Author: Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.

Rogers Outage

Greg

[sc:internet-category ]In my recent post about building an emergency server I mentioned I had lost Internet access for a week.  Here’s a little background on the issue and my experience with Rogers.

Only Dec 21st, 2012 a huge ice storm came through southern Ontario and I lost power for 25 hours.  This wasn’t a big deal and when power came up the next night everything was fine with the internet connection.

However, overnight as power was being restored, a branch came down and hit the cable line to my house.  It didn’t take the line down, but it was stretched several feet lower than it was the day before.

Everything functioned reasonably well, but I was getting intermittent drops.  This wasn’t surprising as power was still down for hundreds of thousands of people.

Things continued for a while, I had a significant outage of about 6 hours one day, but other than that it was fine.

Until December 30th, when I arrived home the internet was down and it didn’t come back up.  I called Rogers and they couldn’t connect to the modem, or anyone else in the area so they opened a ticket and scheduled an appointment.

Still getting through the backlog, my appointment date was for Jan 6th, a week later…

Having my mail server at home meant I had to get an alternate site up and running which wasn’t much of an issue.  I called back in to Rogers to confirm I was still down the next day and they also confirmed the rest of the area was back up.

At this point the support rep from Rogers also wanted me to swap out the modem, in case that was the issue.  I dropped by my local Rogers store and got them to swap out the modem, and that’s where the problems really started.

Once I arrived at Rogers to swap the modem, I found out they don’t make the modem I have anymore, that wasn’t very surprising and they brought out a new DOCSIS modem for me.  They activated it and while we were talking the subject of my current plan came up.  Turns out the new modem didn’t support the plan I had and so there was a different modem I needed.

However the other modem was a router/wireless unit as well and cost more per month, which I didn’t want to pay so I said I’d purchase the unit instead.

This seemed to confuse them and after talking to their manager it turns out they didn’t have a modem for purchase available, only a rental unit.

After going back and forth for a while they suggested I take the rental unit and then call in to customer service, which could ship me a unit to purchase.

Getting home and setting up the modem proved out that it wasn’t the modem, which I knew, but sometimes you just have to play along to get through to the next step 😉

I called in to customer service and it turns out they can’t ship me one, well they can but there’s a $49.95 charge… I really do hate Rogers.

There was nothing to do but wait for the service call… and setup the new modem/router.

The new router was pretty straight forward, kind of bland looking as far as the web interface goes but functional.  The one issue I had with it was that I use port 8080 for an OpenVPN server, however the router uses port 8080 for its management interface and you can’t disable/redirect it.  In the end I changed OpenVPN to port 943 and everything was up and running.

A week later the Rogers tech showed up, found no signal at the house, went to the pole and promptly started taking the cable down 🙂

3 hours later, all was good and things were back up and running.

Bell’s Roaming Packages – Follow Up

Greg

[sc:mobile-category ]Last month I wrote about my experience with Bell’s roaming package to the US, I received my bill for that trip just the other day.  So how did Bell do at getting the mess sorted out…

In a word: Terrible.

Here’s what my Phone bill looked like this month:

Travel Bill

Now notice the last four items:

The “US Roaming 25 30day” item is the original travel package I purchased before my trip.

The “US Voice & Text $30 – 30day” is the new package for voice and text.

The “Travel US Package – 30day” is the new package for data, however the actual charge is in the last line in “Usage” here:

Travel Usage

So my $25 package became a $55 package.

A call in to Bell was quick and easily resolved it back to what I had been promised during the trip, a $25 charge.  But it does mean that future trips will be a $55 package if I want to roam in the US again.

Emergency Server!

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:internet-category ]In southern Ontario last week a big ice store came through and took out power and Internet connections for many.  I managed to survive with only a 25 hour power outage, which while annoying, was not a huge deal overall.  Since the storm, my internet connection has been a little unreliable, but was working in general.  A week later it’s gone and hasn’t come back 🙁

This was not a huge surprise to me, a tree limb had come down on the cable coming in to my house and stretched it more than I thought it would survive.  However after a few more days I guess it finally gave up the ghost.  Unfortunately that means a service call from Rogers and with the backlog from the storm, at 6 days before they can get out to me.

