Just Uber

It happened again!

Karoo - the demon spawn ISP of Hull’s much bemoaned monopolistic telephone overlords KCOM - has managed to yet again destroy the city’s ability to connect to the t’interweb.

From piecing together odds and sods from various sources (and from being one of the poor buggers having to use KC) it looks like the outage downed all internet services delivered by KCOM.

The fault which lasted over 8 hours, is alledged to have downed essential services, residential broadband, and businesses utilising credit card equipment connecting back through an ADSL connection.

As usual users from the unofficial karoo forums have jumped onto the problem and are debating it, so if you’re interested, jump in and have your say!

Karoo last dropped Hull off the internet in January this year, and August last year. Bad times.

The Register are covering the story here.

Do you ever have one of those days when no matter what you try, you just can’t get a web application to work? I suffered the angst of this recently when trying to install SugarCRM 5 on a Plesk based shared hosting server.

No matter what I tried, in step 2 of the installation process I got an error about the writable session save path not being valid. I checked the path in the /etc/php.ini file, created a php test page using phpinfo() and checked that the php session location was writable. Still, the installer brought up the same error message.

Finally I resorted to hacking the install script. I thought I’d share the hack with you here just in case you suffer the same error as I! Open up the install/installSystemCheck.php file. Check out the example below, and notice that seventh line from the bottom, I have changed the variable $error_found = true; to $error_found = false;

That should move you onto install step 2.

// session save dir
$session_save_path = session_save_path();
if (strpos ($session_save_path, “;”) !== FALSE)
$session_save_path = substr ($session_save_path, strpos ($session_save_path, “;”)+1);
if(is_dir($session_save_path)){
if(is_writable($session_save_path)){
installLog(”Session Save Path is “.$session_save_path);
}else{
$save_pathStatus = “<b><span class=’stop’>{$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_WRITABLE']}</font></b>”;
installLog(”ERROR:: {$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_WRITABLE']}”);
$error_found = true;
$error_txt .= ‘
<tr>
<td><strong>’.$mod_strings['LBL_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH'].’</strong></td>
<td class=”error”>’.$save_pathStatus.’</td>
</tr>’;
}
}else{
$save_pathStatus = “<b><span class=’stop’>{$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_SET']}</font></b>”;
installLog(”ERROR:: {$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_SET']}”);
$error_found = false;
$error_txt .= ‘
<tr>
<td><strong>’.$mod_strings['LBL_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH'].’</strong></td>
<td class=”error”>’.$save_pathStatus.’</td>
</tr>’;
}

Take a deep breath, unwind and relax. Setting up your Ubuntu Linux powered PC for mobile internet access isn’t half as hard as you thought it’d be.

My brother just got a £7.50 a month deal with Three, for 3 GB per month of internet access over 3G (HSDPA). I installed Ubuntu onto a PC for him and had a bash at getting the 3G dongle up and running.

Here is the easiest way to get this up and running.

1.) Plug the dongle into a spare USB slot and restart the computer.

2.) Download the Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver for Linux. The version I’m using is 1.99.17 (Beta) and comes as a .deb package.

3.) After installing, run the Vodafone application that you’ll now find in Applications > Internet.

4.) If the application doesn’t detect your dongle restart your PC and try again (although it should).

5.) Insert these settings if you’re using the Three (UK) network. Leave the DNS settings empty to allow dynamic configuration of DNS.

Username: three
Password: three

Preferred connection: 3G preferred
Authentication mode: Default
APN host: 3internet

6.) That’s about it. You should be able to see a signal strength bar at the bottom of the app screen, and connecting to the internet is a simple as pressing the big green connect button.

The vodafone application itself is pretty good. Particularly useful is the usage indicator. It allows you to restrict the amount of data transferred to help ensure that you don’t breach your monthly limit. Check out the screenshot below. Cool eh?

Enjoy mobile internet on Linux!

Fortunately Ubuntu has packages for Asterisk and Destar located in the Universe repository, so running the following command will grab and install them for you.

sudo apt-get install asterisk destar python2.4

Hardy ships with Python 2.5 but DeStar throws errors unless it’s running on Python 2.4. Therefore you need to tell destar to use Python 2.4 instead.

edit /usr/share/destar/python/destar.py

so that the top line reads:

#!/usr/bin/python2.4

Asterisk needs to be configured to allow DeStar to manage it. To do this, create a file called destar.conf in /etc/asterisk/manager.d/ Change the secret to a password of your choosing.

