The Suretec Blog - Linux

Asterisk 1.6.0 is the first official release of Asterisk 1.6

nospam@example.com (Gavin Henry) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:01:39 +0100

The first official release is out, and you can see lots of new features . Unfortunately there are still a few Realtime LDAP^[?] driver bugs, but it's getting there.

It's well worth having a play with Asterisk 1.6.0 though.

Gavin.

OpenLDAP for Fortune 20 Enterprises

nospam@example.com (Suretec) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:29:53 +0100

HP decided to partner with Symas on OpenLDAP. We engineered as well as funded major contributions to OpenLDAP. On several occasions, we had the opportunity to put the facilitator model to the test. Would Symas be able to respond to urgent support calls? Would they be able to turn around quick patches to fix bugs? Would they be able to get those patches accepted by the OpenLDAP project? Would the OpenLDAP project embrace the overall work of HP and Symas, even though it meant significant change to the underlying codebase? The answer to each of these questions was a resounding yes, and our expectations for working in this model were fully validated.

Learn how to do this for your Enterprise.

For Enterprise grade OpenLDAP Support and consultancy, contact Suretec or Symas.

GNU/Linux and Microsoft Active Directory

nospam@example.com (Gavin Henry) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:44:40 +0100

There's an interesting interview video with Gerald Carter of Samba and Likewise Software talking about Likewise Open:

Likewise Open is an open source, community project sponsored by Likewise Software to integrate Linux, Unix, and Mac in Microsoft Active Directory and authenticate users with their domain credentials. Likewise Open is licensed under the open source licensing so you can download it for free. Or, if you would like to become involved with the project, join one of the community mailing lists and discuss Likewise Open with other users and developers.

Suretec use Likewise Open for some of its cusomters and it's very good if you need to go down that route....

Hardware and Operating System Best Practices for OpenLDAP

nospam@example.com (Suretec) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:53:55 +0100

Just a quick one to say our partners Symas have written a very nice peice about how to pick your base hardware and operating system for use with OpenLDAP in your Enterprise:

The key to this first factor is that OpenLDAP is the most efficient, most stable, and most suitable LDAP^[?] Directory Service technology for Enterprise production use. Installing it as a new service or an upgrade to an older technology will be the most cost-effective step assuming the capacity is available. In general, replacing an older Directory Technology will reduce the processor load by two to five times. It will also improve the stability of the server(s) making simplification of configurations tuned to frequent server outages possible. Symas OpenLDAP is available under inexpensive annual support subscriptions with no consideration for the number of CPUs in the server or the number of objects/entries in the Directory, too. So, our preference of platform, in general, is put OpenLDAP (Symas OpenLDAP) on what you’ve got!

Read the full article

Asterisk RealTime LDAP Driver Guide

nospam@example.com (Gavin Henry) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:25:18 +0100

W. Michael Petullo has published a very detailed article for Red Hat Magazine about using the Asterisk RealTime LDAP^[?] Driver and Fedora Directory Server.

It's well written and a good read, but just so you know, OpenLDAP can easily be used and should have been the first choice as I'm sure our partners in crime Symas would point out too

But hey, it's a Red Hat Magazine so you can't blame them really...

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has emerged as a popular technology for modern voice communications. Many organizations have replaced their analog or proprietary digital telephone systems with VoIP-based solutions. This allows the consolidation of telephone services into an existing IP infrastructure. In addition, using IP to host voice services lets the organization leverage existing expertise–while retaining all of the network’s management advantages. Though not without its disadvantages, VoIP provides a compelling option to those looking for a telephone solution.

This article will present a simple VoIP solution using Asterisk, an open source private branch exchange (PBX) product. It will show you how to install Asterisk, configure it using its LDAP backend, and connect to it using the Ekiga software VoIP client and a Cisco 7900 Series VoIP telephone to make calls.

The first comment about the article is right though:

In general experienced users from the Asterisk community advise against purchasing Cisco phones for business deployment with Asterisk and recommend Polycom, Aastra or Snom instead. Cisco phones are very expensive, difficult to setup, technical documentation is not easily accessible for the end-user, their SIP firmware has some nasty surprises and as far as I know that cheap SmartNet contract is still quite difficult to get.

