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Five great ways to annoy telemarketers with Asterisk

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:17:00 +1000

I'm not going to mince words here: I can't stand telemarketers. I don't care whether they are charities, political organisations or just run-of-the-mill salespeople, I simply have neither the time, interest nor will to waste my own neurons talking to them. It particularly infuriates me that technology - auto-diallers and voice-over-IP - combined with minimum wage staff, has made it so easy for telemarketers to misuse my time, while making a fortune from it. Even being on a do-not-call list hasn't fixed the problem completely; there's so many exemptions that I still find I get unsolicited calls far too often.

Of course, technology can be fought with more technology, and fortunately those of us who move in the free-software sphere have been graced with the marvelous gift of Asterisk, which presents many opportunities to waste the time of these people, as they try to waste ours. The equipment needed to run this is all fairly basic, by today's standards: I have a Snom-300 IP phone on my desk, a Linksys SPA-3000 adaptor to connect my PSTN line into my household ethernet (and can also drive a standard PSTN phone) and finally an old-whitebox PC as my Asterisk server.

So if you're being driven insane by students reading from canned scripts wanting your money, here's five ways to use Asterisk to get rid of them and maybe even slow them down in the process...

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Checking out Opensolaris 2008.05

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:13:00 +1000

Author: Paul Dwerryhouse <paul@dwerryhouse.com.au>

OpenSolaris 2008.05, Sun's community-developed open-source Solaris distribution, was released in May of this year, to much fanfare. While I began my system administration career in the Solaris field, I've found myself more and more in the Linux arena in the last few years, and haven't had a good look at Sun's flagship product since back in 2005, when Solaris 10 was released. With this in mind, I decided to pull down an ISO and see just how much going open-source has improved the product.

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Starting out with Lighttpd

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:51:00 +1000

While a large proportion of the world's webservers are currently using Apache, a competitor has been steadily gaining popularity on many high-usage sites. Lighttpd, pronounced "lighty", is a small-footprint, high-speed webserver, and is notably used by sites such as Sourceforge, YouTube and MiniNova. Netcraft state that Lighttpd is currently being used on 1.38 million sites, and is steadily gaining on Sun's share of the market. This introductory article provides a guide to getting Lighttpd installed and configured.

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Review: Ubuntu Server Edition 6.06

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 10:05:00 +1000

The release of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), back in June, brought not only a new desktop system to the Linux world, but also a server system with long-term commercial support. It has one key advantage over similar offerings from Redhat and Novell; the flexibility of the Debian dpkg packaging system.

This was of particular interest to me, as a system administrator who generally installs Debian, if given a choice. One of the annoying problems with Debian has been its potentially short support lifespan; essentially as long as it takes to get two more releases out. Admittedly this hasn't been a real problem, to date, but not having firm dates has been an issue in some environments in which I've worked.

Another was its perceived lack of commercial support, which often made it very difficult to bring into a corporate environment. While I've worked in situations where I had complete authority to use whatever OS I chose, I've also been in workplaces where it has been made clear that Debian simply would not be used, due to the lack of a commercial organisation providing security support.

Ubuntu's server release solves both of these problems, so I installed a copy to see how it held up.

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Running Linux for ARM processors under QEMU

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 11:31:00 +1000

QEMU is well-known as a free replacement for VMware, allowing users to run a PC within a PC. What isn't so well known about QEMU is that, in addition to emulating x86 architectures, it can emulate AMD64, Sparc, MIPS, PPC and ARM CPUs.

In the case of the ARM architecture, QEMU provides a convenient, if slow, environment in which development can be done for embedded systems.

This article describes the process involved in building a Debian/ARM server running under QEMU. It assumes that Debian is also being used as the host server.

Since QEMU's arm emulator has no ability to emulate either IDE or SCSI disks, it will be necessary to install the server on an NFS exported partition.

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Ethernet Bridges under Linux

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Sat, 13 May 2006 09:32:00 +1000

Ten years ago, shortly after I started my first job as a network programmer at an Australian university, I received a call from a person working in one faculty who was having some network difficulties. All of their computers were connected together by 50-ohm coaxial cable ethernet, and two of the computers on this network sent a considerable amount of data to each other.

This data, naturally, was echoed along the entire network cable and was the primary cause of delays and packet loss to other users of the network. The caller wanted to know of a way to solve this problem. My manager suggested the use of a bridge; the two noisy computers could be placed behind this device and their traffic to each other would be confined to their segment. This solution was particularly attractive as it would not require any other changes to the network or the network numbering; it could be inserted and would work immediately.

For a number of years now, the Linux kernel has had the ability to turn any host with more than one network interface into a bridge. This article explains how it works.

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Review: Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 18:18:00 +1100

The Ubuntu Linux distribution launched itself into the Linux community only eighteen months ago, and in that short amount of time has managed to gather a considerably large amount of publicity.

The fifth alpha release, Dapper Flight 5, was released on March 10th, 2006; the final release of Ubuntu 6.06, codenamed "Dapper Drake", is expected in June, after founder Mark Shuttleworth recommended a six week delay to iron out usability issues.

This release will be promising considerable more than Ubuntu's earlier releases - making a big grab for the commercial desktop by supporting it for five years. Five years is a long time, and clearly the Ubuntu people want to make sure it's every bit as good as it can be. So how is it stacking up so far?

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Building Java RPMS for Redhat Enterprise Linux

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:01:00 +1100

Althought it is a commercial distribution, Redhat Enterprise Linux is only supplied with software that is considered to be free; that is, openly redistributable, with licences that meet the Open Source Institute's guidelines for being considered to be open source software.

Sun's Java Development Kit does not meet this guidelines; while the JDK is available for free download, its source is not available and there are restrictions on its use. Hence, for this reason, Sun's JDK is not supplied with Redhat Enterprise Linux.

This article provides a guide to building RPMs from Sun's JDK, so that they will work correctly with your system. The following instructions will also apply to anyone running Fedora.

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Installing Debian Sarge with software RAID

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Sun, 22 May 2005 19:06:00 +1000

With the imminent release of Debian Sarge, comes a new installer program, which is much more flexible than that of previous releases. Among many of the new features is support for installation with LVM, installation over an ssh console and even the ability to install over an infra-red link. However with these extra features comes an added layer of complexity, and for the new user, accessing the less commonly used features is not always straightforward.

This article intends to provide a step-by-step guide to installing Debian Sarge with a mirrored-disk configuration. This process can easily be extended to cover any RAID configuration that Debian Linux supports (concatenated disks, RAID5, etc).

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