But I already have a router!

Verizon is a great company, doing great things, but that doesn't mean they're not evil. I've found that this is an effective maxim which allows me to extol the virtues of Verizon without sounding like I'm drinking the kool-aid. Today I'm hoping it works inversely as well.

When in doubt, test.

Shortly after I last upgraded my mail server, one user reported that his mail client was failing to connect with the message:

"Unable to connect to your IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server..."

He was the only one known to be having this issue, so after a cursory check of the server with no obvious problems, I suggested that this might be an error on his end, such as connecting to the secure IMAP port without using SSL/TLS. Occam’s Razor suggests that a server error is more likely than a client error which just happens to coincide with a server upgrade, so I eventually decided to dig up some infrequently used commands and perform a thorough analysis.

Quick and Easy Caller ID on MythTV

I have resisted the urge to display caller id on my MythTV as somewhat obvious. I’m always looking for ways to demonstrate the freedom which comes from using open source software, but I prefer the zesty freshness of an original idea rather than anything that’s been done, redone, and done again. My wife, however, thought that Myth caller id sounded like a great idea and asked me to set it up. What follows is how I did this with the least possible effort.

Merry ChristMyth

This past Sunday I joined my brother-in-law in watching Christmas in Yellowstone, but we only caught part of the program, so I decided to record a later showing in high definition; unfortunately my MythTV box is about 360 km southeast of my current location. I thought MythWeb might be useful but I was not familiar with it, nor had I installed it. Now that I am, and have, I wish I had set this up earlier. Off site management access is just the beginning of MythWeb’s feature set.

Direct Inward Dialing with Asterisk and Broadvoice

When I wrote about building my own PBX, I mentioned that I set up Direct Inward Dialing (DID), a feature which allows virtual phone numbers to be routed directly to extensions while using shared trunks (phone lines). I figured out how to accomplish this after reading this discussion, but made improvements along the way.

Quick Fix for Asterisk/BroadVoice Number Conflict.

I have a strange issue on my Asterisk box. If I call BroadVoice tech support using one of their trunks, I connect normally and hear the initial IVR, I press "1" and hear "Your call is being transferred." Then the weirdness starts: I remain connected, but I hear my own hold music. As near as I can figure, while I'm on hold in their call queue, Asterisk has dumped me in to hold and I can't get out. If I stay on long enough for a tech to pick up, they either hear nothing or my hold music and hang up. Free beer goes to anyone who can identify and solve this issue, meanwhile I have developed a workaround.

Linux Bane

The Cat Who Walked Through Firewalls

While I was cooking last night's dinner, I made the mistake of leaving my laptop running, open, and unattended. Because ours is primarily a Linux household (my wife is a Mac user),`aptitude update && aptitude upgrade`. Laptops, however, are an entirely different story. As you can see in the photo, we live with a creature that is essentially a heat seeking missle bent on killing laptop computers. Sure it was funny the first couple times, but amusement quickly turned to horror when I saw that she can actually crash Linux. All my base are belong to her.

I normally don't worry much about the computers. The servers, devices, and desktops tend to chug along without needing anything more than an occasional