Hello 2012!! The most >Geek< fun I’ve had in a while
by Jason on Feb.09, 2012, under computers, IOS Apps, IP Telephony, iPhone, Tech Stuffs
ok ok, so this is really not at all keeping up to trying to post regularly. Got too busy, had a baby, etc.. excuses.
Now, I have a great reason to post!! I just finished a little pet project, tiny one.. but I’m quite excited about it as it’s something I’ve tried to do over 10 years ago, but the products were bad. Now, with newer hardware and software it’s a reality!
I had just succeeded to build my home SIP infrastructure. With a SIP client on my iPhone, I can connect to my personal PBX server, and make calls to regular phones via a SIP to PSTN router.
You are lost? I just built my own VOIP system, which I can make data calls over the air, from my iPhone, connect to my home based VOIP system, and call to a land line. What’s so big deal about that? Here in Singapore, the digital land lines are completely toll free! All outgoing LOCAL calls are free. With 3G and 10GB of quota a month, I can make a lot of phone calls this way!
I will share how I did it… and boy, it’s not easy. This setup is not for the faint hearted to even attempt to consider. Leave it to the real IT geeks *cough*
Here’s a glimpse on what you’ll need.
- Home broadband connection which has preferably unlimited usage (as we get here in Singapore)
+the broadband connection must always be up (otherwise you cannot connect from outside of your home) - Home wifi network, if you want to make calls via your SIP client in the smartphone
- A Linksys SPA 3102 (retailing for about S$100 in Singapore) – this is a VOIP Router
- Asterisk - a free PBX Server – run this on an old PC, or a small atom machine, or a virtual machine
(I run mine as a VMware Virtual Machine) - A SIP client for your PC and/or smartphone
PC – A good and free SIP client called X-Lite (http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite.html)
iOS – many choices available, free and paid I use the free client from 3CX (http://www.3cx.com/VOIP/voip-phone.html)
Generally, each item is easy to get up and running, but to get them working together was not easy, especially when you don’t understand half the terms involved. This is one of the craziest situations where I was looking at pages of configuration items and they are mostly abbreviated.
In addition, there are few up to date guides on the net which tells you what to do. I found lots of guides for Asterisk, some very good, but are for older versions. I’m using version 1.8, and there are lots that are now redundant. After all I’ve done to get things to work, I must say it’s actually not a lot of settings we need to make.
Credits will be given when due. I will link to the sites which I found the most useful information.
Windows 7 accessing file share error
by Jason on Oct.17, 2011, under computers, Tech Stuffs
strange issue came up for me recently, my notebook running Windows 7, stopped to be able to connect to CIFS shares. I keep getting that the “network is not reacheable” error from Windows. Networking wise, it’s incorrect as I can ping the device and I can access the web services on the device.
Some research pointed me to the proliferation of the 6to4 adapters in Windows. These adapters help to route IPv6 over IPv4, and for some reason, I’ve got hundreds of these adapters in my system.
All I had to do is to remove them by disabling IPv6, and the problem got resolved. No root cause here yet, but at least there’s the fix.
So, go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929852 and apply Fix #50409 & #50412. Both will need a reboot each time, and then my problem was resolved.
thumb friendly keyboard on the iPad with iOS5
by Jason on Oct.16, 2011, under Tech Stuffs
iPad Split Keyboard
one of the best improvement to the onscreen keyboard for the iPad is that it’s now movable and also thumb friendly.
The standard keyboard still exists, and you can easily switch between the new layout and the old. The special enabling key for this is the button on the bottom right of the keyboard. This used to be for hiding the keyboard. Now, in addition to hide, if you tap on the key and drag it upwards, the keyboard will transform to the split mode. This has 2 big benefits, both sides of the keyboard are now thumb friendly. I can comfortably hold the iPad and type away with both thumbs. And this is true for both portrait and landscape orientation for the iPad.
Second benefit, is that you can move the keyboard any location vertically!!
To get back the original keyboard layout, just drag the keyboard back to the bottom of the screen.
Way cool!
This works for both the original iPad and iPad 2.
Blueant V1 voice dialing with iOS5 is broken
by Jason on Oct.16, 2011, under iPhone, Tech Stuffs
So, one of the first problems I have with iOS5 is voice dialing with my trusty Blueant V1. It works, but it dials the wrong entry in my favorites list!
I tried to reset the V1 and re-initiate pairing with the iPhone, but didn’t help at all.
I realized what the problem was, and it feels like an iOS5 bug!
I have contacts, in my favorites list, which have multiple phone numbers. e.g. my wife has 2 entries, one for her office number and one to her mobile number. And I’ve got this setup since pre OS3.0 days. So, this is not a new configuration for me. When I do the voice dial, it will not dial the number I’ve set as the favorite, but the first number listed in the contact view. But, if I manually touch the favorites entry, the phone will dial the correct number. So, the portion which allows bluetooth integrated dialing is broken some where.
The workaround is to split the contact into a few contacts. Each with the unique phone number you want to dial. So, for my wife, I have to create 2 new entries, one for office and one for mobile.
This is a really bizarre problem. Hope a fix appears soon.
iOS Upgrade fail with error 23 – the workaround
by Jason on Oct.14, 2011, under iPhone, Tech Stuffs
So after trying iOS 5 myself, I’m feeling good to upgrade my wife’s iPhone 4.