The LDIF Schema and normal LDAP schema are available in non-FDS format and are contributed to the Asterisk Project by Suretec and maintained by Suretec.

Thanks,

Gavin.

Flexi Time Manager Shortlisted for National Business Award

nospam@example.com (Suretec) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:59:56 +0100

Flexi Time Manager "in the pink" after shortlisting for National Business Award

Entrepreneur Louise Wreathall has been shortlisted for the ‘Best Mumpreneur’ award at the National mother@work awards 2008. Louise, creator of Flexi Time Manager, which offers an online flexi time recording service, launched her business last year and has seen it go from strength to strength. She will attend a reception at 11 Downing Street on 18th June, where the winners will be announced.

Louise says, “Being shortlisted for this award means so much to me. Of course I’d be thrilled to win, but reaching the final stage itself shows that my work in getting the business where it is today has paid off.”

As a working mother who returned to work after a career break, Louise knows how important flexi time can be. Working in the HR department of a charitable organisation, she was responsible for administering a time consuming flexi time system for 30 staff, using scraps of paper and mental arithmetic to calculate hours worked. When staff numbers doubled, she knew something had to change, and set about creating an electronic timesheet system. By 2005, Louise had set up the business and set about trialling her own online time management system. With the help of Enterprise North East Trust, and local networks Women Into Business and Aberdeen Entrepreneurs, she learned the fundamentals of business management, finally launching the fully tested web application in November 2007.

Suretec designed and implemented the Flexi Time Manager Solution.

Running a business on desktop Linux

nospam@example.com (Gavin Henry) — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:26:24 +0100

There is much more to cost equation than the up-front price you pay. Microsoft has done an outstanding job of hiding the true costs of its software from consumers. Linux eliminates these hidden costs from Windows:

Fewer security and privacy problems

No loss of support as systems age

No problems running current software on older computers

No forced software and hardware upgrades every couple years

No system slowdown over time (due to Registry bloat, malware, or other causes)

No forced upgrade of one product due to artificial coupling with another ("Installing this product requires IE 8!")

No need to re-install the operating system due to software corruption

No performance costs from built-in digital rights management (Vista Content Management)

No worry about whether you understand the legalistic license terms

No buying multiple licenses for desktop and laptop, or for primary and backup systems

No risk that the software CD you purchased in good faith is counterfeit

No system outages due to inaccurate license checks by Windows Genuine Advantage

No errant "piracy pop-ups" when you're running legal software due to Microsoft's Office Genuine Advantage

No restrictions on computer upgrades (no Windows Product Activation / Windows Genuine Advantage)

No restrictions on disk image backups (no WPA/WGA or Registry problems)

No restrictions on moving disks between computers during upgrades (no WPA/WGA or Registry problems)
Linux empowers you to run your business on low-cost computers that are deemed worthless within the distorted perspective of "Windows world." I'm writing this article, for example, on a Pentium III. It runs Ubuntu just fine, and it runs Puppy Linux fast as a scalded greyhound.

Original article

iwl3945 on "Ubuntu 8.04 - the Hardy Heron"

nospam@example.com (Gavin Henry) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:18:46 +0100

In case anyone else got stuck. To get iwl3945 on a Dell Inspiron 640m to work:

CODE:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-hardy-generic

Spring 2008 - a UKUUG Conference Review

nospam@example.com (Gavin Henry) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:37:12 +0100

I got back last night, after a somewhat hectic Flybe.com flight (long story).

I really enjoyed the conference, my first time speaking at one, bit nervous, but it can only get better

Tuesday:

As I arrived around 10.30am on Tuesday, I just caught the end of Testing with Selenium, very handy bit of kit.

- System Configuration : An end to hacky scripts? This was very good and showed an alternative (IMHO, much better) to things like Cfengine and Puppet
- An Introduction to DBIx::Class - Tom Hukins is an excellent speaker and a very nice guy to boot. Had some good chat in the pub afterwards, mainly Perl related. He knows his stuff.
- Building a new model for account management - I've meet Simon a few times before, he's another great guy. His talk was about a completely new way to manage accounts (and much more) that they are using at Edinburgh uni.
- Software patents and open standards - This was one hour of very interesting, worrying and intelligent discussion.

