Thunderbird - Use Gmail as address book

To be reviewed

The article refers to an LDAP server which is installed locally and which connects to Google address book to retrieve the address book information. The guide foresees in the installation on different platforms including Mac OS X.
This can be for that reason a very good alternative to Apple's MobileMe which costs about 79euro per year

Referenced article : http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/usage4.html#setup

Thunderbird - Backup

It seems not very important, but once you loose your appreciated mail history you can be far away from running your business. All of you contacts, appointments etc can be captured in a certain way in your mail archives.
It is therefor very important to make on a regular basis a copy of your thunderbird data so that you can restore it if required.

I have not run into any problem with other problems than Windows yet, so the information is restricted to this environment.

Backing up the data

The procedural steps are very simple:

• go to the directory where the profiles are stored
  The directory can be found (in a standard installation) in \users\\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird
  The directory named users will seem to be named differently on dutch systems. Using the users directory works however.
• Copy the content of this entire directory
• Paste it on a safe location

How to restore your mails and other data?

Running into this problem after a migration from Vista to Windows 7 I found this article which refers  this tool at this site.
The software - which is a Thunderbird add-on - makes it possible to import thunderbird data of any kind back into the existing thunderbird environment.
Tested the software ... and it worked for importing the folders from a backup set of the thunderbird profile.

XEN network cards

First location to look for information:
Xen Networking wiki

Info about configuring XEN logical network cards on physical nic's:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/470
To be reviewed ...

apache loadbalancer

This Link is a doc file on how to configure apache to act as a load balancer.

Just in case the document would not last for ever, the scripting involved:

Definition on the virtual host level:

        ServerName www.yourcompany.com
 ServerAlias yourcompany.com

        DocumentRoot /Library/WebServer/Documents

        ProxyRequests Off

        
          Order deny,allow
          Allow from all
        

        ProxyPass /balancer-manager !
        ProxyPass / balancer://mycluster/ stickysession=JSESSIONID nofailover=On
        ProxyPassReverse / ajp://public1.yourcompany.com:8009
        ProxyPassReverse / ajp://public2.yourcompany.com:8009
        
          BalancerMember ajp://public1.yourcompany.com:8009 route=public1
          BalancerMember ajp://public2.yourcompany.com:8009 route=public2
          ProxySet lbmethod=byrequests
        

        
          SetHandler balancer-manager
        

        
    AllowOverride AuthConfig
 

Protection of the balance-manager path.

mkdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/balancer-manager
htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/conf/security/users administrator
cd /Library/WebServer/Documents/balancer-manager
touch .htaccess
vi .htaccess

Text to enter in the .htaccess file:

AuthName "secured"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile users

require valid-user

on the balanced server side:

Check the AJP port on the server:
jboss JBOSS_HOME/server/default/deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/server.xml
tomcat: TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml 
Configuration of this file:

connection link

Not yet tested myself but will not take long ...

Create a VM from a running Windows Environment

Check out the utility disk2vhd which is described here.
It creates a standard Virtual Machine Harddisk from a running Windows system so that the same pc can be run by different VM software distributions.

Browsers - Default proxy configuration

This is just to recall me ... ;-)

WPAD : Web Proxy Auto Discovery

To set automatic proxy configuration use the following line as an automatic proxy script reference:

http://wpad/wpad.dat

This assumes wpad can be found on the local network.
Else no proxy configuration is used.

Move to OpenOffice from MS-OfficeInproductivity Suite

Ever wondered if macro's in OpenOffice are the same as they are in MS-Office?
Well ... they are definitively not.

While discussing the Famous takeover of Sun by Oracle, we got this magnificent product OpenOffice on top of it. So, having all these macro's in our inproductivity Suite we are a little bit stuck with MicroS.


A dear colleague - Marc - has already found some answer and solution to the question : http://www.business-spreadsheets.com/vba2oo.asp.

I have not tested it yet, but knowing Marc I believe him on his words - even those not honorable - that this is the way to go.

Thanks Marc!!

Wake Up On Lan - the mistery

If you would be thinking that a simple access to a shutdown server would bring it up, you will have found out that is not at all the case.

I had the same kind of problem in my perception of what "wake on lan" could be and started sniffing around. On the 'net I found this very interesting article which will explain the concept - which is not to difficult - and provides along the way the solution by means of a piece of Java code. (the code is at the end of this article)

In a way of safeguarding this referenced article's information - and not having to look it up again - here's a kind of resumé.

