we installed and look after a Hudson server for a customer who is developing a Java and Cocoa application – if you’re looking for a CI tool for a Java (or other) development project, this is definitely worth a look (easy installation, nice and intuitive interface and well featured).

Open Solutions is Hiring

We’ve just announced that we are looking for someone new to join our team over at Open Solutions.

UPDATE: Official Announcement

We’ve just announced that we are looking for someone new to join our team over at Open Solutions.

We’ll be making a more official announcement later next week but I’m heading away for a few days and wanted to get something out there.

Emily @ Glenroe Open Farm

image

image

image

From their own site:

Glenroe Farm is one of Wicklow’s top tourist attractions. The farm is ideally located beside the picturesque North Wicklow coastline and less than an hour from Dublin City just off the N11.The farm is both educational and fun and here you can get up close to a wide variety of farm animals and pets, enjoy the great outdoors, relax in the peace and tranquillity of our Nature walk, have fun in the large outdoor playground overlooking the farm, try our home cooking from the Coffee Shop or bring your own picnic.

Installing FreeBSD on Soekris net4801-48

Nick introduced me to Soekris a few weeks ago and some neat little boxes they make. For a current project, the net4801 fit the bill perfectly, especially with the add in vpn1411 which off loads the intensive computational operations for encryption and compression.

I plan some future posts looking at the throughput performance of OpenVPN with and without the vpn1411 as well as general traffic throughput measurements. This post however will focus on installing FreeBSD on this device as easily as possible.

Firstly, I ordered the following:

Including P&P, this all came to €369.48.

While there is a lot of documentation online and a number of methods available to install FreeBSD on a Soekris box, I found that the easiest way to to do it was as if I were installing on the local machine and hence I could just install it as normal. For this, we turn to VirtualBox1.

  1. Install VirtualBox if you don’t have it.
  2. Attach the CF card to your computer via the USB card reader.
  3. Download a FreeBSD installation CD (e.g. 8.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso.
  4. Create a new VirtualBox machine such that:
    • the ISO image is mounted;
    • you have enabled a network adapter (PCnet-PCI II in bridged mode works for me as I have a DHCP server on the LAN).
  5. Boot the new VirtualBox machine and from its built in BIOS, choose to boot from the mounted CD ROM.
  6. Immediately attach the USB card reader device to the VirtualBox machine.
  7. Choose a custom install so you can select the USB device as the destination medium (da0 for me).
  8. Proceed with your FreeBSD installation as normal.

Once it completes, there are some changes you should make before popping the CF card back into the Soekris box:

  1. In /etc/rc.conf, set up the network configuration. Note that in VirtualBox, the interfaces will be reported as le0 but when booted on the Soekris box, they’ll be sis0 through sis2. I set sis0 (marked Eth 0 on the case) to configure by DHCP. I also set a static IP on sis2 so I can access the box on a direct computer to computer connection if necessary. Lastly, I enable the SSH daemon (ensure you have created a user!): 
    ifconfig_sis0="DHCP"
ifconfig_sis2="inet 192.168.130.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up"
sshd_enable="YES"
  2. When installing via VirtualBox, the destination device was a USB drive. On the Soekris, the CF is handled as an IDE drive. As such, change fstab to something like (as appropriate for you – I have a single root filesystem and a swap partition): 
    # Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/ad0s1b             none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/ad0s1a             /               ufs     rw              1       1
  3. Enable a console on the serial port in /etc/ttys by editing the ttyu0 line: 
    ttyu0   "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600"   vt100   on secure
  4. Lastly, add the following lines to /boot/loader.conf: 
    comconsole_speed="9600"
console="comconsole"

Now, pop the CF card back into the Soekris box and boot with the serial console attached (19200,8,n,1). I immediately changed the Soekris console speed to 9600 so that it works seemlessly from Soekris BIOS to FreeBSD bootloader, kernel and console.

1. VirtualBox is a fantastic piece of software. I run Kubuntu natively on my laptop and I have a virtual Windows 7 Professional machine running in VirtualBox most of the time. It runs smoothly and quickly and there is a wonderful feature to allow you to attach USB devices to the virtual machine (so my iPhone can access iTunes for example).