It was good to see so much Catalyst usage too.

The rest of the day was spent chatting with Matt and Mike, meeting lots of very clever people, drinking, eating and generally have brilliant discussions over dinner and in the pubs

Wednesday:

I sat in the PostgreSQL talks all day.

Simon did an excellent job being the event host. Dave gave us an insight into how the Postgres project works..pretty much like other well organised Open Source projects of this size. Chris fewtrell talk was interesting to see how Postgres is used at the core of a business.

Explaining the Explain was very technical, but also fun. I think some useful things for Postgres will come out of the HA talk.

Mark Cave-Ayland was another excellent speaker and his talk on Integrating Map Data with PostGIS was well worth attending.

A real eye-opener was Simons talk on PostgreSQL Performance Features in 8.3. Well worth an upgrade!

Simon has written his thoughts on the event up too.

Gavin.

Oracle Internet Directory and 2 Billion Entries?

nospam@example.com (Gavin Henry) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:20:51 +0000

I've just finished reading The 2 billion entry directory tree - The scalability of Oracle Internet Directory at very large Directory Information Tree sizes, and thought I'd blog some initial thoughts (I'm sure our partners Symas will have something to say later).

The following is from the 2 Billion User Benchmark (Oracle Internet Directory 10.1.4.0.1) - Technical Whitepaper (PDF) on the Oracle Internet Directory homepage.

So here's the Network kit they used:

Some pretty accessible kit there!

Summary of Bulk Load Timings for the first Billion entries
- Offline Activity = 35 hours 47 mins
- Bulk Load “load” phase = 2 hours 28 mins
- Database Index creation = 16 hours

Summary of Bulk Load Timings for the second Billion entries
- Offline Activity = 33 hours 01 mins
- Bulk Load “load” phase = 2 hours 32 mins
- Database Index creation = 19 hours 41 mins

Quite a while. I wonder how long Active Directory would take...years.

4.2.5 Tuning and Optimization
- The Test Clients
SLAMD clients were used to generate LDAP^[?] operations load in most of the test. A total of 8 nodes were available for the tests and for any given test we utilized all of them.
- OID LDAP Instance Configuration
-- ‘orclserverprocs’ was set to 72, this is the number of OID LDAP Server processes used in the OID LDAP instance.
-- ‘orclmaxcc’ was set to 1, this influences the number of threads and database connections used by OID LDAP Server processes.
- OID Root DSE
-- In the root DSE entry, the attribute ‘orclmatchdnenabled’ was set to 0 (zero) to disable detailed matching DN information
- OID DSA Configuration
-- In the entry “cn=dsaconfig,cn=configsets,cn=oracle internet directory”, the following attributes were updated –
'orclskiprefinsql' was set to 1, this enables optimized SQL generation and can be used when LDAP referral entries are not present in the DIT as was the case in this benchmark. Presence of LDAP referral entries is not common.
'Orclmaxconnincache' was set to 300000000.
- Password Policies and Verifier Profiles
-- The Password Policies on OID were disabled.
- OID Change Log Generation
-- OID Change log was disabled.

Also quite a few things disabled.

4.4 Conclusion
The following conclusions were drawn from the benchmark –
• OID installation and configuration is straightforward and does not require undue time or effort.
• The Bulk Load is a very fast operation in OID and 2Billion users LDIF data was loaded in under 118 hours.
• It was observed that, for the chosen test scenarios, OID could easily scale up to 101,000 searches/sec, 37,000 authentications/sec, 80,500 binds/sec, 14,000 modifications/sec and 84,000 comparisons/sec. OID sustained 99,500 searches/sec while serving 16,000 concurrent clients, beyond which, even though the system resources were not fully utilized, the load generation mechanism becomes the bottleneck.
• Given our experience with OID, we feel it is suitable for high-end mission critical applications requiring LDAP services, owing to its performance in the set of experiments conducted.

Now the above is the interesting part, let me explain. For the kit shown above in their image, I would expect much, much better results than above. OpenLDAP has been benchmarked doing pretty close to some of these results on only simple servers with average amounts of RAM

At a rough guess if the same equipment above was used in the above OpenLDAP tests, OpenLDAP would easily be around 5 times faster.