A wake up on lan is performed by sending a very specific packet to a machine's NIC (= network interface card) which should have the WOL capability. Because it is the NIC which is addressed and not the computer's operating system itselve the addressing is done at the level of the MAC address.

The packets content, which is often named the 'magic packet', is composed of 6 bytes filled with 1bits (= ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) followed by 6 bytes that contain the MAC address of the NIC, followed by a repetition of the MAC address bytes 'til the packet is full.

Attention should be taken that the packet gets transmitted upto the machines NIC. It is very useful to consider the network topology on which you are broadcasting (UDP packets) the Magic Packet. If for example you want to wake up your server from some lokation on the internet, you should enable port forwarding rules on your Internet Router).

A commandline tool exists (windows) which is called mc-cmd and can be downloaded from this location.

Further information can be found, obviously, on Wikipedia.

For those speaking French WOL should not be translated into LAINE .... it will not work ;-)

I reformatted the java code of the article to suite my own layout ...

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;

public class WakeUpOnLan 
{  
   // Define the port to be used to send the UDP packet
   public static final int PORT = 9;
   
   public static 
   void 
   main
   (  String[] args
   ) 
   {
      if (args.length != 2) 
      {  
         System.out.println("Usage: java WakeOnLan  ");
         System.out.println("Example: java WakeOnLan 192.168.0.255 00:0D:61:08:22:4A");
         System.out.println("Example: java WakeOnLan 192.168.0.255 00-0D-61-08-22-4A");
         System.exit(1);
      }
        
      String ipStr  = args[0];
      String macStr = args[1];

      try
      {  
         byte[] macBytes = getMacBytes(macStr);
         byte[] bytes = new byte[6 + 16 * macBytes.length];
         for (int i = 0; i < 6; i++) 
         {  
            bytes[i] = (byte) 0xff;
         }
         for (int i = 6; i < bytes.length; i += macBytes.length) 
         {  
            System.arraycopy(macBytes, 0, bytes, i, macBytes.length);
         }
            
         InetAddress address = InetAddress.getByName(ipStr);
         DatagramPacket packet = new DatagramPacket(bytes, bytes.length, address, PORT);
         DatagramSocket socket = new DatagramSocket();
         socket.send(packet);
         socket.close();
            
         System.out.println("Wake-on-LAN packet sent.");
      }
      catch 
      (  Exception e
      )
      {  
         System.out.println("Failed to send Wake-on-LAN packet: + e");
         System.exit(1);
      }
        
   }
    
    private static 
    byte[] 
    getMacBytes
    (  String macStr
    )  throws IllegalArgumentException 
    {
       byte[] bytes = new byte[6];
       String[] hex = macStr.split("(\\:|\\-)");
       if (hex.length != 6) 
       { 
          throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid MAC address.");
       }
       try 
       {  
          for (int i = 0; i < 6; i++) 
          {  
             bytes[i] = (byte) Integer.parseInt(hex[i], 16);
          }
        }
        catch (NumberFormatException e) 
        {
           throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid hex digit in MAC address.");
        }
        return bytes;
    }
}

Tug's Blog: Using HTTPS with Web Services

Tug's Blog: Using HTTPS with Web Services

OEL netwerk configuration

Sometimes a system has been initiated to use DHCP and the use of a static ip-address is required, including correct dns resolution and gateway settings.

The following steps accomplish this:

Define the parameters of the NIC

• Connect as root
• Go to directoy /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
• Identify the file that is used for the NIC that you must define:
  
  for example ifcfg-eth0 is for the traditional first network card.
  
  
  
• Verify/Change the settings depending on your needs
• When changing from dhcp to static addressing, the file should become something like this:
  
  BOOTPROTO=static
  
  
  
  BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
  
  HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
  
  IPADDR=192.168.1.102
  
  NETMASK=255.255.255.0
  
  NETWORK=192.168.1.0
  
  ONBOOT=yes
  
  
  

Define the paramter for the network in itself

• Connect as root
• Go to /etc/sysconfig
• Edit the file network
• Set the hostname here and the gateway for the network.
• The file should contain something like:
  
  HOSTNAME=myservername
  
  
  
  GATEWAY=192.168.1.1
  
  
  

Set the resolv.conf file with the nameservers

• Connect as root
• Go to directory /etc
• Edit the file resolv.conf
• Add/modify lines in the file with the specification of the nameserver.
• An example
  
  search hellings.be
  
  
  
  nameserver vvv.xxx.yyy.zzzz
  
  
  
• Add as many nameservers as you require

Restart the network

• Connect as root
• Restart the network
  service network restart