slaptijack

After all this time, I still love VirtualBox, the open source hypervisor from Sun (now Oracle). I use it almost everyday on my iMac to either test something in Windows XP or see what's going on in some version of Linux. It's been almost a year since the release of …

If you're using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or one of it's variants (CentOS, etc.), you may have noticed that using a non-standard document root for your Apache-based web site results in a DocumentRoot does not exist warning if the directory exists. The most likely cause of this problem is …

It's not often that I have to restart a Asterisk VoIP PBX. I recently upgraded to the latest version of Asterisk 1.4. After the installation was complete, I restarted the service and everything appeared to be functioning OK. Processes were running and owned by the asterisk user. When I …

In this case, gentlemen, size matters.

Yesterday, I calculated the average packet size for one of the networks I work on using data from 263986M (263,986,000,000+) packets.

Average packet size for that sample was 557 bytes.

Protocol Basics

Layer: Application Transport: <acronym title="Transmission Control Protocol">TCP</acronym> or <acronym title="User Datagram Protocol">UDP</acronym> Port(s): 5060, 5061 RFC(s): 2543, 3261

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)

SIP is by far the most popular protocol used in VoIP communication today. SIP was designed as a …

If you have an interest in information security from a technical or managerial point of view, check out Principles of Information Security. It does an excellent job of presenting material for both audiences.

If you have other vendors you would like to see on this list, send me a message …

Somehow, I have let my Gmail inbox get totally out of control. I don't know if it was the holidays or what, but as of this morning, I had over 800 unread messages in my Gmail inbox. I decided a little while ago that it was time to focus on …

Importing Mozilla Firefox bookmarks into Safari on your Mac is really easy. Firefox stores its bookmarks in an HTML file that can be parsed by Safari. In Safari, simply click on the File menu and select Import Bookmarks. This will open a file selection dialog box. Firefox stores its bookmarks …

Previously, I mentioned that I was unable to remove the FAX= portion of the string produced by Cisco's $s$ (or $d$) macro in a T.37 store and forward fax configuration. That's still the case. I have found no way of doing this inside IOS. If it's possible, I've …

If you get this error when trying to save something in the Django admin, it's probably because you forgot to synchronize the database after adding the admin application. If you are using a pre-1.2 version of Django, you can simply:

$ ./managy.py syncdb

Django 1.2 (which is currently …

Former Lotus Notes users may prefer to see unread messages in red rather than just bold. Microsoft Outlook uses two different views to display message lists to the user: Messages and Messages with AutoPreview. We will need to change the font color to red in both views to ensure that …

For about a month, I've had a problem with my Contacts app crashing on my T-Mobile G1. Whenever this would happen, I would be forced to close the Contacts application. This was a pretty major pain in the butt since I tend to use the Contacts and Favorites tab to …

I use screen for various purposes. It's nice to be able to sit down at a different terminal and attach to my same session, for example. I also occasionally run some long-term commands that will blow up if my session is disconnected. The one thing I need to do with …

For some reason, sorting a dictionary by its keys seems to be one of the most frequently asked Python questions. I'm not sure if this is because it's just much easier to do in other languages, or if the semantics of the language just confuse new Python developers. I guess …

If you're like me, you abandoned non-free virtualization options in favor of VirtualBox. I use VirtuaBox every day on my iMac in order to perform Windows or Linux specific tasks. Since Sun released VirtualBox 3 this summer, they continued to improve the product. Check out the ChangeLog to see what …