Background: When we got the fibre connection, I decided to use Bahnhof as our service provider. They enable a SIP phone connection at no extra cost, but they don’t support using third-party SIP boxes; you have to use their combined router/wifi AP/SIP converter (a box by Tilgin), which they manage for you. Naturally, since I’m… Continue reading SIP telephony behind a pfSense firewall
Category: Computing
Two steps forward and one step back
I’m happy to report that oxcrag.net has been upgraded from a crappy ADSL line to a fibre based connection, which has improved uplink speed for the server tremendously. Unfortunately, it looks as though newer technology doesn’t always imply that everything gets better: Unlike what the representative for the fibre project stated, there’s no sign of… Continue reading Two steps forward and one step back
IPv6 guests in KVM
I’ve been experimenting with IPv6 at home, and spent some time trying to get it working in my virtual machines. The first symptom I got was that VMs got a “Network unreachable” error when trying to ping6 anything but their own address. The cause was a complete brainfart on my side: We need a loopback interface… Continue reading IPv6 guests in KVM
Frustrations in Ubuntu 18.04
My first frustration with Ubuntu 18.04 came yesterday. I created a template VM with my basic toolkit that any machine in my network should have. I then deployed the VM and asked vSphere to set the hostname to the value of the VM name. Strangely, this didn’t happen: The new machine booted up alright, but… Continue reading Frustrations in Ubuntu 18.04
DNS/DHCP issues in modern Windows versions
Static IP addresses are a solid way to configure machines if you have few enough of them to manage them manually. But the more ability you want to have to change things on the fly, the more limiting such a configuration scheme becomes. Unfortunately I’ve had severe problems with getting servers with DHCP leases (or… Continue reading DNS/DHCP issues in modern Windows versions
Transport security with Postfix
I had a “Face: Meet Palm” moment today, and as usual when that happens, I learned something new: What happened was that I noticed that mail from a Postfix server I use for sending mail from a couple of domains was marked with the red “no encryption” label rather than the expected grey “standard encryption”… Continue reading Transport security with Postfix
Resizing the system volume on a Linux VM
Background With LVM, the preferred way of adding storage space to a computer running a Linux-based operating system seems to be to add disks, judging by my search results. Naturally, this is a great way of minimizing disruption in a physical machine, but what if you’re running your machines virtually? Adding virtual disks tends to… Continue reading Resizing the system volume on a Linux VM
When the French attack…
A consultant working with our Alcatel phone system encountered a weird issue that caused us some problems the other day. When attempting to install an Open Touch Media Server (used for receiving fax, for example), the entire vCenter client environment froze, and a reload of the page resulted in the following error message: 503 Service… Continue reading When the French attack…
Manually removing ghost vVols from IBM SVC-based storage
As part of my evaluation of presenting vVols to vCenter from an IBM FlashSystem V9000, I decided to start from scratch after learning a bit about the benefits and limitations of the system. That is: I like vVols a lot, but I learned some things in my tests that I wanted to do differently in… Continue reading Manually removing ghost vVols from IBM SVC-based storage
FTP server on IIS
I recently had cause to set up an FTP server for internal use on a Windows server, and I bumped into an issue that took me a little while to figure out, since I had never done it before: I wanted to give a domain user account an isolated directory, and started out by creating… Continue reading FTP server on IIS