Upgrading Asterisk on trixbox

For whatever reason trixbox is not releasing Asterisk updates in their repository for their 2.6 versions.  (see rant at bottom)  Luckily, where trixbox slacks digium delivers.  With little trouble I was able upgrade a  trixbox distribution so that I can get the latest updates of the asterisk software direct from digium, while continuing to keep my trixbox software up to date through trixbox.  Here is the rundown:

Bring your system up to date with the trixbox repository

yum update

Modify the repository settings.

trixbox by default has the centos repos, and its own trixbox repo.  We need to add the digium repo and remove the kernel exception from the centos repo.

wget http://packages.asterisk.org/centos/5/current/i386/RPMS/yum-repos-asterisk-1.0.0-1_centos5.noarch.rpm
rpm -i yum-repos-asterisk-1.0.0-1_centos5.noarch.rpm

in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo under the section titled [base] comment out exclude kernel:

#exclude=kernel*

Update your kernel

yum update kernel kernel-headers
reboot

Replace the asterisk software from trixbox with the latest software from digium

To find all the currently installed packages that you will need to remove use the commands:

rpm -qa | grep asterisk
rpm -qa | grep zap

You will not need to remove all of these packages, only the ones that are provided by digium through packages.asterisk.org.  In my case I left both tbm-asteriskinfo, asterisk-perl installed and removed the rest.  Here are the packages i removed:

rpm -e --nodeps asterisk-sounds-1.2.1-2 asterisk-1.4.22-4 asterisk-addons-1.4.7-2 zaptel-modules-1.4.12.9-1_trixbox.2.6.18_128.1.10.el5 zaptel-1.4.12.9-1_trixbox

This order of operations left some driver cruft that I had to manually remove:

rm -Rf /lib/modules/2.6.18-164.el5/weak-updates/zaptel/*

Now we can install the latest asterisk software from digium’s repo:

yum install asterisk14 dahdi-tools asterisk14-addons

Now this new asterisk system will use all the same old configuration files that are still in place, except for 2 which we will modify now.  Both of these modifications are related to the name change from zaptel to dahdi.

/etc/dahdi/system.conf

This is really just a new name for what was /etc/zaptel.conf.  Simply copy /etc/zaptel.conf to /etc/dahdi/system.conf and you’re done.  If rpm moved your zaptel.conf then copy /etc/zaptel.conf.rpmsave to /etc/dahdi/system.conf.

/etc/dahdi/modules

This is a new name and syntax for /etc/sysconfig/zaptel.  Open it up and comment out the modules you will not be needed, based on the hardware you have installed.  Compare against your /etc/sysconfig/zaptel if you are at a loss.

Lastly, modify /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf by adding this directive to the [options] section:

[options]
dahdichanname=no

Now reboot and voila!

Rant

trixbox doesn’t respond to bug reports, doesn’t maintain their changelog, has little in the way of developer support, doesn’t integrate bugs fixes of opensource software that it repackages.  I am currently testing asterisknow as an alternative.

http://www.trixbox.org/changelog

Economic Indicators

NJ showed up as the 15th highest unemployment rate (9.7 which is also the national average) on the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Top 5:

1. Michigan
2. Nevada
3. Rhode Island
4. Oregon
5. California

Bottom 5:

50. North Dakota
49. South Dakota
48. Nebraska
47. Utah
46. Virginia

The average price of a home in Detroit is under 20K and the median house price is under 10K!

Yikes!  References:

• Chicago Tribune
• http://www.tribbleagency.com/?p=3598

Fedora Core Live USB

I am really excited about live linux on usb flash drive,  and the persistent storage feature in particular.  It basically means instant linux on any computer.  Prior to this tool I had been trying to fill this gap in two ways:

1. Dual Boot Windows and Linux on my pcs.
2. Live CDs

My new plan is to add this flash drive to my physical keychain.  The persistent storage feature means that you can easily customize your live distribution and load it with tools and drivers.  This task previously would require building a custom live distribution and burning it to cd, updating would require you to repeat this process.

Hardware:

• 4 GB USB Flash Drive – IOCELL Network NetDISK
• Laptop – Dell Latitude E6400

Software:

• Windows Vista Home Edition
• Fedora Core 11 Live iso
• liveusb-creator
• Broadcom Linux Wireless Driver
  

Potential Limiation:

• Some machines don’t support booting from usb.

