Month: October 2010

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Disabling (or enabling) geotagging of photos in iPhone camera

Some people may not be aware that photos taken with the iPhone camera have the GPS coordinates of your location embedded in the EXIF metadata of the file. This means that when you post the picture online or send it to someone, you’re letting them know where you were at a certain place and time. If you’re ok with that then there’s no problem. But if you want to disable it, it’s pretty simple.

The procedure is basically the same as the one I described in this post about enabling Facebook Places. The difference is that once you’re in Location Services you’ll want to make sure “Camera” is disabled. Photos taken from that point on won’t have GPS embedded in their metadata. If you want to turn it back on, just set Camera to “enabled” in Location Services.

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Setting up InspIRCd as an internal IRC server for companywide chat

I got this idea (from this blog post) that it would be cool and great if we had an IRC server to facilitate communication within our team.  I started checking out some different IRC servers to see which ones supported the main features I wanted (LDAP auth & SSL).  I started out with ratbox but I didn’t really like it.  I found InspIRCd and after some config tweaking it’s working well.  Here’s the info from modules.conf for authentication against Active Directory (so people login with their AD usernames):
<module name="m_ldapauth.so">
<ldapauth baserdn="OU=Users,DC=did"
attribute="sAMAccountName"
server="ldap://activedirectory.example.com"
killreason="LDAP auth failed"
searchscope="subtree"
binddn="CN=binduser,OU=Users,DC=example,DC=com"
bindauth="password"
verbose="yes"
userfield="yes">
Here’s the configure line (since I had to build from source):
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/inspircd --enable-gnutls --uid 101 --enable-extras=m_ldapauth.cpp --enable-extras=m_ldapoper.cpp

I still have some more customization to do to make ChanServ work, but since this is internal I don’t know if that even matters.  Also I can’t seem to get SSL working – I tried compiling with –enable-openssl but that failed, so I went with –enable-gnutls, which worked, but I can’t connect via ircs:// in my client.  If it looks like people are interested in this I may fix it up, but I have a feeling most people won’t be as enthused about it as I am.

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I’m pissed.

Learned something today that pissed me off. Makes me wish I had an anonymous blog so I could actually bitch about it.

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I'm pissed.

Learned something today that pissed me off. Makes me wish I had an anonymous blog so I could actually bitch about it.

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Upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.1 with Update Manager

This turned out to be so ridiculously easy I probably shouldn’t even mention it, but only because I remembered that Update Manager exists. I thought I was going to have to burn an ISO, go to the datacenter, pop the disc in, etc. But with Update Manager this is all handled remotely. Just download the files from vmware.com and upload them to your vCenter server through the client. This YouTube video by VMware walks you through the procedure:

Continue reading “Upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.1 with Update Manager”

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Exchange 2010 Post-Upgrade weirdness: can’t edit Mail Non-Universal Group or Security Group

Now that everyone’s been moved to Exchange 2010 we’ve started using the 2010 Exchange Managment Console/Shell exclusively which has revealed some weirdness. First, we created a new group in AD using an old script (which used LDAP) and created a Mail-enabled Global Security group. We put people in the group, and everything seemed to be working fine until it was discovered that users in the group couldn’t see the group in the Global Address List. Users not in the group had no problem seeing the group. Additionally, users in the group couldn’t see users added directly in 2010. This only appeared to affect the GAL; the users were able to send/receive email fine with the full SMTP addresses.

Continue reading “Exchange 2010 Post-Upgrade weirdness: can’t edit Mail Non-Universal Group or Security Group”

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Exchange 2010 Post-Upgrade weirdness: can't edit Mail Non-Universal Group or Security Group

Now that everyone’s been moved to Exchange 2010 we’ve started using the 2010 Exchange Managment Console/Shell exclusively which has revealed some weirdness. First, we created a new group in AD using an old script (which used LDAP) and created a Mail-enabled Global Security group. We put people in the group, and everything seemed to be working fine until it was discovered that users in the group couldn’t see the group in the Global Address List. Users not in the group had no problem seeing the group. Additionally, users in the group couldn’t see users added directly in 2010. This only appeared to affect the GAL; the users were able to send/receive email fine with the full SMTP addresses.

Continue reading “Exchange 2010 Post-Upgrade weirdness: can't edit Mail Non-Universal Group or Security Group”

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Looking into modernizing our office phone system

I’m researching replacing our current office phone system with a modern one. Currently we have a pretty old system (not managed by my department): POTS lines into an old PBX, old Toshiba DKT2010 handsets, lousy voicemail, and no direct-dial to each desk. You have to call in, talk to the receptionist, and get transferred. We also have no caller ID, and when you move from desk A to desk B, your extension changes from 305 to 309 (or whatever) – your extension is not bound to the phone, but to the jack. In addition to being retarded, this means your business cards now have the wrong extension on them

If I’m going to be taking over the phone system then I’m replacing it. I don’t know anything about phone systems except that VoIP and Asterisk are my starting points. Here’s what I want:

  • DID to each desk
  • Caller ID
  • Voicemail emailed to your inbox as MP3/WAV
  • Jabber integration if possible – if your Jabber status is “away” the call goes straight to voicemail.
  • Extension bound to the phone… this seems like an easy one, since DHCP already does this for computers.
  • Faxes delivered to users’ inboxes – complete email/fax conversion would be idea.

    • We have Exchange 2010 which has Unified Messaging; I don’t know if we’d need to use that but I guess it’s an option. A friend pointed me at MS Response Point, which I was going to look at, but Microsoft apparently ended that product, so I didn’t bother.

    Currently I’m checking out Trixbox, specifically their trixbox appliance. Though, I usually like to “roll my own” box when first playing around with new technology to learn how it works.

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vCenter Data Migration tool doesn’t restore SQL Express DB – Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 2)

I’m into my second day on this project. It appears that the backup and restore procedures run to completion but on the target machine the database is empty. This is pretty easy to check; I just went in with SQL Management Studio, looked in VIM_VCDB -> Tables -> dbo.VPX_DATASTORE and did “Open Table.” On the source machine I saw all the datastores in there (as expected). On the target machine, however, the table was empty.
Continue reading “vCenter Data Migration tool doesn’t restore SQL Express DB – Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 2)”

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vCenter Data Migration tool doesn't restore SQL Express DB – Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 2)

I’m into my second day on this project. It appears that the backup and restore procedures run to completion but on the target machine the database is empty. This is pretty easy to check; I just went in with SQL Management Studio, looked in VIM_VCDB -> Tables -> dbo.VPX_DATASTORE and did “Open Table.” On the source machine I saw all the datastores in there (as expected). On the target machine, however, the table was empty.
Continue reading “vCenter Data Migration tool doesn't restore SQL Express DB – Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 2)”