Entries by Gavin Henry

OpenLDAP 2.4.23 is now officially out. Download now and review the final changes list:

OpenLDAP 2.4.23 is now available for download as detailed on our download page:
http://www.openldap.org/software/download/

and should soon be available on all official mirrors:
ftp://ftp.openldap.org/pub/OpenLDAP/MIRRORS

This is a maintenance release and is made available for general use. Users of OpenLDAP Software are encouraged to upgrade.

Significant contributors to this release include:
Howard Chu (Symas Corp)
Quanah Gibson-Mount (Yahoo! Inc)
Ralf Haferkamp (SUSE Linux)
Pierangelo Masarati (Politecnico di Milano)

OpenLDAP 2.4.23 Release (2010/06/30)
Fixed libldap to return server's error code (ITS#6569)
Fixed libldap memleaks (ITS#6568)
Fixed liblutil off-by-one with delta (ITS#6541)
Fixed slapd acls with glued databases (ITS#6468)
Fixed slapd syncrepl rid logging (ITS#6533)
Fixed slapd modrdn handling of invalid values (ITS#6570)
Fixed slapd-bdb hasSubordinates computation (ITS#6549)
Fixed slapd-bdb to use memcpy instead for strcpy (ITS#6474)
Fixed slapd-bdb entry cache delete failure (ITS#6577)
Fixed slapd-ldap^[?] to return control responses (ITS#6530)
Fixed slapo-ppolicy to use Debug (ITS#6566)
Fixed slapo-refint to zero out freed DN vals (ITS#6572)
Fixed slapo-rwm to use Debug (ITS#6566)
Fixed slapo-sssvlv to use Debug (ITS#6566)
Fixed slapo-syncprov lost deletes in refresh phase (ITS#6555)
Fixed slapo-valsort to use Debug (ITS#6566)
Fixed contrib/nssov network.c missing patch (ITS#6562)
Build Environment
Fixed test043 attribute sorting (ITS#6553)
Documentation
slapd-config(5) note default rootdn (ITS#6546)

MD5 (openldap-2.4.23.tgz) = 90150b8c0d0192e10b30157e68844ddf
SHA1 (openldap-2.4.23.tgz) = 26027e7020256c5f47e17787f17ee8b31af42378

If you're about to "make current" for FreeSWITCH read:

[Freeswitch-users] mod_limit / db / hash changes - If you update action is required

Gavin.

Hi all,

I'd like to share some of my favourite essays from Paul Graham. These are in a kind of order of which I love the best and are related to software startups, but they can really, really help any business:

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy - http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html
Good and Bad Procrastination - http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
How to Do What You Love - http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
How Not to Die - http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

Why There Aren't More Googles - http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html
Apple's Mistake - http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html
Microsoft is Dead - http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
What Business can Learn from Open Source - http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html

Why to Not Not Start a Startup - http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html
How to Start a Startup - http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
Organic Startup Ideas - http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html
Startups in 13 Sentences - http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
How to Fund a Startup - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
The Hardest Lessons For Startups to Learn - http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
What Startups Are Really Like - http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html


How to Disagree - http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Copy What You Like - http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html



Please read them all!

Hi all,

The iPhone 4, which was officially unveiled on the June 7th at a presentation in San Francisco, includes several new features that will benefit VoIP users. These are touted as:

• Multi-task when making a VoIP call, so customers can access other applications, such as a calendar, during a conversation.


• Built-in noise cancellation to eliminate background sounds when making VoIP calls.


• Videoconferencing will also be possible between iPhones via the Face Time feature, allowing remote employees to partake in business meetings.


• Longer battery life, while the screen resolution has been significantly improved compared to previous models.

The iPhone 4 will be available in the UK from June 24th.

Wow you may think this is amazing, but all these features have been available on Android phones (Google's Open Source mobile operating system) for ages. I've just got an HTC Desire from O2 and it's the No.1 phone in the world right now. It can do all of above and more, plus the Sipdroid VoIP client is free and works on 3G and WiFi using our VoIP services or anyone elses. Best of all it's free software and just works.


Another good blog post covers why the iPhone can never keep up with Android or Open Source:

"Through a bevy of handset makers, Android can offer a variety of phones that will make it difficult for
Apple to beat with just one hardware release a year. While it is hard to

ever go wrong with an iPhone, Android offers a ton of alternative form

factors, price points and carriers: Sprint (NYSE: S) has released the

first 4G phone on Android; T-Mobile has a new competitive Android phone

with a slide-out keyboard; the HTC Incredible sold by Verizon has been

flying off store shelves; and even Google’s Nexus One still boasts some

of the latest hardware. Not to mention new Android phones from Samsung

and LG (SEO: 066570) coming later this summer."

Google now have figures to show that 100,000 open source Android mobile phones are getting activated daily!

Gavin.

Hi all,

We follow the KashFlow Blog as we use them for our accounts (the only non open source software we use and is based online). Duane, the owner, did an interesting blog post today about External Funding vs Organic Growth.

