Dirk-Jan’s blog

It took me some time to figure out how to get the wireless device of my Amilo Li 2727 working with Windows 7. For the ones who stumble across the same problem I have describe how to solve it.

1. Download the Windows XP Drivers For Amilo Li 2727 here
2. Extract the contents of the compressed file
3. Open ‘Control Panel’, click on ‘System’ and choose ‘Device Manager’
4. Open the ‘Action’ menu item and click on ‘Add legacy hardware’
5. Next -> Next -> Next and pick ‘Network Adapters’
6. Choose ‘Have disk’ and Navigate into the ‘04 WLAN’ directory
7. Select ‘Atheros AR5007EG Wireless Network Adapter’
8. Install the FSC Launchmanager from the ‘05 FSC_LaunchManager’ directory by executing the setup.exe
9. Reboot

Once you have rebooted you should have a working wireless device. To active the wireless device, you need to press the Fn+F1 button combination and choose WLAN. I can confirm this driver works on Windows 7.

Good luck!

This howto describes how to configure vsftpd to enable SSL using so called intermediate/ chaining certificates.

Edit vsftpd.conf so that SSL is enabled:

It is very important to construct the certificate file /usr/share/ssl/certs/vsftpd.pem with the correct certificate order. The fist Your certificate file has to be a .pem file. If you also received an Intermediate Certificate then you have to concatenate this with the Domain Certificate and your Private Key file into one single .pem file. Make sure all the information is included, without any spaces or blanks, see below.

This is how to check a SSL enabled FTP service (FTP Secure). See the result below:

Today I recieved a strange message when I tried to open a RDP connection.

To resolve this issue you need to add the client hostname.

This happens with rdeskop version 1.6.0 on Fedora 11 (rdesktop-1.6.0-4.fc11.x86_64).

This website was served by an old timer PC running on an Intel N440BX Server Board codename Nightshade. Despite being a rock solid system, it housed a dual Intel Pentium III 600Mhz processor configuration which did not meet today’s performance demands and energy consumption.
So I decided to build a new computer system that was a little bit faster and more energy efficient than it’s predecessor and thus environmentally friendly.

After doing some research I decided to go for the following setup:

• Antec NSK3480 MicroTower, EarthWatts 380 Watt PSU
• Intel Desktop board D945GCLF2, Atom 330
• Kingston ValueRam 2GB DDR2 533MHz C4
• 2 Western Digital AV-GP Green 1TB, 5400~7200rpm, 8MB, SATA2
• 2 Serial ATA II Cable, 0.75m
• Scythe Mini Kaze Ultra 40mm x 20mm

The Antec casing comes with an energy efficient PSU. It’s 80 PLUS® certified and is equipped with a built-in active PFC to make the PSU reduce electrical waste and protect the environment.

As some reviews at silentpcreview.com stated, the stock cooler on the chipset is not that quite as you would expect. I decided to replace the 40mm x 10mm stock cooler with the Scythe Mini Kaze Ultra 40mm x 20mm. Because the motherboard sits inside a MicroTower there was space enough to put the Mini Kaze Ultra on top of the heatsink as you can see on the pictures below.

As expected there’s nearly no noise coming from the system. The case itself is designed to do noise cancellation with it’s dual chamber structure, and the new cooler only whispers silently. Besides doing a nice quite job it also makes a difference at it’s cooling task. That’s because it’s 10mm higher then the stock cooler.

Temperatures with the stock cooler:

1. Chip Temp: +33.0°C
2. CPU Temp: +43.0°C
3. Sys Temp: +38.0°C

Temperatures with the Scythe Mini Kaze Ultra cooler:

1. Chip Temp: +31.0°C
2. CPU Temp: +41.0°C
3. Sys Temp: +36.0°C

I’ve planned to do an energy consumption test in the coming days.

When using WordPress version 2.5.1 (Debian Lenny package) it is not possible to add/upload media using the “Add media” button in the editor. If you click on Add an image, a new window appears where you should have the option buttons “Browse” and “Upload”, but they’re gone. What’s left is a “Choose files to upload” button that won’t do anything.

I have experienced this problem when using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.14 on Linux with the Shockwave Flash add-on enabled.

Workaround: When this add-on is disabled the add media problem will not occur. To disable the add-on, open Firefox and go to ‘Tools’ -> ‘Add-ons’ and select disable Shockwave Flash.