Strange thing occurred that once I asked iTunes 10.5 to upgrade the iPhone 4, after the first dialog box that says something about backup, the next thing I get is error 23. Which actually means the phone has a hardware problem. Is there an underlying problem? I have no idea, phone seems fine.
So, what I did that made it work… or at least now it’s gone past that stage. Put the phone into recovery mode, and now iTunes 10.5 is downloading iOS5. Will know soon enough if it will work all the way.
*update* the workaround was successful!!
*update 2* to get the iPhone into recovery mode, do the following
- have your computer running iTunes 10.5, and the iPhone sync cable plugged into the computer
- don’t connect the sync it to your phone yet, and shutdown the phone
- after the phone is off, press and hold the home button (don’t let go of the button)
- keep holding the home button, and plug the sync cable into the phone (still, hold on to the home button, don’t let go yet)
- when you get to the recovery screen, you’ll see the iTunes logo and the sync cable show up on the phone, you can now let go of the home button
- iTunes will detect and report that the phone is in recovery
- Follow the wizard to proceed with the upgrade
iTunes 10.5 can sync 2 devices simultaneously
by Jason on Oct.14, 2011, under iPhone, Tech Stuffs
Things have been different, and I didn’t have anything good to write about. Until now…
I’ve just updated my iPhone 3GS then my iPad to IOS5. The sync was taking quite some time and I decided to try to sync my 3GS while the iPad is being restored. Searched around a bit and found some old posts saying that Windows iTunes can’t sync simultaneously. Yea, that post is a little old, from 2009.
So now, I’m trying it myself. It works!! The improvement now is that for music, videos and app sync, the device doesn’t stay in the lock screen anymore. It’s more like a background process.
There’s more to be discovered with iOS5, hopefully some more good stuffs to write about!
P2V migration servers with “small files syndrome”
by Jason on Jun.13, 2011, under Virtualization
The past weekend I was helping a customer perform several P2V of physical servers to VMware virtual machines. Those were critical applications with small downtime window.
Generally P2V are pretty straightforward and easy to do. Given enough time, any x86 physical workloads can be migrated. In the ones I just did, all I had was 4 hours each. On the surface, 4 hours for about 120GB worth of data was achievable over 1Gbps networks. For these, we needed a lot more time. We did a migration on one of the machines which had no issues with a tight window, it took 16hrs!
The cause, nearly 1 million small files!! Small files are the bane of storage, which are a pain to copy.
We had to use different techniques for the P2V. Block based copying was not an option, and so it would have to be just regular file based copying.
The solution? P2V the OS disk only, then copy the other drives using FastCopy.
FastCopy was much more efficient that standard file copying utilities. It is known to be very successful in copying small files, and it’s true! Even for copying over the network! Though it’s still far from being as fast as block copy, but it was certainly faster than leaving it to regular copy/migration means.
Update to my Manila SUN Cellular Experience
by Jason on Jun.13, 2011, under Tech Stuffs, Travel
My earlier post was basically highlighting that if you are purchasing a Sun Cellular prepaid SIM for internet usage, you’ll have to get it activated before trying to apply and SBW load. Otherwise the load will be wasted, which was what happened to me.
The follow up experience to that was that I did get my GPRS (data) access activated within the 48hrs as mentioned by the call center help agent. There was no automated notification, I just had to keep trying to send “activate” to 2300. When it works, it will reply with the activation message.
Then I applied the SBW50 load and I was immediately online. The next thing I tried was tethering with my iPhone 3GS. The tethering didn’t work. In fact, the tethering option disappeared from the iPhone menu.
So what I did for the rest of the trip was to just use my E5830 to provide Internet access to my laptop and phone over WIFI.
I noticed for the E5830, in most places, there are good 3G signal, but for some reason the device will fall back to a slower speed. So I just forced the device to only use WCDMA to keep to the constant good speed. The drawback on this is when the 3G signal quality was bad, Internet access will be miserable.
SUN Mobile Prepaid SIM Service in Manila, Philippines
by Jason on Jun.07, 2011, under Travel
Here on a business trip, I decided to try out a local prepaid mobile service. This is from Sun, one of the 3 local mobile service providers.
The experience is pretty straightforward, and cheaper, compared to Singapore.
There are 2 types of prepaid SIM services, Sun Cellular & Sun Broadband. The former is for voice and the latter dedicated to data only. I bought both, as I was advised at the shop that Sun Cellular does not support data connection. This I have found to be not totally accurate.
For a heavy internet user like myself, opting for the time based internet access does not work for me. What works for me will be the unlimited day pass (SBW50) I can get for P50 (approx, S$1.42, US$1.14). The easiest way to activate this service is to buy a SBW50 Load card, scratch the card to get the code to activate the service. Here”s what I’ve realized, the SBW50 service CAN be applied to a Sun Cellular service.
The catch… which I was caught is you need to first activate data usage on the Sun Cellular SIM. Do this by sending a text “ACTIVATE” to 2300. It failed for me, and I called the customer service number 200, and there was some back end processing required first. Once that is done, then I can use data. I have already loaded the SIM with a SBW50, but too bad, it’s wasted.
Other than the hiccup above, I’m pretty happy with the performance I’m getting. It’s not super fast, but it works decently. I’m using the data SIM with my Huawei e5830.
Overall, I’m pleased with the solution I’ve checked out, and is saving me quite a few dollars!
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