We're in the Organic/Bootstrapping camp as that's how we've funded our upcoming VoIP service provider called SureVoIP

In the two articles he links to, I liked the TechCrunch one as it lists these 16 things to help raise your profile to help bring in the business to bootstrap:

0. Get on Twitter and Tweet smart things [added Dec 2009]
1. News is a Purple Cow – UK translation: Man Bites Dog
2. Keep in contact – conversations usually beat press releases
3. Negotiate your exclusives
4. Don’t be a leech – Be part of the community
5. Conferences are not news
6. Be a great contact
7. Be a friendly blogger
8. Should you hire a PR firm?
9. Want to join in? Network.
10. Please pitch like a human
11. Understand who you are talking to
12. The media likes CEOs
13. Do you really need to have formal press meetings?
14. One company in a space is not (generally) a story
15. “Yes, but how do I get on TechCrunch.com?”
16. “Strike when the news is hot” added 16 March 2010


In summary Duane closes with something I agree with:

So where does that leave us? I spend a lot of time talking to startups
and there are no hard and fast rules that apply to them all. What I would say is that if there is the opportunity to build a profitable business, while maintaining control and enjoying a reasonable quality of life and all while bootstrapping, then this is the ideal route to take. If there are market forces, competitive issues or limited lifespan pressures that mean that a funding route is the only way to go, then so be it.

Hi all,

Just a short note to say we're now listed on the Xorcom reseller pages as we really like their Asterisk hardware.

Thanks.

Hi all,

Another quick one, just finished a conference call with BT and our credit check and applications are now all complete and approved. We will have our VoIP interconnect with BT live in month or so!!

Cheers,

Gavin.

Hi all,

Two bits of important news today:

"For those of you who use libcurl in your own applications, you may be interested to know that I've written a new LDAP^[?] implementation for libcurl." - Howard Chu from Symas

and

Shutdown of the OpenLDAP-Software list in favor of the OpenLDAP-Technical list

So when you post to openldap-software@openldap.org don't get scared, nothing has happened to OpenLDAP!

Thanks,

Gavin.

Hi all,

Looks like all of them are coming in except critically low areas, but we'll use sub-allocations from our carriers for these areas.

We'll have around 98% UK coverage for numbers in the end. We haven't even finished applying or done 03/07/08/09 yet!

We also got our Communications Provider ID and Carrier-Pre-Select numbers.

More later,

Gavin.

Just a quick note to say that our application to join the The Internet Telephony Services Providers’ Association has been approved!

More about all this next month.

Thanks,

Gavin.

My Yubikey arrived yesterday and I was keen to check out the apps already enabled for it, but it was better just using Google.



A search for Yubikey Drupal found the Drupal Yubikey plugin. So I dropped that into one of the main Suretec websites, got my Yubico API Key for the plugin config and now I can log in with a password plus the key (or just the one-time-password from teh Yubikey is I so desire)!

I love the usb keyboard that just pastes the OTP key into whereever your cursor is. But what happens if you loose your key and vital services are enabled with Yubikey I wonder?

Gavin.

It's taken us a while to get round to ordering one of these Yubikeys from Yubico, but they do look great and have lots of documentation via the wiki.

We're going to be testing them via the pam module for SSH access (and of course using pam_ldap).

So, users in LDAP^[?] via pam, and a Yubikey, let's see how it goes!

(will be interesting for logging in a SIP handset via Asterisk or FreeSWITCH that needs one too and all the others technologies Suretec use and support (Catalyst, Perl, PostgresSQL, Squid and more....). We'll see....

Hi all,

Andreas Andersson posted this on the openldap technical list last week about CN=Montior:

My name is Andreas and I want to inform you about a little project I've been working on called CN=Monitor.
It's about monitoring and verifying directory servers with focus on open source LDAP^[?] servers. From single installed servers to large scaled deployments.

Its a webbased application where you can:
- Verify availability, compare load and performance between servers
- Collect historical events for long term analysis (and get weekly reports by mail)
- Verify cluster and load balancing functionality
- Query several directories at the same time for data consistancy verification
... and a lot more.

Why the name CN=Monitor. Well.. a lot of the information collected and analyzed is gathered from the CN=Monitor base DN.

Looks very promising!!!

Will keep you posted,

Gavin.

We founded the TechMeetup because there is an abundance of events for entrepreneurs to meet investors and lawyers, and next to nothing for techies and tech. Considering the wealth of tech talent around (yes you), why haven’t we made the effort before to get to know everyone – see what else everyone is working on – get help on our projects from others – and talk about some of the cool stuff we’re doing – web apps, software, mobile apps, hardware, games…

I'll be there at the Aberdeen Techmeetup 6.30pm tomorrow:

TIME: Wed, 21th Oct, 6.30pm

VENUE: North Side Meston Building, Aberdeen Uni (map)

SPEAKERS: Gavin MacLean, James Littlejohn

It's been a long process, almost 6 weeks, what with the new laws regarding PCI DSS compliance as of the 1st of October 2009, PCI DSS Scans, Business plans, website terms and connditions and many more things we have a merchant account at last!!!

This is mainly for our new Internet Telephony Service Provider called SureVoIP which is currently live with various customers but has no front facing sales and marketing site yet, only the admin and customer portal.

We'll keep you posted with a proper press release in due course.

Thanks,

Gavin.