May 2011 - Blind-sysadmins - lists.hodgsonfamily.org

Telephony systems
by Andrew Hodgson 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

Hi all, Our current Call Manager 4.x servers are creaking under their age, and we are looking at replacing this either with a new Cisco telephony system or a completely new system altogether. The system has to use IP as the connection to the handsets, as we don't want to add in more cables. Has anyone any experience in deploying a new Call manager setup, or a similar telephony system, and how was the accessibility? Thanks. Andrew.

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let's talk Backup Exec
by Ryan Shugart 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

Hey everyone: I just got a promotion at work, and with the goodness of a promotion comes more responsibilities. I'm now in charge of our backup infrastructure. We run Backup Exec 12.5, and have 16 or so media servers in various branch offices around the world. While Backup Exec used to be very accessible, over the last two versions accessibility seems to have gone into something of a decline, I already use scripts just to read the main table of jobs, and might need more just to get around the scheduling window so I can actually schedule a job. I'd consider the rest of the program accessible but clunky, tabbing doesn't always bring you where you think it will, on some screens tab order seems to be dynamic. Backup Exec also has an odd way of bringing up alert windows and grabbing your focus, even when you tell it specifically not to. While clunkyness is OK on one server, when you have fifteen individual servers to manage and no way to do it in a centralized fashion clunkyness is less acceptable. This is also less than a quarter of my new responsibilities as well. The current admin has the remote desktop console setup with all the Backup Exec servers in his favorites, stays logged into each server with a Backup Exec window open, and flicks from screen to screen and can easily glance at the output from each job. For us screen reader users, that doesn't work well. I've already got e-mail alerts set up and am using some Outlook rules to sort failure jobs out from successes, but was wondering if there's anything else I can be doing? I'd think people in really large environments with hundreds of media servers aren't logging into each server on a daily basis, so there has to be better ways to handle this. Any ideas? Thanks. Ryan

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Distributed Version Control System
by David Mehler 20 May '11

20 May '11

Hello, I'm looking for a version control system for a few up and coming personal projects, one already underway one to begin. Over the years I've tried tackling both cvs and svn as version control systems with no success. I'm therefor looking in to a distributed version control system I do plan to have other developers assisting or taking a machine away from my network and not allowing internet access to a server, so I'll need to go distributed. Things I need: Good Windows and Linux support I'm going to either be working in both environments or have developers who will. For the windows I'd prefer a gui app that integrates in to windows explorer. File and Directory renaming support I've read so much today my head is swimming but if I rename a file or a directory I want the version control system to track that. I know some do, some don't. Central server A network or internet accessible server that developers can pull a copy of the current files, go offline and work distributed, and then come back online and commit changes. Branching and merging Not sure about this one, but I've read that cvs and svn in particular make branching (cvs) and merging (svn) I hope I don't have those backwards difficult. I've looked at: 1. Git 2. Mercurial 3. Monotone I started out with many more, but those seem to be the ones that will best work. I was wondering after all that if anyone has any opinions pro conn on these three distributed version control systems? Or, others I might have missed that might work as well. I am preferential to open source. Thanks a lot. Dave.

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Copy & paste in Putty using keyboard
by Ben Mustill-Rose 20 May '11

20 May '11

Hey all, I need to paste some text into a file which I'm modifying via vi which resides on a machine that I'm connecting to using putty. For those of you that don't know, control v for paste won't work inside putty; it just sends the charactor that control + v represents. The idea is that you can right click anyware inside the putty window and the text will be pasted in. This isn't usually an issue, except I'm working on a system without a mouse. I did try using expan drive (A great product for mounting sftp locations as drives in explorer) to find the file that I want and then modify it in notepad, but doing it this way bash seems to see some strange charactors which are stopping the script from running - I think it might be the different way that windows and linux do linebreaks. I did think I'd found a way to paste; hal doesn't offer any form of cursor mooving as far as I'm aware, so I loded up narrator, told it to move the mouse to the active item, opened the putty window then used hal to perform a right click, but this doesn't seem to work. We're talking quite a few lines of code here so I don't really want to echo them to the file line by line if it can be avoided. As always, any solutions or tips will be gratefully received, but I think I'll be going into s3 soon since its just past 4AM in the uk. Cheers, Ben.

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JFW and event viewer (Windows 7)
by Andrew Hodgson 05 May '11

05 May '11

Hi, Has anyone else noticed that in JFW 12 the event viewer text is not reading out when using the event viewer in Windows 7? Andrew.

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Cisco Linksys Routers
by George Bell 02 May '11

02 May '11

This is an issue which has stumped us, but may be of interest generally. 1) Do you have access to Server 2003? 2) Do you have a Linksys WAG320N Router connected to that server? (That's the Dual Band Wireless-N ADSL2+ Modem Gigabit Router.) 3) Does your router have a static IP address? 4) Windows 7 pro or above? If the answer is yes to all four, are you able to VPN into your server, and retain Internet connection? The situation I have is that the Router's Firewall has to be off in order to get Windows 7's VPN to connect at all. I can then run Outlook 2003 from my laptop and (after a long delay) it will connect to the Exchange Server 2003, and I can send and receive mail. However I get a warning that the Internet is no longer connected - although the mail side is still working. Consequently, any external links in messages fail, and IE onbvioulsy doesn't work. I hasten to add that when I had the late, now defunkt, Draytek 2600G router all was well. I can VPN into one of our suppliers, and this Internet failure does not occur. Has anyone any ideas where to even begin looking here? I'm off to Iceland on Wednesday, and while at least I can get my e-mail, it's rather a pain to have to kill the VPN to get web access. George.

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Cisco Linksys Routers
by George Bell 02 May '11

02 May '11

This is an issue which has stumped us, but may be of interest generally. 1) Do you have access to Server 2003? 2) Do you have a Linksys WAG320N Router connected to that server? (That's the Dual Band Wireless-N ADSL2+ Modem Gigabit Router.) 3) Does your router have a static IP address? 4) Windows 7 pro or above? If the answer is yes to all four, are you able to VPN into your server, and retain Internet connection? The situation I have is that the Router's Firewall has to be off in order to get Windows 7's VPN to connect at all. I can then run Outlook 2003 from my laptop and (after a long delay) it will connect to the Exchange Server 2003, and I can send and receive mail. However I get a warning that the Internet is no longer connected - although the mail side is still working. Consequently, any external links in messages fail, and IE onbvioulsy doesn't work. I hasten to add that when I had the late, now defunkt, Draytek 2600G router all was well. I can VPN into one of our suppliers, and this Internet failure does not occur. Has anyone any ideas where to even begin looking here? I'm off to Iceland on Wednesday, and while at least I can get my e-mail, it's rather a pain to have to kill the VPN to get web access. George.

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