Last weekend I installed the upgraded version of Leopard on my Mac mini. The installation went successfully but took a long time to complete. At first nothing seemed to be broken, but soon I discovered the loss of my NFS shares. So I started to look for the Directory Utility, because that was the tool I used for auto mounting my NFS shares in Leopard. After a little digging, I found out that I needed to re-add them using Disk Utility.

- Inside Disk Utility, click File then NFS Mounts..

So if you’re looking for your lost NFS shares you now know what to do.

Last week I’ve spend some time doing an Asterisk PBX setup at home. Because I like the technique and my girlfriend likes to use the phone I decided to build my own PBX (Private Branch Exchange). In other words a telephone exchange. So doing some research I figured out what the requirements where and came up with the following components:
- a SIP provider
- a SIP compliant phone
- Asterisk PBX software
- an Internet connected Linux server running 24/7

As for the SIP provider I chose the Budgetphone company because they support Asterisk and you get a local area number on which you can be called.

On my search for a suitable phone selected the Siemens Gigaset A580 IP. The main reasons I chose this phone where:
- it’s a hybrid phone so you can use POTS and or VOIP
- it’s energy efficient by using multiple energy-saving technologies
- it’s in a affordable price range

The installation of Asterisk was a piece of cake. Being a very happy user of Debian Linux, I installed the pre-compiled package from the Debian repository by executing the following command:

In my case the Asterisk server has a public ip-address, and the phone base station is located in private ip space behind a NAT router.

Below you’ll find the Asterisk configuration. This configuration is known to work on Asterisk version 1.4.21.2~dfsg-3. In my case all configuration files reside in ‘/etc/asterisk/’.

sip.conf:

extensions.conf:

voicemail.conf

When done editing those files, you need to connect to the Asterisk CLI (Command Line Interface) by using the following command:

Set the verbosity level to 10:

To reload the new configuration issue:

To see if the SIP services have registered succesfully issue:

I needed to configure the next fields in the base station configuration to get the phone registered with Asterisk. Go to ’settings’ -> ‘telephony’ -> ‘connections’ -> ‘edit’ -> ’show advanced settings’.
- Authentication Name: phone
- Authentication password: *******
- Username: phone

- Domain: local
- Proxy server address: Asterisk server ip
- Registrar server: Asterisk server ip

To make the MWI (Message Wait Indicator) work on the handset you need to follow the next steps:
Web browse to the Siemens phone web interface, go to ’settings’ -> ‘telephony’ -> ‘Network Mailbox’. For the connection you want MWI with, enter the voicemail access number into the ‘Call Number’ box, in my case 1001 and tick the ‘Active’ box. This will make the Siemens phone subscribe to the mailbox status.

Have fun!

Recently I have a personal certificate also known as a Digital ID on a smart card (Aladdin eToken) to access a secure web service. While installing the certificate I noticed it is also possible to use it to digitally sign and encrypt email with the same certificate, so I fired up Thunderbird and added the PCKS#11 security device to configure signing using S/MIME. See the steps below.

“PKCS#11 is one of the family of standards called Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS), published by RSA Laboratories. It defines a platform-independent API to cryptographic tokens, such as Hardware Security Modules (HSM) and smart cards.” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKCS11)

I assume you already have installed the eToken software. In case you haven’t, take a look at this article I wrote earlier.

Open Thunderbird and go to Preferences -> Advanced -> Encryption -> Security Devices

Click on “Load” and enter a Module name or choose the default like I did, which is “New PKCS#11 Module” and browse for the ‘libeTPkcs11.so’ library. This file probably sits in ‘/usr/lib’ or ‘/usr/lib64′. Be sure to pick the right one, because you need the 64bit version if you’re using 64bit Firefox.

Open Account Settings -> Security

Select the certificate on your smart card you like to use.

Thunderbird and Firefox are not bundled with the needed CA’s to support GlobalSign PersonalSign Class 2 out-of-the-box. You have to Import the GlobalSign Primary Class 2 CA (http://secure.globalsign.net/cacert/PrimClass2.crt) and GlobalSign PersonalSign Class 2 CA (http://secure.globalsign.net/cacert/PersonalSignClass2.crt) to make it work in Thunderbird, otherwise you’ll notice you’re not able to send digitally signed email.