Monthly Archives: December 2011

Webroot Removal Tool?

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Webroot Spy Sweeper 2011Norton have their Removal Tools for sometimes damaged installations that do not remove correctly.

A customer of mine had used Webroot SpySweeper for many years but we both decided that it wasn’t offering adequate protection and was instead slowing down the customers computer. A real shame because SpySweeper used to be a really good product when the customer first used it on Windows XP – today it doesn’t seem to be so good in the era of Windows 7. So we wanted to remove it.

The standard installer would not work. After some time it gave an “Error 100” whatever that means and directed me to this website. I wasn’t able to find this through Google so I thought I’d blog about it, so that maybe it is reachable through Google. That page describes WRUpgrade.exe which is published by Webroot to remove damaged installations of their products when their regular uninstaller does not work.

When I ran WRUpgrade I had to then load Task Manager and kill off Webroot related processes as it got stuck. But after I did that it removed Spysweeper no problems.

Noontec A9 Smart TV Box

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Noontec A9 Out Of The BoxI’m writing up a review for my Noontec A9 Smart TV Box since none seem to exist. The trouble is I’ve never owned a Smart TV Box other than a modded XBox running XBox Media Center or a PC running Windows XP connected to the TV, so I have no real comparison.

Out of the box the Noontec doesn’t have a lot. It has a tiny 11 button remote and a power supply.

The Noontec A9 is really easy to plug in and get up and running, especially with a HDMI connection (obviously you’ll need to buy the HDMI cable as extra). Simply plug in an Ethernet cable (optional, WiFi could also be used), your TV, the power supply, and you’re up and running.

At very first you need to confirm your Internet is connected. If you didn’t connect an Ethernet cable you should set up WiFi under Settings. Load up the Browser on the home screen to ensure your Internet is up.

A USB keyboard and mouse goes really well with the A9. I plugged in some generic PC versions and they work great. However on Android there are some minor differences to the keymap that you’ll need to know. The very first one is right click won’t bring up a menu, it has the same action as the “Back” button.

USB Keyboard Keymap

Keyboard Key Android
Home Home
Esc Back
F1 Menu
F4 Volume Down
F5 Volume Up
Power Power

Another thing I needed to do before I did anything at all… Out of the box the default firmware wasn’t so crash hot, and at the time of writing v1.1.06 OC03 11-11-29 is the latest firmware available from the Noontec download page. Installing the firmware is fairly easy but you’ll need an SD memory card. I tried using a USB flash drive but it would not install correctly. As Noontec instruct, you simply download their ZIP file and extract the recovery.img file to the root folder of your SD card. Then when inserted into your A9 which is already powered on, it pops up with a dialog to install the new firmware.

With the pre-installed firmware I couldn’t install ES File Explorer, the Android Market said it wasn’t compatible with my device. After performing the firmware update I could. This app is really useful to install as it allows you to play videos from Samba/CIFS/Windows File shares. So for a downloader like me, I just setup ES File Explorer to read some shares on my PC and I download videos on my PC and when they’re available I can play it on the TV with the Noontec remote.

One slight disadvantage for video playback with the A9 is there is no information on rooting, or installing the SuperUser application and the /system/xbin/su binary it requires. This means you cannot use CifsManager which would be the desired operation for playing media from Samba shares – since it would allow any application to play the media, and not limit you to media players that support Samba shares. It’d also allow you to run ClockSync which seems wise considering that “Automatic Network Time” is a feature of GSM networks that the A9 cannot support since it has no support for GSM networks or any mobile phone networks at all.

YouTube and any website which uses Adobe Flash Video (FLV) also works very well on the A9. YouTube obviously works best with the app pre-installed with Android, while some FLV streaming sites for pirated content don’t work so great as the overload of Flash based advertising can overload the browser making it quite slow. ABC iView doesn’t work so great since the screen layout of the A9 increases the size of the page, and essentially blows it up so its too big to be useable. I’d love it if either ABC or Noontec did something to fix this.

