GCal Sidebar 2.7

GCal Sidebar 2.7 is out. This release is all about shortcodes. [ gcal-sidebar feed_id="FEED_ID" ]  to use the new shortcode. Mode and show_date are only supported by shortcode currently, I’ll be working on converging the options for shortcodes and widgets over the next couple of weeks.

List of shortcode options (Default options are first):

• map_link=[0|1] 0 disables the map link, 1 shows a link to the location in google maps.
• mode=[agenda|prose] agenda will display the title and time of the event, prose displays the title, then description
• show_date[none|short|long] none displays no date header, short displays “Thu, Dec 2″, long displays “Thursday, December 2″
• pub_or_priv[0|1] 0 is a public calender, 1 is a private calendar
• priv_id=[STRING] STRING is the private key of the calendar, see the FAQ for instructions on how to get it.
• rs_offset=[0|number] lets you ignore the first X results
• max_results=[4|number] Set the number of results to display in your calendar

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AVG and Symantec Cheat Repeat Customers

PC Pro and Which both ran articles about AVG and Symantec cheating users out of service. These two companies set the expiration date of your subscription based on when you renew. Every other vendor however, extends your subscription by the renewal duration. Meaning when you get the notice that your anti-virus expires in ninety days from AVG or Symantec,  you’ll lose ninety days of service if you renew immediately.

AVG provides a decent anti-virus package, and their boot cd scanner has helped me clean more than one virus. Symantec however is generally regarded as snake-oil and should be avoided. Practices like these are why we recommend Avast! antivirus.

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Ad Engine 0.4

Ad-Engine 0.4 is available here and from ad-engine’s wordpress.org page.

Changes include:

• Fixed two bugs where Ad URLs didn’t track properly

This is kind of a big deal as 0.3 does not properly flag anything. You should upgrade

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Ad Engine 0.3

Ad-Engine 0.3 is available here and from ad-engine’s wordpress.org page.

Changes include:

• It fixes a bug where some functions should not have had parameters, but did.
• Now using proper capabilities, you must be an editor to have access to it.
• Uses jQuery to cycle through ads in a particular group.
• Allows text, image, or both in an ad.
• tracks impressions as well as clicks.
• No longer relies on the PECL mime extension to display images(required PHP 5.3+)

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GCal Sidebar 2.4

GCal Sidebar 2.4 is out. It fixes a UI bug and adds a new feature

• Caches calender so that if the server connection fails it can still display your calendar
• Fixed bug where empty calendars displayed empty events on Jan 1 1970

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Basic MRTG

Introduction

MRTG records a graph of historic data on anything which can be represented by a number. This entry focuses on a quick setup to graph information pulled from SNMP on a network switch. Our demonstration network consists of around fifteen switches, with SNMP supported on ten of them. Additionally, not all ports are clearly labelled, although historically 1 Gbps ports are reserved for switch to switch connections while switch to system connections are 100 Mbps. Still This lets us put together some simple collection gathering and provided the administrator of the network some insight on usage of his network. The demo system is an Ubuntu box with MRTG installed,  other Linux distributions should behave similarly, and while you can run MRTG on Windows, I have not had occasion to do so.

On the switches

For demonstration purposes we have configured SNMP with a read only community of public, in production systems, treat this similarly to a password as SNMP can divulge potentially useful information to an attacker. If your device supports SNMPv3, then you should use that instead of SNMP v2c. Additionally, it is good practice to limit SNMP access to the collector system and not allow your full network to read SNMP data.

On the collector

Once you have SNMP configured on the target systems, it’s time to setup the collector. First install mrtg using your package manager ( apt-get install mrtg on Ubuntu / Debian and derivatives, yum install mrtg on Fedora / CentOS / RedHat and derivatives). Once MRTG is installed you’ll need to run cfgmaker to build configuration files for each device to monitor. It’s a good idea to read this page anyway to see what other options there are. Run this command for each device to be monitored. It will generate the configuration file /etc/mrtg/10.1.3.31.cfg. You can repeat the line for each address you want to monitor.

cfgmaker --global "options[_]: growright,bits" --global "WorkDir: /var/www/mrtg" public@10.1.3.31 > /etc/mrtg/10.1.3.31.cfg

Next, open /etc/mrtg/10.1.3.31.cfg and set the “Title” and “PageTop” for each section to something descriptive and meaningful. Doing this will make your life easier later on. Then edit the MRTG config file ( /etc/mrtg.cfg on Ubuntu / Debian derivatives,  /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg on Fedora / CentOS / RedHat and derivatives) and include this line, repeat for each address you are monitoring.

Include: /etc/mrtg/10.1.3.31.cfg

On most distributions, the MRTG package is configured to run automatically at five minute intervals, but if it doesn’t, then you’ll need to add a line similar to this to /etc/cron.d/mrtg

*/5 *   * * *   root    if [ -d /var/lock/mrtg ]; then if [ -x /usr/bin/mrtg ] && [ -r /etc/mrtg.cfg ]; \
    then env LANG=C /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg.cfg >> /var/log/mrtg/mrtg.log 2>&1; fi else mkdir /var/lock/mrtg; fi

Once this is done, you should be able to go to http://SERVER_IP/mrtg/10.1.3.31.html and see the graphs generated for your device. Our mrtg sample includes a handful of routers providing

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Provisioning SPA-942 with Elastix

I like the SPA-942, they seem to be solid phones that do what they should without grief. During the rollout of Elastix a couple of weeks ago, I ran into some limitations of the Elastix auto proision feature for these phones. Specifically, it did not provide for administrator modification at all. All the phones worked, but I could not modify the configuration easily, for example to add a syslog server.

I did some research and found how the configuration files get created. I logged into the server at the command line, then made some modifications. Specifically I added a master file so I could easily setup global configurations and a custom file for each phone. Now if I need to update the phones configuration with something not provided by Elastix, I look it up in the SPA-942 provisioning documentation and put the configuration into /tftpboot/spa942-master.cfg or into /tftpboot/spaMAC-custom.cfg if I want to configure a single phone’s option. This is the spa942-master.cfg file I used:

<flat-profile>
<Syslog_Server ua="na">SYSLOG_IP</Syslog_Server>
<flat-profile>

To add this functionality to your Elastix installation replace /var/www/html/modules/endpoint_configuration/libs/vendors/Linksys.cfg.php with my modified Linksys.cfg.php

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