In a Technical Frame

Finally - faster internet!

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:32:41 +1300

One of the downsides of working in Central Hawke's Bay is that internet access has been slower than other parts of the country. We still had dial up only long after most of the country had moved to ADSL. It was quite a relief when ADSL was introduced. It actually made it possible for us to change the way we ran our business and move towards doing more online.

Of course as we did more online the speed of ADSL wasn't quite so wonderful. We found that we had problems with running video sessions and online conferencing. We managed to work with this though and have been looking forward to either ADSL2 or fibre being made available to us. Well, the day has finally arrived. Telecom have been upgrading our local exchange over the past week - and in the process annoying many people with continual dropouts and disconnects - and we now have ADSL2. This gives us a greatly improved download speed and a somewhat improved upload speed. This should ease our issues to some degree.

Next step - Fibre! There is a run of it with an access node down the end of our street. At some point we will investigate getting a cable run to our premises. At the moment though, it seems there is a black hole into which enquiries disappear. No doubt somebody will answer one of them one day.

Server upgrade and virtualisation

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:15:02 +1300

We are in the process of replacing our main server at the moment. We have decided to make the move to a virtualised system built on the free version of VMWare's hypervisor, ESXi 5.0. There are a number of reasons we are making this move but one of the main reasons is separation of function.

Our current server has quite a number of roles – it acts as a web server, file server, print server, database server, mail server, development server and more. It also gets used to test any software that we feel may be of use to either ourselves or our clients. Sometimes these things get a conflict and part of the structure stops working as it should which causes a loss of productivity until the issue is cleared.

With ESXi we will be able to create a separate virtualised server for each of the main functions. Those servers will do one thing and one thing only. The web server will only host our various web interfaces. The database server will only run MySQL and serve our databases. The mail server will only handle email and related functions, and so on.

There are a number of advantages to this arrangement. Each server becomes easier to manage and there is far less chance of a change causing a problem. Updating software becomes easier and less risky. Because a virtualised server can be 'snapshotted' before any changes are made, it is very easy to roll back a change should it be necessary. One simply reverts to the snapshot thereby restoring the system to its state prior to the update.

Test servers can be created and deleted as required without intefering with the rest of the system so the problems associated with software testing are completely eliminated.

We will also be able to virtualise some of our other systems. For example, our phone system is an Asterisk PABX Linux distribution called Trixbox. Our new server will be capable of running the phone system as well as the other servers. We also have a server in our DMZ which we will be able to virtualise and run off the second network interface on the hardware. This will reduce our hardware costs and may reduce our power costs as well.

The old hardware, while not as capable and lacking the amount of RAM of the new hardware, will act as a backup server. We will replicate the production server images to it to ensure we can be operational should we suffer a hardware failure with the new server. We will still be able to work until the main server is repaired - though at a somewhat reduced pace.

This change is costing us quite a bit more than we would usually spend on server hardware but we believe the long term benefits more than outweigh that extra cost. We will have a more stable system with better management and a better business continuity plan in the event of hardware problems.

EC Read'n Website

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:16:28 +1300

CLAD Services has been working with the E.C. Read'N Committee to develop a website for their annual reading programmes. EC Read'N run four programmes each year designed to draw children and young people into reading and libraries. They required a website to provide some basic information about the programmes and to provide an area where librarians can access materials and resources for promoting the programmes in their areas.

The site has been built using the Silverstripe CMS which gives the E.C. Read'N committee the ability to manage the site and its content themselves. Part of the requirement was for each reading programme to have its own theme. Silverstripe does not support multiple themes but it only takes a few lines of code to enable this facility.

The code sets up a new tab with a dropdown list of theme names. This allow the site administrator to select different themes for different pages.

