Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Update: No X10 on a VM

Just a bit to add to the previous post. Updating VMware-Tools also does not un-gray the host serial port option. Having looked at the dmesg output, I'm leaning towards the feature being a for-pay option.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

No X10 on a VM

I was hopeful when I last posted. Sadly to say, the config option for connecting to the host serial port is grayed out, preventing me from accessing the serial port. The Internet appears to be in disagreement as to which version of ESX or ESXi actually supports the feature.

Then again, it could be my machine. My serial port is actually located on a PCI card and not the motherboard. More than likely, I'll need to resort to adding drivers to ESXi again (not something that I'm looking forward to).

I'll keep poking at it and let y'all know if I get it running. I may have to resort to a eth-to-serial adapter.

X10 on a VM?

Just noticed the artcile on vladan.fr about connecting to the host system's serial port. This is a feature that wasn't available in earlier versions. I'm wondering if I can put my X10 module back on the machine's serial port. Will keep you posted.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Connecting Bitlbee to your own StatusNet

If you want to connect Bitlbee to a private or personal StatusNet (Identica) service, one that doesn't have fancy URLs turned on, you may have notice that the following doesn't work (where "2" is the account id for the account created by the first line):

  account add twitter yourname yourpass
  account 2 set base_url http://yourserver/api
  account 2 set mode chat
  account 2 set oauth false
  account 2 on

The problem is that, if fancy URLs aren't enabled, the API line is incorrect.  The fix is use of a slightly different syntax:

  account 2 set base_url http://yourserver/index.php/api

Enjoy!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Old blog down

I've taken down the old wiki and have posted a "street sign", pointing to here.

Adding the old content to the new wiki is in progress (slow going due to time constraints). Currently, about half of the Asterisk content is posted. If there's to-be-restored content that you want prioritized, give a yell.

The movement is a bit slow due to school, re-certification requirements, and rebuilding a few VMs. (Note to self: beat self up for not testing that last piece of software on a scratch VM and for not recently employing the snapshot or backup functions.)

For Sparks, the rebuild is almost complete. We need to look at resurrecting the VPN.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Old wiki down

I've taken down the old MediaWiki wiki (finally) and have stood up its PmWiki replacement. I'll be moving most of the old content into the new wiki in the near future. If you want a priority on restoration of a particular article or topic, give a yell. In addition, I have a backlog of newer articles to post. I'll also be pulling down the old blog shortly.

The URL for the new wiki is: http://www.757.org/~joat/wiki/.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

XChat, bip, bitlbee, and troubles

I finally have a working set up with bip and bitlbee. I'd previously used the versions packaged with Ubuntu. This turned out to be a bad idea. The packaged version of bitlbee didn't have Twitter support and the packaged version of bip would crash any time it was pointed at bitlbee.

Short version of the story is bip 0.8.6 and bitlbee 1.3dev are now installed, both compiled from source code and both playing nicely.

However, I did spend most of this morning trying to get XChat to autoconnect to bip (and bitlbee/Freenode/OFTC/757 beyond that). Finally figured it out: you shouldn't add the "quote pass name:passwd:connection" string to the autoconnect command field. Instead, just add "name:passwd:connection" to the Server Password field. If you're editing the servlist_.conf file by hand, your server will have a "P" line that looks like:

  P=name:passwd:connection

I'd been messing with the "C" line and not getting anywhere.  It wasn't until I was wading through the XChat docs that I realized that this might be treated as a password string.  Tried it and it worked!

Why is it that the simple things take all day?