The trouble with PSTN lines is that the CID has to be transmitted in-band, and there are more than one standard in doing this. On top of that, there are small differences between the various Telcos on the planet. And finally, to make things worse, documentation about it, is sparse and scattered at best.

The settings displayed usually go in /etc/asterisk/zapata.conf (either directly, or by inclusion).

How CID is handled is defined by the following variables:

cidsignalling: tells how the CID signalling occurs, can be bellcore (mostly US hardware), v23, or dtmf.

cidstart: specifies how the start of the CID transmission is indicated. Can be polarity (the polarity on the wire is swit  ...

After installing Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 on a Windows 2000 Server, I got a flood of Event ID 1008 in the Application system log. These log entries complain about performance counters not being able to be properly initialized.



First, try running these two commands sequentially from an NT console:

winmgmt /clearadapwinmgmt /resyncperf

Because it didn't work for me, I worked around the issue by disabling the performance counter for the particular ASP.NET services. For this, you need to download an application of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit Tools for administrative tasks, called Extensible Performance Counter List (exctrlst.exe).

After downloading (and installing) the tool, start it  ...

Had this issue with one of my clients: he was unable to open spreadsheets from his desktop or from his Windows Explorer. Double-clicking on the file opens a new, empty Excel session, and an error message is displayed.
After a quick search on the Microsoft support site, I found a solution.

When attempting to open an Excel spreadsheet from the desktop or from Windows Explorer (or any other program), a new, empty Excel session is started, and an error message is shown:

Quote
Cannot find the file path (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available.

or

Quote
Windows cannot find FilePathFileName, Make sure you typed the nam  ...

Got a curious error during the merge of the latest VirtualBox ebuild for Gentoo:
it fails with a die:

Quote
kmk failed

It took a bit, but looking around the output gave some indication of a problem with one or more dependencies. Looking around the Gentoo Forum, I came across this thread, which had the proper solution.

The error, more in full, is attached.
A bit more to the top of the error (sorry, but couldn't capture the right line as the new merge was already busy), it complains about Xmd.h, and GLXext.h. In that way, the solution provided by the forum thread I mentioned earlier, makes sense. In my case, issuing the following commands did the trick:

mikuru ~ # eselect opengl set xorg-  ...

Because of my move, I had need of a media PC system, which allowed me to watch TV, record from TV, watch DVDs, listen to music and more. Buying a pc with Windows Media Center was not an option: linux has very wonderful applications and utilities to build such a sytem.
This guide is not a real how-to, but rather the steps I took to get things running, along with descriptions and solutions to caveats and problems I encountered. Since my Media PC is still in progress of being build and configured, this guide is also a work in progress. Comments on any of the steps are, of course, very welcome.

This is a work in progress...

A PC running Gentoo, with several applications to:

Watch TV, record f  ...

Update: AMD and Microsoft have released patches to fix the TSC-drift problem. Read page 2 to find out where to get them.

The latest and newest in CPU technology is dual-core: this means having two CPUs on a single chip. Like real multi-processor (SMP), this greatly enhances processing power, among other benefits.
Unfortunately, there's a downside, called TSC-drift, causing serious trouble with certain applications and games.


random crashes: random crashes, which get worse the longer the computer is running. An application with logging usually complains about differences in "times".

sluggish performance: the performance of the application/game becomes very sluggish  ...

Realtek has a new gigabit chipset which is appearing on various motherboards, including the Asus M2A-VM board. At the time of writing (with kernel 2.6.22 being the default), this driver is not yet included in the default kernel tree.

Thanks to Realtek's wonderful support for linux, they have the driver source for various Unix/Linux flavours available for download on their website.

Download the driver from the official download site.

First, have your dependencies in order by having the following:

A sane build environment (contains gcc, make, etc.)

The kernel tree and/or headers of your current kernel.

Root access for installing and using the driver (of course).

Once all that is in orde  ...

As follow up on the post of a few weeks back, this little benchmark result:

http://tastic.brillig.org/~jwb/zfs-xfs-ext4.html

It clearly states what everybody is thinking: ZFS is definitely not the better one... Now that that's been said, we can get on with our lives again... ;-)

In light of my media guide (which is still under heavy development), I did a bit of experimenting with MythTV.
The result of my experiment is pretty nifty: I now have the ability to watch TV on my laptop (without a TV tuner), as long as I have a connection to my media PC (where the tuner is). Want to know more? Read on then...

As you know (or perhaps not yet), MythTV consists of two parts: a backend server (which does all the work: managing records, accessing hardware and so on), and a frontend client (basically controls the backend server, look up recordings, watch actual TV, etc.).
These two parts communicates with each other using the IP stack. While (according to the Gentoo ebuild main  ...

Finally, it's ready: my very new, special-ordered media pc. I mainly bought it to replace my (rather noisy) old pc with it, and to have a real looking PVR thingy.
Want to see pictures? Of course you do...