If I was just a normal user, that would be unfortunate, but not the end of the world.  As I’m running my mail server on that connection, 6 days is far too long to go without!

Fortunately I do have a few friends that are up and running and I’ve managed to borrow a connection that I can run a server on until I get back up.  However there was no way I was taking my entire AD/Exchange environment to their place to run so I need to build something that would do for a while.

I decided it that this was a good time to try out Zarafa in a ‘production’ environment.  The first step was to grab a piece of hardware to run it.  I still had my Acer Timeline 1810T, which is a fine little box to run as a server.

Ubuntu

First up was installing Ubuntu.  I had a copy of 12.04 already burned so I used that, it was the 32bit version which was fine as the Timeline only had 4g of RAM anyway.

In a earlier post I mentioned some of the things you needed to do to make it livable, and I’ve found a few more:

  • SSH isn’t installed by default, who in their right mind doesn’t install this by default in this day and age?
  • By default, the login prompt does not include root, only “users” on the system.  This is good and bad.  Good in the fact that usually you shouldn’t be logging in as root, but bad as if you need to you can’t do it from the GUI.

Now some may be saying that root login isn’t such a big deal, but let me tell you.  While setting up the system something corrupted my user profile, each time I tried to login it just lopped back to the login page.

That’s a problem when its the only admin account other than root 🙂

Fortunately you can still use the virtual terminals (accessed through Ctl-Alt-F1, etc.) to get to a command shell and login as root.  You can always get back to the GUI login through Ctl-Alt-F7.

Of course the first thing you do here is to re-enable root to be able to login through the GUI, this article takes you through the required changes.

Fixing my user account came down to a simple delete and re-create.

The support Zarafa, several other packages are required, including Postfix, MySQL, Apache and others.  These are all available through the Ubuntu Software Manager and installed without issue.

Zarafa

The Zarafa Community Hub is the place to go to get the open source version of Zarafa.  I pulled down the 32bit version and followed the install instructions.  Everything went smoothly until the Postfix integration step, which don’t exist in the install section.  There is a very confusing section later on in the manual that talks about Postfix, but this is not very clear at all.

A better set of instructions are in the help area, however even they are missing an important item.  You have to make the vmail user an admin in Zarafa (edit the Zarafa config file, it even uses vmail as an example in the comments).

After the install and a reboot I noticed that the server didn’t come back up automatically.  Turns out that it tries to start before the MySQL database is up.  I’ve always hated *nix startup scripts and instead of finding the “right” solution of getting the boot order right, I just added a quick “sleep 15” to the start of the Zarafa server init script, which solved the problem.

Finally I had to setup the outbound mail configuration.  Rogers blocks port 25 outbound (not inbound fortunately) and require you to use their SMTP server with authentication.  There’s a good set of instructions on how to setup authenticated mail forwarding with post here.

The last item of note is IMAP access.  By default Zarafa disableds IMAP so you have to go and enabled in the config file.

Outstanding Items

This leaves a few items outstanding:

  • No SSL certs:  I didn’t bother to move my SSL certs over for web and mail access as this should only be a short term solution.  I’ll use SSH to tunnel in to the server and get to the web interface to read my mail for the time being.
  • No ActiveSync support:  Again, just couldn’t be bothered to install it without an SSL cert.
  • No Web server:  I don’t have much on my home web server, but there are a few things I’ll miss for a few days.  If it gets too bad I’ll move my web data over.
  • No Spam filter:  I have a custom spam filter setup on my standard server, I haven’t moved it over but if the spam gets too bad I will later in the week.

But at least mail is back up and running!

Windows Phone 8.1 Roundup

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:mobile-category ]Over the last few weeks we had some new Windows Phone 8.1 information and rumors turn up, so what’s the scoop?

On-Screen Buttons

First was on-screen buttons (from @evleaks on Twitter via wpcentral.com), which is interesting as they do make sense in general.  Just like on-screen keyboards, you can do lots of things with a set of on-screen buttons that just can’t be done with physical ones.

For example, if there’s no more pages  to go “back” to you can visually disable the button instead of having to simply do nothing when the button is hit.  Also screen rotation can move the buttons are required, instead of them fixed to one side of the phone.

Important to note is that while on-screen buttons seem to be coming, that doesn’t exclude separate off-screen buttons, either capacitive or physical.