[destarman]
secret=123342342
deny=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
permit=127.0.0.1/255.255.255.0
read=,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user
write=,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user

Try DeStar now by going to http://servername:8080 The default username is admin and the password ad26. (don’t forget the dot at the end). You should change it.

In the DeStar web GUI go to Configuration > Options > Management API Access and ensure that the secret there is the same as the secret in your destarman.conf file.

You should now have Asterisk installed and DeStar configured to manage it!

This is just a quick post to say well done to Hull City AFC for achieving promotion to the premier league!

The city of Hull is currently undergoing a period of regeneration unprecedented in it’s long history. Previously a prosperous fishing town, Hull is fighting back against economic decline and trying to etch a place out for itself in a new millenium.

Having a team in the premier league is the icing on the cake and I for one am excited to see what the future holds for both our football team and our city at large.

Hull. Things are looking up!

I just read this on Slashdot and wondered what people thought of this seemingly bizarre move from MS?

After campaigning for OOXML so vigorously, MS have now announced that they will be issuing an update to Office 2007 to add support for OASIS ODF 1.1.

This won’t be available as the default format for saving, but even so - making support available for ODF and not supporting OOXML (that won’t come until a future version) must fatally damage OOXML as a standard.

Hopefully the delay in OOXML support and the emergance of ODF support as standard in an MS Office suite will herald new support by the public sector for the ODF format.

Who knows, the next time you visit your favorite government website you might be able to grab a copy of taxreturn.odt

Some exciting news coming from the Phoronix website suggests that Valve may be porting the Source engine to Linux.

The Source engine powers many of Valve’s top titles including Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, Day of Defeat: Source, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

Linux support for Source is likely to increase the take up of Linux based operating systems amongst Joe Public. Lack of support for modern games is often cited as a reason for not moving from Windows.

Lets hope that the rumours are true, and that Valve are the first of many games developers to go down this route.

Want iPlayer on your telly but don’t have a Wii? Check out this very useful script for the Xbox Media Centre. The script allows you to download programs from the BBC iPlayer service to an old Xbox (or Linux or Windows PC) with XBMC installed, and watch them at your convenience.

Quality isn’t great as the script uses the old ‘I’m pretending to be an iPhone’ trick to grab an MP4 file, but it’s still fairly watchable until a better quality stream becomes available.

Because this hack is using an iPhone masquerade trick (oh, and in case you were wondering, the authors overcome the BBC’s first attempts to thwart this kind of hack), the upside is that there is no DRM on the files you download. You can grab the script from Google Code.

I suppose it just goes to prove, there’s life in the old Xbox yet!

Here are a couple of screenies for your enjoyment.

Hello there. I can’t believe it’s been nearly a month since I wrote anything. Recently I’ve found myself pre-occupied with other things so I’ve been neglecting you. I’m sorry!

There has been a major change in the Ubuntu landscape since the last time I put finger to keyboard. Hardy Heron has arrived, Ubuntu’s new long term supported release! I’ve been running the pre-release version on my laptop for a while (until I accidently smashed the machine the other night) so it hardly surprises me that people installing it for the first time are finding it to be the best Ubuntu Linux yet! Of course, a few bugs remain, but if you find one, join me and hundreds of other users in reporting it and helping the developers to make Ubuntu better! It’s fun, and you might even get your name up in lights!

One thing I have noticed is that the validated hardware list has grown even larger with this release. It’s now easier than ever to grab yourself a laptop, desktop or server certified to work with Ubuntu. Seeing a good range of HP servers in the list is great for me as they’re the most commonly used ones at work - Hoorah!

So, that’s about it for now. Catch you soon…

A laptop running Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) remained the only uncompromised system at the CanSecWest conference PWN to OWN competition.

The competition sees hackers compete to discover a 0 day code execution vulnerability, on one of three laptops running Mac OSX, Windows Vista or Ubuntu. The winners take the pwned laptop plus a generous cash award.

Mac OSX (10.5.2) fell on day two, after the discovery of a vulnerability in the Safari web browser allowed a team from Independent Security Evaluators to remotely exploit an Apple MacBook Air. Day three saw Shane Macauly of Security Objectives defeat the Windows Vista (SP1) laptop using an exploit against the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Well done Ubuntu.