This is the code used:

/mysite/code/Page.php

class Page extends SiteTree {

        public static $db = array(

                // enumeration of theme list
                'Theme'=>"Enum('comma,delimited,theme,names,list','default')"
        );

        public static $has_one = array(
        );


        function getCMSFields() {

                $fields = parent::getCMSFields();

                // add a tab to allow the admin to select themes
                $fields->addFieldToTab('Root.Content.Theme', new DropdownField(
                        'Theme',
                        'Select A Theme:',
                        singleton('Page')->dbObject('Theme')->enumValues()
                ));

                return $fields;
        }

}


class Page_Controller extends ContentController {

        public static $allowed_actions = array (
        );

        public function init() {

                parent::init();

                // set the theme but default to default
                $theme = ( $this->Theme) ? $this->Theme:'default';
                SSViewer::set_theme( $theme );

                // Note: you should use SS template require tags inside your templates
                // instead of putting Requirements calls here.  However these are
                // included so that our older themes still work
                Requirements::themedCSS('layout');
                Requirements::themedCSS('typography');
                Requirements::themedCSS('form');
        }

}

Email vs. forms on your website

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 08:27:43 +1200

There is a lot of discussion on the web about whether to use a contact form or provide an email address on your website. I usually lean towards forms but currently have only an email address on our contact page. During our CMS upgrade our forms module broke and none of our forms (Certificate in Business Ownership Interest, Online CPD Contact, and Your Business Question) worked. I had to remove the forms and replace them with email addresses until I had time to fix the module.

The forms were down for seven days. We experienced an immediate drop in the number of contacts we normally receive through our website each week.

Usually we get around ten to twelve contacts through one of our forms each week. While the forms were down, we received a total of ONE enquiry through the email links. The day I put the form back up again, enquires started rolling back in with three coming in that day.

As enquiries through this form have been steady for at least a year this sudden drop is unlikely to be due to any reason other than we didn't have an easy to fill out form for people to complete.

I will be adding a general contact form to our contact page later today and will be using forms over email addresses on future pages.

This is painful

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 11:38:59 +1200

I have just upgraded this site to the latest version of Silverstripe. I also upgraded to the latest versions of the various modules we use. The blog module is a lot better than it was as it now uses the tinymce editor which means you have full access to the usual editing facilities - no more entering tedious blog code like [url=http://blah.blah.com] Go here [/url]. This is a big plus.

Unfortunately it means that all my blog posts have lost their formatting. I am now in the process of going through every post and reformatting them manually.

Ho hum.

Mobile phone upgrade

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 06:16:00 +1200

I recently upgraded my mobile phone from a Nokia E75 to a Samsung Galaxy S (or Samsung i9000t) running the Android operating system. The E75 was a good phone but it was getting a little rundown in some ways and I was having increasing difficulty in staying online with it as I have been using it as a modem for my laptops. I decided that I wanted an android phone as I am very comfortable with Linux and wanted an operating system that I could bend to my own needs rather than what the phone vendor thought I needed.

The Galaxy is a phone with a decent sized touch screen. I have had several touchscreen phones in the past including an HTC Harrier and a Treo 700wx but moved away from them as I found the Windows Mobile OS to be flakey and difficult to use. I had a short play on a collegue's Android phone and this convinced me that I was going to have a very different experience.

And it is. This is easily the best mobile I have owned. It's responsive and very easy to use. Being Android based there is a huge range of applications available and, if you are of a technical bent, you can 'root' the phone very easily. This gives you the ability to install a wider range of applications than the Telecom restricted phone lets you - terminals, vpn software, backup software and others that require superuser access in order to work.

The GPS on the phone isn't great but there are a couple of work arounds that make it work better. If you type *#*#1472365#*#* into the phone dialler, you get taken to the GPS set up application. You may need to 'root' your phone before you can do this. I'm not sure if that is required or not as I worked on the GPS after rooting it. The settings to change are [/Application Settings

Test Modes - ensure it is set to S/W Test
Operation Mode - set to MS Assisted
Accuracy - set to 100
Start Mode - set to cold start

Before I made these changes I couldn't get a GPS fix at all. Now it works well - at least when I'm outside. It's still flakey inside but this is probably due to the tiny GPS antennae that the phone has. This is one area where the Nokia E75 excelled.

