Go’in all wireless

Personal,

Ever since the move I’ve debated about bringing cable into the office. This past weekend I decided it was time to do something about it. After checking the outlet in the bedroom, it was split with cable running on the floor, it did not come from the attic. That pretty much told me I needed to go wireless.

Yes I did not want to split, run up the wall and through the attic then back down to the other side.

Linksys WRT300N

So it was off to Curcuit City for a new router with wireless and a wireless PCI for the work PC. An important less I forgot here was do some research first before these kinds of purchases it can save you time and money.

The selections to choose from were Linksys, D-Link, Netgear and Belkin.

My current router is a Netgear MR314, it has served me well for the last 5 year but I figured if I was going wireless on the work PC I should be current. I decided on Linksys’s WRT300N and their WMP300N PCI card. I would later learn one of those choices was not the best. I was able to move the cable modem, router and the test server out of the office which was another reason for going wireless. Setup was quick and initial tests with VPN into the office were good.

Linksys PCI WMP300N

But then, after about 5 minutes, the PC froze. A hard reset was the only choice and after coming back up it repeated. The uptime would vary between 5 to 15 minutes depending on internet usage. Like I said do some research first cause a quick google took me to the Linksys forums and problems with the WMP300N. No need to go into all the specifics but a driver problem with the Broadcom chipset seems to be the root of it and no update from Linksys at this point in time. So back to the store for another card and we are up and running, no freezes. Signal strength is not as good as the Linksys, as the external antenna of the WMP300N does help, but after a full day of using it I don’t see a difference from wired.

Finally a test server

Personal,

For some time now I’ve been wanting to have a test server I can dedicate to a DMZ. Thanks to the parents for looking to donate an old tower system and I can make that work.. It was a good opportunity to try the Edgy server install but that didn’t go so well. The load went fine but the boot was toast. That might have been something to dig into but I was looking to get it up and I just didn’t feel like it was worth the effort at the time. So I settled on the server install. No problems their, added a few packages and then installed Plone. I’ve been a fan of this product for some time and still believe it is an excellent content management package out of the box. An entry I made a few months back mentioned a backup for a site at work and that’s complete.

I have some other plans for it as well related to general storage. It’s great to have a place where I can put stuff now and not worry about it. The access as a DMZ is also a plus when on the road. The drive is only 20GB but for now that will do the trick.

vcf2ldif … time saver

Technology,

I’ve been using Thunderbird for years now on Windows, managing email for work. For me it’s more efficient and I can find things faster. However for personal mail I’ve always used Evolution even back when it was Ximian. It is an excellent PIM and has served me well over the years. But I decided to switch to Thunderbird the other day. The main reason is for simplicity and managing upgrades a little easier.

So moving mail wasn’t a big deal both use mbox format, copy the files that’s it, but contacts was another story. So my delima was add contacts manually or find a way to convert. Evolution can export contacts in CSV or VCF format but Thunderbird can only import CSV or LDIF. One might say no problem use CSV as it’s common with both. Well for me that wasn’t the case as the Evo export had some interesting labeling and when walking through the Thunderbird import more fields were wrong than right.

I wasn’t really ready to do that so I went looking for a way to convert VCF to LDIF. That’s when I found vcf2ldif. Cudos to Ryan Mills for creating this Java app as it did the trick and saved hours of manual work. I ran into a couple of errors on some address books relating to the number of fields per record, or so it seemed. But removing unnecessary lines in the VCF files fixed it.

SWEET !!!

Blog upgrade

Personal,

Being a number of versions behind decided to upgrade WordPress this evening. A quick review of the upgrade instructions and I was off. An hour later and I’m done. Ran into one problem with a error in upgrade.php but that was solved by uploading the files in wp-includes. The upgrade instructions said this wasn’t necessary, so maybe it’s something related to the version I was running I’m not sure. None the less after moving those files the upgrade was complete. We’re back in business.

Now that I’m current wonder how long it will take before I’m not, again !!!!

Evolution on Windows … interesting

Technology,

I ran across Evolution on Windows this week, it’s interesting. Installed, imported contacts, and about 1.5 gig of email and so far so good. The email import was not easy as I had to take the mbox files, bring them into Evo on Linux then copy the files to the Windows box. Importing on Windows consistently crashed if more than 1500 emails were in the folder.

Nice thing is if it doesn’t work I can just take the mbox files back to Thunderbird.

Update: Sept. 7 It was a fun week with Evo on Windows. The UI and functionality is pretty much identical to Linux however it is slower which is to be expected. Only a couple crashes but it’s time to go back to Thunderbird.