For an overall rating on the device, with ES File Explorer it does do the tasks I purchased it for – play video from the downloads folder on my PC and from websites which use Adobe Flash. The interface is a little clunky on the A9 and could be improved, however it is useable & functional. Compared to Apple TV, the A9 is cheaper and doesn’t have limitations of iTunes software or DRM. Given the clunky UI and the comparison to Apple TV, the price is probably very reasonable.

Selling multiple items on eBay?

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I’ve done this in the past before but it appears eBay have changed the rules. If you want to have a “Buy It Now” item with a quantity greater than 1, you need to either be registered as a business account, be a PowerSeller, or pay at least $20 per month to be an eBay store. This just seems silly.

However there is the current promotion that private sellers get up to 30 listings for free per month (which expires 1/1/12).

I’ll have to work on becoming a PowerSeller I think. It would appear that my eBay account only lacks the minimum of $3,000 USD of sales over 12 months.

That may be a challenge, then again it may not. My views on selling things on eBay is to sell stuff you get for free, because then ultimately it doesn’t matter what price you sell it for. Things my computer repair business would “throw away” I sell privately on eBay.

yours2take.com.au?

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I saw the TV ad for yours2take.com.au yesterday while I was listing a bunch of junk on eBay. I’ve been doing a bit of cleaning yesterday and today as the new TV has motivated me to rearrange some things and get rid of junk.

I found it interesting Yours 2 Take’s main selling points in this ad were that its a free service and the intention is to give your unwanted junk a more deserving home (better for the environment etc.). I found this interesting because I could see I wasn’t being charged insertion fees on eBay, other than when I purchased extras like more images (25c per image after the first free image), or extra categories (a further charge of the insertion fee).

I looked into the eBay fees and charges and discovered to my surprise that for a private seller that does not have an eBay store or is not a registered business, you can list 30 items for free per month. eBay will take a “Final Value Fee” of 7.9% if your item sells, but this charge is also capped to $49.95 for the higher value items so it seems a reasonable fee.

eBay does also have excellent shipping calculation through arrangements with Australia Post – when listing a product if you use the “Calculated” shipping and provide the packed items dimensions and weight, eBay will do all the shipping calculations for you. If you want to mark up your shipping costs, you can add a handling fee. Because of this it makes sense to box up items as you list them on eBay because you can then get the exact shipping costs calculated automatically for your potential buyers location.

So I ask when I can list my junk on eBay and potentially earn a few bucks from things that’d otherwise go in the bin, and pay nothing for the listing so if it doesn’t sell I haven’t lost a cent – why would I even consider Yours 2 Take?

Christmas was winnah

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I got really spoilt this year by my family. My parents paid a few bills for me, that helped out greatly. My partner got me a 32” Vivo Full HD TV, that made a dramatic change to my bedroom and freed up space even though the screen is much larger than my old CRT style TV. My partners parents got me a Noontec A9 Android Smart TV Box, that replaced a very noisy Soltek QBic PC which is now for sale on eBay.

Christmas day was actually quite frustrating though, as I made a mess of my bedroom and frustrated as to why the TV antenna wasn’t working. Sorted all that out though.

I’m still yet to program up the Logitech Harmony 600 remote I have for the new gear so that remote is essentially useless for now. The Noontec didn’t come with any remote at all, except a tiny thing thats very useless with web browsing. Noontec apparently have a remote sold as an optional extra that has a touchpad. So I’m wondering if having the Harmony is even a good idea.

Another issue is that Android out of the box won’t mount SMB shares, which would be a very handy way to play videos on the A9 off my PC. If I root the A9 I can mount SMB shares, but there doesn’t seem to be any documentation about this. So thats something I’ll also have to look at. For now I can play videos I download on a USB flash drive, and I can still hit YouTube.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find the Vivo TV has USB recording built in. While it doesn’t really have timeshifting capability, recording is still very nice to have since Dick Smith never let on it had this feature and instead tried to upsell to different more expensive models. I’ve now plugged in a USB extension cable into the USB port to make it more accessible (its on the rear of the TV?), and I can see that some regular programs like Deal or No Deal will get recorded daily just in case we miss it.