One of the nice things about the phone is that it acts as a router rather than a modem. When I connect it to my laptop it is instantly recognised and set up as a router. No setting up of dialler applications and modems is required. Of course this is under Linux as that is what I run on my laptop and netbook. I can't provide any advice about using it under Windows.

The only real downside I have found with it is that the battery life is appalling. At the moment I have had it off charge for a bit over 24 hours and it has 32% charge left. However, I have barely used it during that time. If I were to spend a few hours using it constantly from full charge, the battery would be sucked dry. As it is I have all background syncing turned off in an effort to increase its life.

Samsung has released version Android 2.3 for this phone but Telecom's version of it comes with Android 2.1 . The later versions are said to improve the battery life. If Telecom doesn't release an upgrade soon, I'll seriously consider flashing the phone with a newer OS myself. Apart from battery life I find the phone to be extremely good and well worth the ugprade.

Full specs from the Telecom NZ site

Sony E-Reader PRS-650

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:59:00 +1200

I have a lot of technical manuals and other reading material which I refer to fairly frequently. A year or so ago I abandoned buying paper versions of them and instead bought PDF copies of the books. However I found that flicking between different application screens while working was more than a bit annoying and so made the decision to purchase an e-reader. I decided to buy a Sony PRS-650 as a person I work with had tested every available e-reader and had decided this model was the best.

It is a reasonable size, very readable in daylight, has a good page turning speed (essential!) and can store 1200 books in its own memory and even more if you use either an SD or Memory Stick Duo card. It uses an e-ink Pearl display which provides excellent contrast and has no glare issues even in bright sunlight. In fact, the brighter the light, the easier it is to read.

It lacks a direct connection to the internet and doesn't have wifi either. However, I don't think this matters as it is very easy to transfer files to the device over a USB cable. You can simply drag/drop books on to it or use an application to do the job. Apparently the Sony provided software is appalling but as I haven't installed it, I can't really comment. I use a program called Calibre which is available for Windows, Macs and Linux. This manages your e-book library very well and also will convert publications between different formats.

Reading large PDFs on the e-reader is hopeless. They don't flow properly and if they are very large, the page turning can be hopelessly slow. I used Calibre to convert my PDF manuals to the e-pub format which makes them flow properly and the pages turn at a reasonable speed.

Best E-Readers.com has an excellent review of the PRS-650. I recommend you read it if you are considering purchasing an e-reader.

Continuity

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:57:00 +1300

We had a powerful thunderstorm pass over today. As it looked like it was going to pass directly overhead I powered down our entire computer system and disconnected them from wall sockets, power sockets etc. - phones, desktops, laptops, servers and so on.

Unfortunately when I brought them back up again one of the servers decided to fail. Being our incoming mail server it does play a fairly critical role in our business. Here the importance of having contingency plans came to the fore.

I had backups of all the configuration files so it was about a 10 minute job to get the mail service restored and tested. I didn't have a backup server ready to go but I could re-route the mail to another server and quickly install spam blockers etc. to keep the mail at a manageable level. I'll build a replacement out of spare hardware tomorrow.

I wasn't surprised the server failed though. It's been running almost constantly - 24 / 7 since around 1999 or thereabouts. It may even be older than that.

Sanctuary Sounds

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 06:18:00 +1300

One of the websites we host is for Sanctuary Sounds. Sanctuary Sounds is a Hawke's Bay based music initiative which holds music workshops, festivals and alternative events in Central Hawke's Bay. They have announced their next event, a music festival themed "Into The Atmosphere". You can find out more information about Sanctuary Sounds and Into The Atmosphere on their website: Sanctuary Sounds: Music Festivals and Other Events.

Client website redesign

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 06:10:00 +1300

One of our clients, the New Zealand Institute of Dental Technologists, has just launched its new website. CLAD Services was commissioned to redesign their website to give it a fresh look, new functionality and better management.