Half-front-side view, along with the big, silent fans.



The rear of the case, displaying HDMI, Audigy and TV tuner, among other things.



The internals of the case, displaying the various system components, like in any other system, really.



The line up: from bottoms up, the media pc, the radio tuner and amp, the cd player, and my MP3 player's at the top.



The system will be running Gentoo Linux, with MythTV, of course. Aside of the media thingy, it will host various files and stuff  ...

Gentoo users that do regular updates, probably already ran into this issue before: Gentoo has pushed libexpat-2 to stable, effectively breaking all applications that depend upon it because of a missing library. While this is quite normal behaviour (the two versions of libexpat are not entirely compatible), it is mostly a very annoying thing, as it is not easy to find out which packages depend on it. Lucky, the Gentoo Forums provided me with a good solution.

Normally, in such a scenario, one would use revdep-rebuild to solve these issues, but, as seen on the forums, it more than occassionally results in havok on user's systems. Since I did not want to risk reinstalling my system altogether,   ...

Had a bit of a problem with re-emerging app-arch/rpm-4.4.6-r3 after an update of libexpat: the emerge failed with a whole bunch of compiler messages.
After a quick search on Gentoo Forums, I found a post about someone who has had the same problem, and was able to solve it.

About halfway the merge, the compile failed. At the beginning of a long list, I found these error messages:

Quote
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I. -I.. -I/usr/include/beecrypt -I../lua/include -I../lua/local -I../misc -march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fPIC -DPIC -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_REENTRANT -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wno-char-subscripts -MT rpmdav.lo -MD   ...

Information about nvidia in Gentoo can be found here.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml

It goes more in detail about which driver versions are suitable for which nvidia cards; quite handy, since they kicked out nvidia-legacy-drivers.

If you don't want to read the article, here's the short story about the driver version:

Geforce FX, 6, 7 and 8: use the newest driver (100.xx and up)

Geforce 3 and 4: max 96.xx

TNT, TNT2, Geforce and Geforce 2: max 71.xx

In order to properly install the correct version, it is recommended to mask the packages like so:

Add the following to /etc/portage/package.mask:

>=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9700

Add the following to /etc/portage/pa  ...

Sun has released benchmark reports about Solaris' ZFS vs. Red Hat ext3:

Download the benchmark report here.

Sun claims for ZFS to be a revolutionary file system, and proves it by their well-documented, and objective (but not really) benchmark report, found at the link above.

ZFS has pretty much overall gain, when compared to ext3, which was to be expected.Of course, what Sun conveniently did not mention, was the alternative of filesystems on RH (or any other linux for that matter).
Are we really impressed about ZFS outperforming ext3? I for one am not, and most sysadmins know that ext3 is not the most performant filesystem in existence. If Sun really wants to show off, they would've taken  ...

This little article contains some useful tips and tricks about using tar.

When your starting point for the tar is situated at /, you may already have noticed the warning output from it:

Quote
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

In case of an automated backup, where the tar is executed using cron, this warning quickly becomes annoying: most systems mail the output of a cron job to a specified email address (and in any normal scenario, this is configured properly to know whether a backup succeeds or fails). If each time you get a mail with only this warning (the rest of the backup was succesfully completed), one might actually lean towards suffering from a nervous breakdown (if only  ...

In absence of a decent article, here's a good resource page for performance tuning of DSPAM:

http://dspamwiki.expass.de/Performance_Tuning

If you ever had the need to automatically reboot your system (whether it's a workstation or a server), knows that this is not a very simple thing to do. The shutdown command of Windows is often limited (e.g. it can't be used when nobody is logged on, or when the system is locked), and other applications are often too complex, or not free, or may even contain spyware and other ill-made wares. Windows Sysinternals has a solution.

The application is called PsShutdown, and is downloadable for free:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/psshutdown.mspx

PsShutdown is quite similar to "regular" shutdown - the former accepts the same parameters as the latter, but has various add  ...

The HP Agents for VMware ESX can be downloaded here:

http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/24882.html

A document about the installation of the IBM Director and ServeRAID manager in VMware ESX 3 can be found here:

http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP101047.

Should be useful to anyone who cares... If I ever get the chance to try it out myself (which should be fairly soon), it would probably be added (after rewriting, of course).

An LVM structure is build as follows:At the bottom is the PV (Physical Volume), which is basically just a partition (logical or not). LVM markers need to be placed on it for LVM to see it as a usable PV.

Before actual volumes can be created, a VG (Volume Group) has to be created. A group is the second lowest structure. Only one VGs can be created on per PV, but a single VG can span multiple PVs, which makes VG a very neat thing.

The final step (before the filesystem) is the LV (Logical Volume). This is the thing that will actual hold the filesystem and data. So when mkfs-ing, it will be done on this. Several LVs can occupy one VG, but unlike VG, an LV can not span VGs (so if you were to me  ...