Lastly, in the article it implies that "open source" is not "high end"...hmmm, who owns BerkeleyDB again? and says:

BENEFITS
- Extreme Performance—eliminates client-server communication and SQL processing delays for applications with static access patterns
- High Reliability and Availability—full transactional semantics ensures data integrity and recovery from failures, and replication provides high availability and scalability
- Zero Administration—applications perform database administration, eliminating the need for a DBA and allowing continuous, unattended operation
- Low TCO—extreme performance reduces hardware costs and being embedded eliminates DBA costs

Gavin.

OpenLDAP and LDAP Roundup - 29th Nov 2007

nospam@example.com (Gavin Henry) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:09:00 +0000

Quite a few interesting articles and blog posts today.

Whenever I see a few good ones, I'll do one of these roundup posts.

The Linux Networking Cookbook is out, which includes a section on OpenLDAP.

Andy writes about his OpenLDAP Replication Design thoughts; I'll comment on this later.

Someone really likes GOsa, which is a very good LDAP^[?] web admin tool. We like it too.

Peter Judge doesn't seem to understand the difference between a Directory Server and Active Directory. We blogged about this common mistake yesterday.

Our partners Symas, keep us updated on the unfortunate resignation of Neil Wilson in his An Open Letter to the OpenDS Community and to Sun Microsystems post. We share the same thoughts as the comments in the post, but I'll add that some companies just don't understand how FLOSS^[?] works or how a community works.

Carla Schroder has started a 3 part series on Building an LDAP Server on Linux. There are a few errors we will help her with.

Flexi Time Manager - A Cost Effective and Time Efficient Solution for SMEs to administer flexible working

nospam@example.com (Suretec) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:12:38 +0000

Flexi Time Manager is a web application that provides a cost effective and self-contained administration system for recording and calculating flexitime. Designed to help small and medium sized businesses introduce or extend flexible working for staff, the system can be accessed at a mere 54 pence per employee per week (£30 per employee, per year) and does not require specialist software or hardware, just an internet connection. For firms that already operate flexible working, Flexi Time Manager will ease the administrative burden associated with calculating employee flexi time. Employee hours are input by the user at any time and their data is then automatically calculated, totalling the working time, flexi credit or debit and flexi carry forward.

Louise Wreathall, creator of Flexi Time Manager explains,

“Due to the changes in legislation, employers have to seriously consider how to put the necessary procedures and protocols in place for effectively managing flexible working. Smaller firms often don’t have the money, resources, or expertise to put flexible working into practice. Flexi Time Manager offers these organisations the means to efficiently administer flexi time at considerably lower cost than by manual calculation. The database includes all of the features of a sophisticated flexi system and can be used on any PC. This makes it ideal for those who work remotely. As it is web-based there is no expensive hardware or software needed, only an internet connection and web browser.”

Flexible working has been the hot topic of many government announcements this year. Both Tory leader David Cameron and the Labour Minister for Children, Young People and Families, Beverley Hughes, have called for an extension to the right to request flexible working. Changes in legislation and the Government drive to promote better work life balance has led to almost 95% of requests for flexible working being granted by employers*.

Flexi Time Manager is suitable for users from a wide range of industry sectors from University departments, medical surgeries and voluntary organisations, to accountancy firms and solicitors. The versatility of the system allows it to be tailored to individual user needs, as Louise explains,

“Each person can set up their own unique profile on the database, inputting basic weekly hours, limits to the working day, minimum lunch times, core working times and minimum daily hours. All subscribers are provided with a unique username and password, so that each time they use Flexi Time Manager their settings will remain. Individuals can log into the system at any time to view their total hours and flexi balance ‘as they go’. Flexi Time Manager can also record holidays, sick leave or any other form of absence.

“The system is beneficial for organisations that employ a high percentage of part time (often female) staff. With the new laws granting carers with children under six or disabled children under 18 the right to request flexible working, it is necessary for all employers to plan and prepare for the introduction of dynamic patterns of work for some or all staff.”

For further information on Flexi Time Manager log onto www.flexitimemanager.co.uk or call 01224 649484.

Flexi Time Manager is a Suretec Web Project.

* sourced from the CBI