So over the years, we have some old desktops in the office which aren’t really good enough to use for development any more. I’ve started breathing new life into them by using them to backup our Subversion repositories by using svnsync.
By setting up cron jobs to sync every x minutes or even hours you can have a huge amount of redundancy for next to no cost.
The read only mirrors are also handy for other applications that create load on your repositories (build servers etc) so I use a near real-time mirror to run trac and our Bamboo server from.

A week or so ago, my boss came to me asking if I could write something on what’d I’d done internally with XMPP and Asterisk for someone he knew at Computerworld. I was only too happy to have someone listen to my ramblings, so I wrote up some replies to some of the questions his friend had asked.
Last night my boss sent me a link to the article. Unfortunately, the article makes it look like he was the one who replied to the questions instead of me, but it’s nice to get some of my work out there anyway.
Here’s the full article: Glintech integrates Asterisk, Jabber for open source UC platform.
For those who actually understand what the article is about, you’ll probably realise that what I did here wasn’t anything particularly difficult or out of the ordinary. But hopefully for those who don’t, it might open a few eyes to some of the things that can be done with open source software.

I’ve recently installed Drupal 6, and was having problems sending out emails (specifically for new users and password resets).
The problem was that sometimes the mail was coming through, and other times it wasn’t (it didn’t even appear in our mail server logs).
After lots of scouting around, I noticed that in /var/log/maillog (on FC6), the relay kept on changing.
On our network, we have 3 domain controllers, one of which is a mail server. Send mail was using it’s “Smart” relay to figure out where to relay the mail through, but unfortunately it kept finding whichever domain controller replied first, rather than just the mail server. This meant that sometimes, when it got the mail server, the email would come through, and other times it wouldn’t.
To fix the problem, I had to edit the “Smart” relay host in:

I searched for “DS” and came across a section such as:

I changed this to read

where mail.domain.com is the name of the mail server.
Then I restarted the sendmail service using:

and everything started working!

Just a quick post to mention that I’m heading to Melbourne next month for the Asterisk Bootcamp (care of work). Should be a good opportunity to learn a lot of info about Asterisk and VoIP in general.

In my last post, I was bitching about having problems with VLC and digital channels and trying to stream. Well this morning I saw a slashdot article on MythDora. I have to say, once I got past some hardware issues, I was all set.
Very very happy
I’ll probably still end up using VLC to multicast, as mythstreamtv only broadcasts on http.