Accessing your windows partitions from inside your Live OS:

1. Identify your file system types with ‘fdisk -l [hs]d[a-z]‘
2. mkdir /mnt/windows
3. mount -t ntfs /dev/sda /mnt/windows

or if you want to automatically mount that partition every time you boot modify your /etc/fstab with the above information.

ex: /dev/sda1     /mnt/windows   ntfs   defaults,gid=0    0 0

Great Summer Movies

Quick Facts

• Food Inc – Documentary about failures of American policy with respect to the food industry.

Rotten Tomatoes – 97%

IMDB – 8.2

• Moon – Coherent Science Fiction with a beautiful outer-space set on the moon.

Rotten Tomatoes – 90%

IMDB – 8.3

• Away We Go – Dramatic/Romantic Comedy.

Rotten Tomatoes – 67%

IMDB – 7.9

• Bruno – Sacha Baron Cohen’s (Ali-G, Borat) latest Comedy and Social Commentary.

Rotten Tomatoes – 69%

IMDB – 7.1

Skinny Jeans

Times are changing!! Yayee!  Its finally my turn to criticize a younger generation whilst secretly envying their carefree confidence and lack of regard for convention.  The age of grossly oversized clothes as a fashion manifestation of non-conformity and youthful rebellion seems to finally be passing!  For a couple years now I have been noticing heterosexual young adult men wearing shockingly tight pants walking around in my home town of Red Bank.

Exhibit A: Nick, an 18 year old employee at clothing store Metropark, a Los Angeles based specialty store chain.  Here he is in my local Starbucks (didn’t have to go far for the inspiration for this article) sporting Kill City jeans and a New Era (still oversized) fitted hat which in this context seems to be old-hat;)

Naturally the first couple times I wrote them off as isolated incidents.  However, this trend seems to be gaining speed and attention.  50 cent, naturally bitter about the movement,  stated on his latest freely downloadable mixtape War Angel, “I think these n***as is f***ots.”  Harsh words 50!  (See the full interview here.)  Fashion must be moving fast for 50 cent to come off as the trapped in the last century grandpa on the porch yelling “Kids these days!! Pull up your pants and have some respect!!”  Over at AskMen.com, a harsh review of skinny jeans generates a wave of comments from men, extolling the virtues of their new fashion choice.  Hilarity in the comments section ensues!

Alas, I don’t see myself jumping aboard this skin-boat.  As my babycakes knows, I already have a hard enough time not scaring little kids with my frequent erections.  I am undoubtedly a transparent person, but i am almost positive skinny jeans would take this transparency to a level neither I nor my associates would be comfortable with.  In closing, I hail the new generation of youngsters for their ability to bewilder me!  Rock out with your cock out!

This is England

What I liked best about this movie is its element of surprise.  The story and the character development moves slowly and forcefully until you are feeling for characters who when introduced you were laughing at because of their sheer absurdity.  The writer/director Shane Meadows takes you to England in 1983 and gives you an up close and personal view of a split in the skinhead subculture.

“This is England” is shot in a low budget, unrefined style.  The neighborhoods depicted in the movie are run down and include abandoned buildings.  The characters are very imperfect, for example the main character Thomas Turgoose (Shaun) is an 11-year old boy who only occasionally respects his elders and is prone to throwing fits and sulking when he doesn’t get his way.  At the start of the movie Shaun seems an unlikely candidate to gain the viewer’s compassion.  All of these characteristics add to the “real” feeling of the movie. This effect would not be possible without a stellar acting job by two of the main characters; Thomas Turgoose and Stephen Graham (Combo) an older ex-con who form an almost otherwise unbelievable friendship.

Warning: If you don’t like the challenge of deciphering a thick British accent make sure you have subtitles on.  These were unavailable using the XBOX Netflix combo.

IMDB Rating: 7.9 (lee says this is under-rated)

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 93%

Troublechrooting Linux

For some reason or another my Master Boot Record (MBR) gets corrupted or overwritten from time to time. It could be you have a windows/linux dual boot with grub as your boot loader and you re-install the windows installation (which doesn’t give you a chance to say “No i dont want the stinking windows boot loader on my MBR”). It could be any other number of reasons that has somehow left your hard disk filled with glorious data but won’t boot.  Below are some steps that may help.  The basic gist is to use fsck to check your file system and if all your data is good, use grub to rewrite your master boot record.

