Author Archives: Andrea Valsania

Asterisk

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Few days have past from when I began to play with the most famous and feature-rich open sourced IP PBX. Obviously, I’m running it on my FreeBSD testing systems and, even if I’m in the beginnings, I can say that my impression about this software is very good: I feel like it was the “Sendmail” in the IP PBXes field, and that makes it very friendly to me! 😀

I’ve also discovered many ways to give it a user-friendly graphic interface; I gave them a try, but they are too simple to be effectively useful in the environments I wish to make Asterisk working. I’ll go further and mybe I’ll tell you again as soon I’ll have a sharper vision about that.

At the time I’m writing, the dialplan I’ve wrote is enabling me to place calls between two offices in different locations, manage incorrectly typed extension numbers and support remote SIP and IAX connections to the central office system. I wish to complete the configuration of the voicemail module and implement call parking, conferencing and dial-by-name directory as soon as possible.

Jabber

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Some days ago I read a very nice document explaining the technology behind the Jabber system. I have to admit that the specifications of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol  (XMPP) nicely impressed me! Making XMPP one of the few Internet standard IM protocol approved by the IETF is the fact that definitely convinced me to build a FreeBSD jail and begin testing some Jabber servers. I’m focusing on the Openfire product, which seems to be really enterprise-ready: I’ve been able to connect it to Active Directory and to the MSFT Live Messenger public IM service in a snap! I’m also interested in ejabberd, which seems to support all high-quality features that an hosting provider needs (as the clustering support): maybe it would be a building block of the Phoibos service infrastructure.

Testing Drupal update

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For the first time since I began working with Drupal I had to upgrade a running web site to a newer version. The upgrade has been from 5.1 to 5.2 release, which contains some bug fixes (see the related announcement). The process has been quite simple on a development test site and I succesfully completed it at the first shoot. I decided to wait some days more before upgrading my first Drupal web site in a production environment!

I’ll be back ASAP

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A log time has past since my last post on my corporate weblog, mainly because I’ve spent a lot of time to working on several tasks, both internally and externally to my company. During these months I’ve collected a lot of drafts about many arguments, mainly related to new business experiences, and I wish to publish them as soon as possible, hoping to have some time to spend on it during the next month. See you later! 🙂

Again on WordPress

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Just upgraded all Phoibos hosted weblogs to the latest 2.2.1 WP version, mainly because of new XSS bugfixes. I’d like to move as sson as possible the whole Phoibos blog hosting collection to a new FreeBSD server (6.2-RELEASE) with the latest versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL. I’ll post the results as a comment when I’ll finish. 🙂

Phoibos blog hosting upgraded

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Once more time our blogging service platform has been upgraded to the latest version of the WordPress engine (the 2.2 “Getz”). As usual, there has not been any problem in the simple upgrade process: this news is only to tell our users that we don’t sleep all around the day! 😉

Drupal

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After I had setup it for a friend of mine, some days ago I decided to take a look to the Drupal open source CMS. As usual, I did not have the time to get in deep with it, but I feel it could be a good platform to develop on, mainly to build clean corporate public web sites (looking for theme developers…). Until I’ll be able to take a sharper look at its potential, I’ll publish my work-in-progress pages on http://drupal.valsania.it. Take it a look… I’ll be glad to read your opinion about Drupal as long as you’ll insert your comments to this post.

Windows Server 2003 SP2 deployed

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Finally I got the time to update all production systems to this latest Service Pack from Microsoft. A few days ago I tested the update process in a development environment: I achieved some good results, but I was wondering about what would happen to Automatic Update client service database and repository.
On the production environment I’ve had the chance to leverage the undo disk feature of Microsoft Virtual Server because all my Windows servers are running as virtual guests: this has allowed me to update in a worry-free manner and to found the best method to clear all the Windows AU data, on both the client and the WSUS server.

The update process on all my corporate core system has gone now: if there won’t be any issue during the next two days, I’ll probably update all the Windows Server systems in the Phoibos hosting platform on Easter holidays!

SharePoint 3.0 running

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I have just completed the upgrade of my production systems to the latest revision of Windows SharePoint Services. After about two weeks spent in planning, testing and development, I choose the content database migration process: it has required some more steps and added complexity during the upgrading phase, but the final result is definitely the best one among all the approach suggested in the deployment guide.
More specifically, that upgrade approach allowed me to:

  • migrate contents basing on the real needs, instead of forcing me to upgrade all sites and collections in one big step;
  • obtain the highest levels of reliability, security and compliance, by running a new SharePoint 3.0 farm without porting settings from the old release;
  • redraw the authentication model by using new several service accounts, and reducing Application Pools by 50%.

During the SharePoint upgrade I took the chance to upgrade also my Community Server platform to the 2.1 SP2 release, which is publishing my corporate blogs collection.
Now, I wish to work to redraw several applications which are based on the SharePoint platform (first of all, the Extranet access system) to better serve my customers by leveraging the new features of this exciting release.