More options are better.  In fact I’d like Microsoft to take this to its logical extension and ensure that there are on-screen equivalents for all the physical buttons.  This would let a phone manufacturer build a phone with no buttons (ok, maybe a power button).

The other benefit to on-screen buttons is that it makes it easier and cheaper for OEM’s to use existing Android hardware for Windows Phone.  I love my Nokia 925 and all, but what if you could have a Galaxy S4 or an HTC One running Windows Phone?

Timeline

The Verge brought use quite a bit of information, including the fact that 8.1 details would be covered at Build in April.  Microsoft is beta testing the code now internally.

Server sites have suggested that they may announce at Mobile World Congress in February, which is traditionally a strong show for Nokia.

With the Nokia deal completing shortly, Microsoft can’t say much until it officially closes but waiting until Build seems like a long time.

Traditionally Microsoft has announced early, then done the developers details a few months later with final availability coming a few months after that.

Most are ignoring CES, which happens Jan. 7-10.  CES is traditionally a strong show for Microsoft.

The Microsoft-Nokia deal seems to have passed all of the regulatory hurdles, so if they could get it officially closed by CES we could see something there.

Here’s my guess at it:

  • Make the official announcement at CES/MWC.  This will be a user feature announcement, highlighting new features of the OS.
  • Make the developers announcement at Build.  This would be the release of the SDK (maybe beta) as well as early access for developers to the images to install on devices.
  • Final release would be in June/July, with the first phones from Nokia available at launch.

New Features

The Verge article also details some new features.  Another tweet from @evleaks (via wpcentral.com) also details a dual SIM phone under development from Nokia.  And a third tweet from @evleaks (via wpcentral.com) provides a screen shot of the dual SIM phone.

So to sum up:

  • Dual SIM support
  • Notification Center
  • Cortana Personal assistant
  • Quick settings
  • Separate volume controls for media and system sounds
  • Bing Smart Search results
  • VPN Support
  • More integration options for the People hub for social networks

More interestingly is the fact that Microsoft is looking to remove some of the built-in features and make them applications instead.  This seems probable as Xbox Music and Video have been released separately to the Store and keeping them in the core seems unlikely.

I can’t stress enough how good of an idea this is.  Keeping these separate allows Microsoft to quickly iterate these apps without having to go through the carriers testing and release schedules each time they want to make a change to them.

Overall the update list is pretty much what has been expected for new features for quite a while, may question is where’s the big *WOW* feature that will make appeal to consumers.

I would also expect to see even more kernel changes to bring Windows Phone closer to Windows RT.  I doubt we’ll see a merge kernel in 8.1, but I would expect it with 9.0.  Perhaps even a completely merged OS.

Upgrades

Something no one has talked about yet is the upgrade path to 8.1.  Upgrades from 7 to 8 were a big issue when 8.0 came out.  It left a lot of people at a dead-end.

I don’t expect the same to happen here.  The point upgrade should be workable on any of the existing Windows Phone 8.0 hardware.  Perhaps the lowest end of the 8.0 hardware might not be supported, but even that seems unlikely.

Of course that is dependent on the OEM’s supporting the upgrade, I’m sure there will be some bugs/incompatibilities with 8.1 that will have to be taken care of.  I would expect MS/Nokia to fully support it, but HTC and Samsung may be less willing to invest the time and effort to bring it to their older hardware.

Outlook 2013 and ActiveSync

Greg

[sc:software-category ]I’ve been playing with Zarafa’s mail server for a few weeks and added the ActiveSync option to try and get Outlook 2013 to sync with it.  Only one problem…

Microsoft has purposely broken Outlook to only sync to Outlook.com and a few other providers the ActiveSync.

There is a workaround, when setting up the e-mail account in Outlook, an error will be displayed a “Server cannot be found” error, which is not correct.  Instead of canceling the setup you have to force Outlook to close via task manager and then restart Outlook.  The account will then be added.

Once restarted Outlook will sync correctly but the ActiveSync account cannot be your primary mail store so you get a local mail store as well as the remote ActiveSync account.

Clearly this is Microsoft protecting their Exchange server position in the enterprise and I don’t blame them for doing that, but its still kind of disappointing.