The site has a 'Recent News' feature on the home page that links back to articles within the site. There is also a Member's Only area which requires NZIDT members to log in before it can be viewed. This area uses a single sign-on system authenticating against member's accounts in the NZIDT Membership Database (also provided by CLAD Services). Once logged into the website members can log in to the database with a single click.

The Silverstripe content management system has been used to provide the backend. This gives easy page/content management to non technical people with just a couple of hours training.

New Zealand Institute of Dental Technologists.

Wave in a Box

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:28:00 +1200

Google pulled the plug on Wave a few weeks ago. This is an unfortunate development for us as we found Wave to be quite useful. We have used it to successfully collaborate on a couple of projects as our designer lives a few hundred kilometres away from where we are. The ability to login at any time and view documents, graphics and other work; catch up on the dialogue and add to it was very useful.

The real time aspect of it was also beneficial. Having all the tools in one place worked very well for us. However, all is not lost. Google have already released a substantial portion of the Wave code as Open Source. They have stated they will "flesh it out" to a more complete application which they have dubbed Wave in a Box.

This will be a server and client with some but not all of the functionality of the original Wave. Google anticipates it being more fully developed by other parties. I'm looking forward to it being released and intend to install it on one of our servers. While it may not be as functional as the original Wave in the early days/weeks/months of its release, I am sure that there are plenty of developers who will enhance it.

Naturally I will post updates of the progress on this blog.

Online CPD - a winner for everyone

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 11:37:00 +1200

It's been sometime since I last wrote a blog entry. During that much of the past few months Lisa and I have been working on our latest project, Online CPD. Online CPD is an online education tool for professionals organisations whose members are required to keep up to date with professional developments. This is usually referred to as Continuing Professional Development - hence CPD. Here is a quick cut and paste from another section of our website:

CLAD Services offers an online Continuing Professional Development (CPD) solution suitable for many CPD courses. This is designed for short courses for professionals and others who need to maintain their education and knowledge levels in their areas of expertise.

Continuing Professional Development is a requirement for many professions. Regardless of whether it is required or not, CLAD Services supports life-long learning and is pleased to be able to provide this facility.

We have approached this in an unusual manner. We are not charging organisations any upfront fees to use the Online CPD service. Instead we are offering to partner with them.

They provide the course material; We develop it for use online; People who take the online CPD course get charged a fee per CPD unit (usually one hour). Most of this fee goes to the organisation providing the course material and CLAD Services gets a cut as well.

We like this as it enables organisations to benefit from the courses and this in turn benefits their membership.

Diaspora III

Fri, 14 May 2010 10:25:00 +1200

This is proving to be a very popular project. They originally set out to raise $10,000 by the 1st of June. So far they have raised over $115,000 and they still have 19 days to go. I expect some very good stuff to come from this project.

Diaspora II

Thu, 13 May 2010 07:08:00 +1200

Here are the links to a couple of articles on the Diaspora project I contributed financially to:

New York Times: Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook. How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it? A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

Link to NYT article

Wired: NYU Students Aim to Invent Facebook (Again). We’ve Got Your Back. Remember when Facebook really was a private club? In the days before we called anything a “social network?” When “sharing” and “connecting” wasn’t bait for the switch of “monetizing” the stuff and nonsense of our lives? Well, four NYU students do, and they are so nostalgic for those halcyon days way back in 2004 that they have set out to re-invent that wheel — for the good of mankind. The New York Times reports Wednesday that Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20; Dan Grippi, 21; Max Salzberg, 22; and Raphael Sofaer, 19, decided that Facebook had become so … Facebook that the world needed a safe online haven, one that could fulfill what had once been the fact and promise of Facebook. A place secure from the Big Bad Wolves who walk right though an open door to cull, scrape, decipher and analyze our timelines, and who see a commercial opportunity every time we go for coffee, buy a movie ticket or change partners.

Link to Wired article

Decentralize the web with Diaspora.

