Nicholas Booth Dot Com » Problems

Work on Movable Type

Himself — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:47:44 +0000

Having spent the best part of a couple of days this week working on a Movable Type installation that needs to be migrated for a business RBI sold recently, I’m getting more than a little frustrated. Months ago I specified the MT version they needed, and then about 5 weeks ago provided them with a back-up file to test with. Looks like they did nothing with all that – until this week – and now it’s absolutely crucial that they get this productionised NOW!! I’ve almost completely rebuilt their installation to something a little bit sane, but they still have problems with imports – I did two just fine today – and there are some horrible problems with the content which looks like it’s been badly constructed with absolute links for pictures and other assets. It’s enough to make one weep! I’m wondering if I should offer to do this freelance for them at the weekend – a good rate to charge might be what the Landrover garage charge for working on the car. Might make them think, though. Perhaps I should sell them hosting as well!

Citrix on Fedora 12 Grief

Himself — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:50:35 +0000

Working from home today, so I needed to set up Citrix on my Linux desktop – which I’ve just rebuilt from a selection of parts from other hosts lying around in the study (including replacing the HDD which had a SMART uptime of more than 5 years – it used to be in a a server).

Anyway, after downloading the ICA client tgz file and failing miserably to get that to work, I looked around for more information. As with the Mac (which was a problem when the snow happened) there’s a newer bit of client software, so down the wire that came, and as an RPM should have been easy to install. A quick rpm -ivh did the trick. First step was then to disable a couple of font files which stopped it launching at all (/usr/lib/fonts/cjkuni-uming/* were the culprits). Logging in with the web interface to the office systems, click on the terminal services icon – and wham – a message saying I’d not chosen to install the AddTrust External CA root certificate.

Well – fortunately that existed in the Firefox setup – so a quick export from FF and copy in to the ICA certs folder and It Worked!

It’s still pretty awful – I can’t seem to adjust the screen size for the client window, so I’m working in a small (scaled down) 1024×768 sort of screen. At least, though, I can actually work.

Posted from GScribble.

Update: Inorder to use the wfmgr.bin utility to manage the citrix onnections I also had to symlink /usr/lib/openmotif/libXm.so.4 into /usr/lib (although there’s probably a better way of doing it). Now the session manager works I seem to have more control of window sizes. Phew!

Battle with a Grandstream BT200 VOIP Phone

Himself — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:28:54 +0000

Much hassle trying to upgrade my fairly ancient voip phone which I use in the study connected to the Asterisk PBX. It seemed to have a very early firmware and boot loader version, which no matter how much I tried would not upgrade to Grandstream’s latest and greatest. I troubled their support ticket system for advice, and the persistent reply was that it would work in one go without intermediate versions. Not so. FAIL to Grandstream, I’m afraid.

After much searching I found a site called GrandstreamSucks.com and there were a series of earlier firmwares. I downloaded all I could, then set about seeing what could be done with these; the phone was set to use a local HTTP server for the firmware upgrades, and by this means I could follow the Apache log and see the evidence of the files being sucked up.

From the very early software versions (on my phone it was 1.1.0.5 software / 1.1.0.88 bootloader) you do seem to have to upgrade in stages. From GrandstreamSucks I used firmware 1.1.2.25 which upgraded just fine. I then chose 1.1.4.14 which also upgraded fine. THEN I used the 1.2.2.26 from the real Grandstream site, and that seems to have worked fine as well.

Now all that’s left is to test it all out properly and check the configuration is still right.