Steltek's world of ramblings – Page 55 – Never give up, never surrender!

New QoS implementation

Ever since I switched my Linksys router to OpenWRT (you may have noticed that I like to flash it a lot) I’ve been unhappy with the QoS implementation on it. It’s supposed to work out of the box, and while it does a great job for my SIP/VoIP connections, it fails utterly for everything else (if I don’t explicitly put a service into the ‘Express’ category, the second highest available, I get horrible throughput). Lacking documentation about what the specific settings do, I gave up on trying to customize it and dropped it in favour of another one (now based on HFSC, I don’t even know what the old one used) and hope that it will work out better. I’m still playing around with the options and testing stuff though so it is really too early to tell.

So, that’s the boring news for today. Oh and yeah, I forgot to blog about it but I DID visit the WWCL Finals in Dortmund with gamer-FM, you can see the photos that got shot there here and here.

Back from CeBIT

Whew. After having spent over a week in Hannover, I’ve finally made it back. In case you hadn’t noticed, I went to CeBIT for the World Cyber Games 2006 Samsung Euro Championship, together with a few friends from gamer-FM, to help with the coverage of the event. Now before you start asking what’s new in the IT world, let me tell you that I haven’t seen anything from CeBIT apart from our booth in Hall 27, the Heise booth in Hall 5, which I visited to grab the latest Knoppix DVD and get my PGP key signed, and parts of Hall 14 and 15, which I passed through on my way from Hall 27 to Hall 5 and back. I can tell you that we used an Analog Way EVX8022 Video Switcher/Mixer and 3 dual core AMD PCs for Video/Media Playout and Streaming/Recording stuff though, but you probably don’t care anyway.

Oh, I did snap a few pictures here and there (whenever I remembered to and wasn’t too lazy to go get my camera) which you can marvel at in the brand new gamer-FM @ SEC 2006 gallery.

Let there be light

I finally managed to get some of the, as a colleague of mine called them, West Virginia chandeliers in my ‘new’ home replaced by actual lighting fixtures. You can see them in the gallery starting on page 22.

Making Asterisk dial out through a HT488 adapter

In a previous post I mentioned that I had trouble getting Asterisk, my phone PBX, to dial out directly through my Grandstream HT-488 SIP ATA. Well, I finally found a post on the web that mentions a method to do it. Here we go:

First add this macro to your extensions.conf:

[macro-play-outnum-dtmf]
exten => s,1,Wait(1)
exten => s,2,SendDTMF(${ARG1})

Now you can call this later in your dialplan. For example, I have configured my dialplan so that I have to dial a 0 to go out through the PSTN (and thus the Grandstream Adapter, which is SIP/900 in my case). That definition looks as follows:

exten => _0.,1,Dial(SIP/900,120,rTM(play-outnum-dtmf,${EXTEN:1}))

What this does is it responds to everything that starts with a 0 (the _0 part) then dials SIP/900 (the ATA) and then, in the dialling options, generates a ringing tone (r), lets me transfer the call (T) and calls the aforementioned macro (M….) with the dialled number minus the first character (${EXTEN:1}). The macro, as you may have noticed, does nothing else than ‘play’ DTMF tones to the adapter (which, being connected to the PSTN line, causes dialling to the desired destination).

It’s quite hackish but hopefully useful to somebody. It certainly was for me.

Migrating from uw-imapd to Dovecot

From the I-should-have-done-this-much-earlier department … I recently migrated my IMAP daemon from uw-imapd to Dovecot.

For those of you who wonder what on earth I’m talking about: uw-imapd and Dovecot are so called IMAP servers, IMAP being a protocol that allows you to read your e-mails (a bit like POP3 but IMAP is designed to allow managing mails on the server, supporting stuff like folders and so on). I mostly use IMAP to access my mail through a web interface (using RoundCube Webmail that is) when I’m not at home and while uw-imapd worked fine for me as far as functionality was concerned, one of my mail accounts with thousand mails in its Inbox would always take ages to access. Knowing that, I started looking around for alternatives to uw-imapd and found the Courier IMAP server but that one would’ve required me to change my mailbox format from ‘mbox’ to ‘maildir’ which in turn would have forced me to reconfigure all other programs handling mail on my machine (the SMTP server being the most scary one). Months went on and then I finally stumbled across Dovecot which can apparently handle my mbox-type mailboxes. Continue reading “Migrating from uw-imapd to Dovecot”