Sun, 09 May 2010 10:38:00 +1200

Diaspora is an Open Source project which aims to develop a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed social network". Given my rantings in various places about the lack of privacy associated with Facebook and the way they hide their disregard for you privacy, I thought it was time I put my money where my mouth is.

I have made a financial contribution to Disapora as I believe it could be the solution to my issues with social networking - namely the lack of control users have over their own data. From the Kickstart Diaspora page:

What is it? Enter your Diaspora “seed,” a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends. Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity. Once we have built a solid foundation, we will make Diaspora easy to extend to facilitate any type of communication, and the possibilities will be endless.

A more complete explanation is available here.

MSI 100+ netbook

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:15:00 +1300

Our hardware supplier had a special on MSI 100+ netbooks last week so we bought a couple of them. Our reasoning was that we are spending more time away from the office and home and they would make for light travelling gear. This is particularly attractive to Lisa as she flies to Timaru on a semi-regular basis and finds it difficult working on the tiny plane she has to fly in.

The MSI 100+ is a few years old now which is probably why they were on special. Part of the special included an upgrade to 1.5gb of RAM which is fairly necessary I think. The OS is Windows XP Home which isn't the greatest of OSes but I will be shoe-horning some version of Linux onto my one in the near future. However, I will be keeping the Windows OS as it does come in useful. For instance, I have installed VMWare vSphere Client and Veeam FastSCP on it. As I spend most of my time in Linux, it has proved to been somewhat of an annoyance when I have had to boot into Windows to do some work through the GUI on our ESXi server. In fact, even as I write this Veeam FastSCP is busy running a copy of a 750GB guest to another storage area. Usually doing this type of thing would tie up my my usual computer for hours. No longer!

The MSI is also very handy for those sleepless nights - currently it is around 2:30am. Awake with a cold and bored so I reach for the MSI and get on the net.

Telecom's XT Network down

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:18:00 +1300

As of this moment (Sunday 24 Jan 2010) Telecom's XT network has been down for me for over 24 hours. Whenever people in my household try to use it we get a "Network Busy" error. I dion't know how far the outage extends. As I haven't heard anything about it the outage could be quite localised.

Part of my work involves ensuring a remote site monitoring system (commonly known as telemetry) is up and running. The telemetry system is required to be available 24 hours a day as it monitors water and sewage flows in pump stations. Without it contractors are required to drive many kilometres all over the district to manually check each station. This is a huge inefficiency, wasting both time and money.

Each morning the contractors get a test report. If they don't get the report they contact me via cellphone and I login to the system and find out why it isn't working as it should and fix the problem. Yesterday morning the system didn't send out the test report and so the contractors rang me to let me know. As the contractor is on Telecom's CDMA network they could make calls just fine.I didn't answer my phone (because it never rang) so they left a voice message and assumed that I would act on it when I retrieved it.

Purely by coincidence around the same time I was working on a related network and realised there was a problem with the telemetry system and so fixed it. If it wasn't for this fortuitous coincidence, the contractor would have had to start driving around doing checks until someone found another way to contact me.

So there were two problems here. 1) The XT network was down and 2) The contractor, being on a different network, thought I had been informed. Obviously we need to look at this and have a backup contact system. If I don't answer my cell phone, fall back to Plan B.

Google Wave

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:38:00 +1300

You may have heard about Google Wave. It's a new technology being developed by Google. Google describes it as:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

I was lucky enough to get an invite in the first round of public invites. It was a bit strange at first. As Rod Drury put it, it felt a bit like the first people with fax machines must have felt - no one else to talk to. However, that is rapidly changing. We all were provided with invites to send to friends. They came online and we were all given more invites. Now there must be several million people using it and they are all busy working out how to use Wave and what to use it for.

We have been using it to collaborate with our designer who lives and works several hundred kilometres away. Currently we are working on a website and we are finding the ability to share information through Wave to be very beneficial. We can either work together discussing topics live or separately and read the other's text in our own time.This particularly suits me as I tend to start work around 4:00am which many hours before the designer becomes available.