Daemonizing rsync on Debian

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I use rsync a lot in my multiple server environment. For example its handy to consolidate all the log files from Apache (which sometimes serves the same site from many servers) into the one place, or in my GeoIP BIND setup where BIND’s normal zone transfers no longer work and a tool like rsync is required to replace zone transfers, or relocating telephone recordings from Asterisk to another machine more suited to distributing them to those with access as it has more storage and bandwidth.

There are two problems with rsync & Debian – Debian doesn’t start the rsync daemon and provides no init.d script for startup at boot, and rsync has no facility for PID files when executing a file transfer.

The first solution is to add the following command to /etc/rc.local – this command can also be crontab’ed to ensure the rsync daemon is running – and this command is superior to normal initialization as it checks the PID file and won’t start rsync if its already running:

/sbin/start-stop-daemon -p /var/run/rsyncd.pid -u root -x /usr/bin/rsync -n rsync -S — –daemon

Further to that, crontab’ed rsync jobs can sometimes have a huge hit of data that will take some time to transfer. Or perhaps there are problems with the network causing slower than normal file transfers. There are many scenarios where the crontab’ed job would be executed again before a previous job has completed.

The solution again is to check PID files. My answer was to write a small shell script (below) which creates a PID file for rsync jobs based on a specified “name” (which probably should be associated with the rsync share name and/or the host specified in the job). The solution is good enough to allow runs of rsync every minute, or maybe even multiple times per minute.

To execute rsync with this script you would run:

./rsync-pid.sh “rsync –avz –compress-level=9 –delete –password-file=/path/to/password/file /path/to/local/data/* rsync://user@host/path/to/remote/data” processname

 

The script’s source code is as follows:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -e /var/run/rsync/$2.pid ]
then
        pid=`cat /var/run/rsync/$2.pid`
        ps=`ps auwx | grep rsync | grep $pid | grep -v grep | wc -l`
        if [ $ps -eq 0 ]
        then
                /bin/rm /var/run/rsync/$2.pid
                unset pid
        fi
fi

if [ ! -e /var/run/rsync/$2.pid ]
then
        pid=`echo $$`
        echo $pid >/var/run/rsync/$2.pid

        $1

        /bin/rm /var/run/rsync/$2.pid
else
        echo $2 is already running!
fi

Clustering SIP servers with Asterisk

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I’ve been considering I should make my VoIP systems more redundant. At present its just a single Asterisk installation on a Jumba Virtuzzo VPS account. While many have laughed at me for doing this, the reality is this Asterisk rig has supported about 50 users for several years with very few hiccups. If Jumba for what ever reason fall over, my pure VoIP telephone goes offline. In an ideal world I’d have auto-failover with hosting from several different providers in Sydney (so latency remains really low while redundancy is really good).

I’ve been considering how this can be pulled off, but I think playing with it over the Christmas period will be the best plan so any downtime doesn’t affect business (as business is closed anyway).

My thoughts are that multiple Asterisk installs would run with a few different tasks. One task would be SIP registration where 1 to 3 machines would continually register to SIP providers like Exetel and Pennytel, and when any inbound call is received, try to dial it locally, if not use IAX to try dialling on every other Asterisk node. Another task would be SIP registration with end users where a number of nodes would be mentioned in DNS A and SRV records.

The real magic I’ll have to work on is a macro for the Asterisk dial plan, so that we can replace Dial(SIP/somedestination) with a routine that will attempt that destination on every node in the cluster before producing a failed result. But I can’t see any reason as to why this isn’t possible.

The complicated thing with day to day administration will be duplicating the same configurations on every node in the cluster. Perhaps at a later date the development of some scripts to assist would be beneficial. Naturally I’ll be blogging about this adventure as it progresses.

Another note on VoIP – today I changed my POST 15 VoIP plan with Exetel to the $5 per month plan. I also recharged my Pennytel account and am now using Exetel as a primary provider with the alaw & ulaw codecs and Pennytel for calls to mobiles and 1300 numbers with the g729 codec. I noticed there are some decent differences in price with this operation.

Spoilt little brat

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noontec-a9I feel like one sometimes. Especially after the Christmas shopping adventures of my partner and her family.