1. Boot up a live cd.  Any live cd will work though i use the Fedora Core.
2. fsck your file systems.  If you can’t get past this step a lot more than your MBR is broken:(

fsck -f /dev/sda1 *

3. mount your partitions (you only need to mount your boot partition and your / partition).

cd /mnt
mkdir myroot
mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 myroot
mount /dev/sda1 myroot/boot

4. mount the special file systems dev and proc

mount -o bind /dev/ myroot/dev
mount -o bind /proc/ myroot/proc

5. change the root of the your active file system to your newly mounted partitions

chroot myroot

6. fire up grub and rewrite the master boot record

grub
root (hd0,0) †
setup(hd0)

7. reboot and good luck!

*Note that in this example i used sda1.  This is just an example.  This will vary depending on how many disks and partitions you have.  ‘ls /dev/hd*;ls /dev/sd*’  If you use a Logical Volume Manager (red hat based distro?) you will have to also do ‘fsck -f /dev/VolGroupXY/LogVolAB’ for each of your logical volumes.

†Again this is specific to where your boot partition lives.  hd0,0 is the first partition on the first disk (a likely guess if you don’t know any better)

Blame it on Fidel and King Corn

Open this in a new tab to listen to original music from the movie while you read!

A professional couple (Spanish lawyer and French magazine writer) with two kids (Anna at left on cover and her brother) make an ideological shift from the cookie cutter bourgeois family in a comfortable bubble of isolation to becoming community organizing, self sacrificing political activists.  This shift is inspired by the father losing family tragically to the brutal Franco regime controlling Spain circa 1970.

The story follows young Anna as she transforms and adapts to her changing world.  Various human themes are explored from Anna’s point of view.  Indulging in self centered fantasies she dreads to leave the comfortable luxuries and familiarity of her life.  She fights the current while curiosity, inquisition, the love for her family, and the unity of group solidarity move her to open her mind as she questions her beliefs and the beliefs of those she’s come to trust.  Self discovery and individuality are beautifully expressed through the emotions of a child.

The movie is beautiful to watch and listen to.  It has a wonderful original score with piano, guitar, violin, harps and more.  The score is also colored by songs of revolution sung by Chilean workers in the socialist movement.

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King Corn: Two friends from college discover alarming facts about our diet as they go on an expedition through the corn industry. To provide structure to the movie they farm one acre of corn and take us through the process all the way from arriving in IOWA to the statistical probability of how their corn will be consumed. Farmers, professors, politicians and people are interviewed along the way.

Corn is in everything we eat, and when you are eating meat, well it was in everything they ate. The industrialized farm movement, the government providing subsidies, and the food market with their never ending drive for better margins have developed strong relationships and an infrastructure that gets food and drink to us for cheap that is based on a cheap and efficient corn crop. It is all big business and the health of the consumer is largely overlooked with the most obvious example being the ubiquity of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener in our beverages.

Red Bank Jazz Festival

Red Bank hosts an annual Jazz Festival.  It runs from this Friday night (June 5th) all the way through Sunday.  Its held in Marine Park, walking distance from our house and downtown Red Bank.

Here’s the website:

http://www.redbankfestival.com/.

I’ll be in town all weekend so feel free to stop by anytime!  There will be music, food, blankets on a grassy hill, dancing etc…  Lets test the waters this year and see if we can’t get a tradition going!  Come one Come all!

BB – The IPOD (NANO) Killer

Well to be truthful my nano killed itself.  One day the wheel stopped working.  With the following features on a BB though who needs an ipod?

• Expandable Memory up to 16GB (I’m using 8 and my nano ony had 4)
• Streaming Internet Radio with Pandora
• Plug your BB into your computer and easily sync your music playlists to it.
• The music library interface with the track wheel is an effortless switch if you are used to the ipod.
• A standard headphone jack (sounds basic but the Treo 700p managed to forget it)

Also, the BB allows third party applications to run in the background.  This means you can recieve an email and read it without missing a beat on pandora.  Coming from a Palm Treo 700p i really appreciate the flash on the camera also.