Wave is an exciting and new development in the online world. Google hope to have it replace e-mail as the preferred contact medium. To further this aim they have made the Wave protocol open and are Open Sourcing the code behind it. They want Wave servers to proliferate to the same extent that e-mail servers have.

Keep an eye on it. It has the potential to be as disruptive as Google Maps is proving to be. Read more about it at the site below. There is also an informative video on the page: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Are you prepared for a disaster?

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:42:00 +1300

A few posts ago I talked about the importance of backups. A recent article brought this to my attention again though it was discussing Disaster Recovery rather than just backups: Symantec have found that most Small / Medium Businesses are unprepared for when disaster strikes.

Small and midsize businesses are confident in their disaster recovery capabilities, but their actual performance preventing outages shows they are "remarkably unprepared," according to a Symantec survey.

Ninety-three percent of New Zealand and Australian respondents were satisfied with their disaster-recovery plans, and only a quarter from the region believed customers would seek options other than waiting patiently for an outage to be fixed.[/color] [color=blue]However, the practices of these businesses suggest this confidence is unwarranted. Symantec says the average SMB has experienced three outages in the past 12 months, with the leading causes in Australia and New Zealand being a disaster, a power outage, virus or hacker attacks and employees accidentally deleting data.

-- full article in Reseller news

Disaster Recovery is the ability to get your business up and running again should it suffer failure of some type whether it be the loss of premises through fire or flood, sudden departure of key employees, loss of data, hardware failure or any number of other untoward events.

What would you do if your computer system failed and you had an important contract to complete within a few days? Could you confidently say that you would be able to complete the contract? Would you have all the information you required to hand? Would you be able to get your system back up and running the next day?

in the post about backups I detailed our tape backup system. However, our backups go much further than that. We also have redundant disks in our server, backup changed data on an hourly basis to a second server and also conduct backups to staff computers overnight. You may consider this to be overkill but having lost some important data some seven years ago we consider this regime to be of vital importance.

The redundant disks in the primary server ensure that we will lose no data should one of the disks fail. The hourly backup of changed data to a second server gives us the capability of being up and running within an hour after a major server failure, and in the event of accidental data deletion we can restore the previous days data from the staff computers within minutes without having to resort to tape.

You may consider this to be beyond the capabilities of a small business or too expensive to justify. It isn't beyond your means - and what price do you put on your data? How important is it to you?

CLAD Services is a small business, albeit one with the technical knowledge and ability to make this happen. We can design and implement a suitable and affordable Disaster Recovery system for your computer system. We can also look at your business and provide advice on other ways of reducing the risk of disasters and other untoward events that could have an adverse effect on your day to day work.

Remote Access

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:29:00 +1200

I mentioned in the post about our phone system that we can access our phone system when working remotely. In fact, we can access our entire computer system when working remotely. We have full access to our file server, phone system, mail system, printers, and other IT services when away from the office. We use a very good piece of security software called OpenVPN to accomplish this.

OpenVPN is an open source Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution. A VPN is a completely private computer network that runs over other, larger networks (the Internet for example). When you are running a VPN, any traffic that passes over it is separate from the network it is using for transport. Other people cannot access the traffic on a VPN which makes them ideal for setting up secure access between different networks or between computers.

OpenVPN is an SSL encrypted VPN. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer and it is the standard method of encryption used on the Internet. Whenever you login to a secure site such as your bank, you are almost certainly using SSL encryption to keep your information secure and private.

The security is enhanced by using a combination of server/client certificates and a username/password combination. If you don't have the correct certificates installed on your remote computer or don't have the correct username/password combination then you will not be granted access. Essentially it is a two-factor authentication scheme.

OpenVPN will run on Windows as well as Linux. It can also be installed on Windows Mobile based phones/PDAs. It needs to be installed at both ends of the link - that is inside your own network and on the computer(s) you will be using remotely. Being Open Source, OpenVPN is freely available.

etting it up can be a little tricky but then that is the one of the services we can provide you.