This year my partner got me not only a 32” LCD TV, but her and her parents got me a Noontec A9 Smart TV Box. Knowing I have a wholesale account with their Australian distributor, they submitted the order to me today – ha! I’ll also be fixing up the TV antenna over the Christmas break so it better supports digital TV. Quite a dramatic improvement to my current CRT style TV with a very noisy PC attached via S-Video. The new system should be better for playing Internet or computer based video with the fan-less remote controlled operation. Only today did I realise the A9 ships with a wireless keyboard and mouse, WiFi capability in the box. I’m uncertain though about the camera and if thats in the box or an accessory. I just hope my partner enjoys the presents I have for her as much as I will enjoy hers.

Further to that my partner has also let me borrow her 22” widescreen LCD for my PC. So now I have dual screen with the 17” 4:3 LCD I already have, something I lost when a 17” 4:3 LCD blew its backlight and the replacement part was worth more than a screen replacement.

My parents also wanted a new TV for their bedroom. I ultimately ended up selecting a TV not once but 4 times as an exercise to decide which was the right product – and it seemed I came up with the same TV 3 times. My parents ended up getting the same TV as my partner got me which was ironic considering my last TV they had an identical unit as they purchased the same TV at the same time.

My partner and I also spoilt my partners brother too… got him a new couch. We managed to find a place that was clearing damaged goods at below cost prices as a tax dodge for another business. The couch we picked up was worth $800 but with some acceptable damage they only wanted $225?

The disadvantages of Exigent VPS accounts

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I signed up for a $10 VPS account and put Exigent through a few runs and I must say I’m not very impressed.

First of all there are a couple hidden charges with Exigent. If an invoice goes overdue, they’ll suspend your VPS just the same as any provider, but charge you a $35 late fee.

Last night there was also a scheduled outage as Exigent planned a reboot of their VPS servers. That all went to plan ok. But it would have been nice if Exigent restarted VPS containers, instead waiting for me to action a boot of my VPS.

And finally there is the memory weirdness. Fair enough, at Jumba my VPS with 512MB of memory did not offer enough to run LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) and a full fledged e-mail server with amavisd-new and spamd for filtering. The moment I setup amavisd-new I found the Jumba VPS would frequently have killed processes and crashed services etc. So I got the Exigent account simply for running an e-mail server. And guess what, with 1GB or double the memory, I still can’t run a full fledged e-mail server. Comparing the memory consumption between the Jumba and Exigent accounts demonstrates that the Exigent account requires more memory to run the same services with the same software versions. I’m yet to find an explanation as to why.

Over the Christmas period I’ll have to either figure out the memory issues I have with Exigent, or discontinue them.

Direct imports from China

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Recently I’ve developed a new area of my computer hardware business and began to acquire some new suppliers for common computer accessories that are easy to manufacture. I’ve since gained contacts with several factories in China who ship via Hong Kong.

After buying some samples of the products I’m happy with the quality and have submitted and received much larger orders.

There are some interesting differences dealing with China as opposed to the Sydney based wholesaler I used to acquire these parts from.

The main difference is price. Obviously the price is better, but how much better is really surprising. On average I’m not bothering with any part unless I can save more than 90% of the Sydney wholesaler’s price.

Warranty is another difference. The factory will provide me with no other warranty than DOA or catastrophic failure (fire etc.), however a DOA claim doesn’t require any product return (they honour the claim based on expected failures). This means I have to then finance a 12 month warranty period for various product faults that may develop within 12 months from the purchase date – a legal requirement for any electronic good sold as new in Australia. Considering the price difference though, there isn’t really much to consider since its financially feasible to charge the same price as everyone else (who likely supply from the Sydney wholesaler) or slightly less and the part will still cost less even if the part is replaced under warranty numerous times.

Quality is another minor difference. Some of the products I bought are of an inferior manufacturing quality, however they functionally work exactly the same. However at the same time, some of the products are the same quality, and just a couple are better quality than products offered by my Sydney wholesaler who prides themselves in quality.

Overall my business strategy for this project will be very simple. I’ll trial the sale of these products in my own business, and when satisfied, approach competitors offering a wholesale product range that would compete with my Sydney wholesaler. Ultimately I only care about supplying my very local competitors. Its been said to keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer, and by supplying some parts to my competitors I ultimately ensure that any business in my area will put money in my pocket.