Computer Stuff

Through trial and error, I realised that both the cert and private key filenames that you upload, must end in .crt 🤷 Normally the key would be .key or at a push maybe .key.txt

This config is to allow a Yealink W70B / W56H DECT phone to register as ‘101’, and then place and receive calls via the PSTN (using port fxo 0 0). It’s useful while waiting for number ports (PSTN to SIP provider) to complete instead of putting PSTN on call-divert, and in my case I actually just want to install the SIP-only DECT phone and leave the copper line in place for now. I am aware of the Gigaset N300IP (combined SIP and POTS) but those don’t support PoE. This will allow me to put the W70B PoE DECT base in a good central location and still use the POTS line.

I spent an afternoon trying to figure out why the location service wasn’t working. I could see that directing PSTN to IF_SIP worked, but IF_SIP didn’t know where to send the call. Directing it to the location service didn’t work and there was nothing at all in the syslog. It turns out I needed the mapping function to rewrite the called_nr to 101 so that it would match the registered identity in the location service.

Also, outgoing calls do not work with dial-after dialtone. I had to use dial-after timeout 1. However I was using an ATA to simulate a PSTN line at home so YMMV. Ignore that. When I connected to a real line, the default dial-after dialtone worked fine.

You should update the password to something strong.
That’s this bit here:
authentication-service SER_AUTH
realm 1 smartnode-gw
username 101 password 101

#----------------------------------------------------------------#
#                                                                #
# SN4112/JO/EUI                                                  #
# R6.11 2019-07-02 H323 SIP FXS FXO                              #
# 2024-08-09T18:47:19                                            #
# SN/00A0BA0BD2B7                                                #
# Generated configuration file                                   #
#                                                                #
#----------------------------------------------------------------#

cli version 3.20

clock local default-offset +00:00
webserver port 80 language en
sntp-client
sntp-client server primary uk.pool.ntp.org port 123 version 4

system

  ic voice 0
    low-bitrate-codec g729

profile ppp default

profile call-progress-tone UK_Dialtone
  play 1 5000 350 -13 440 -13

profile call-progress-tone UK_Alertingtone
  play 1 400 400 0 450 0
  pause 2 200
  play 3 400 400 0 450 0
  pause 4 2000

profile call-progress-tone UK_Busytone
  play 1 375 400 0
  pause 2 375

profile call-progress-tone UK_CongestionTone
  play 1 400 400 0
  pause 2 350
  play 3 225 400 0
  pause 4 525

profile call-progress-tone UK_WaitingTone
  play 1 100 400 0
  pause 2 5000

profile call-progress-tone UK_ReleaseTone
  play 1 1500 400 0

profile tone-set default
profile tone-set UK
  map call-progress-tone dial-tone UK_Dialtone
  map call-progress-tone ringback-tone UK_Alertingtone
  map call-progress-tone busy-tone UK_Busytone
  map call-progress-tone waiting-tone UK_WaitingTone
  map call-progress-tone release-tone UK_ReleaseTone
  map call-progress-tone congestion-tone UK_CongestionTone

profile voip default
  codec 1 g711alaw64k rx-length 20 tx-length 20 silence-suppression
  codec 2 g711ulaw64k rx-length 20 tx-length 20 silence-suppression
  no high-pass-filter

profile pstn default
  echo-canceler-hybrid-loss 9

profile sip default
  no autonomous-transitioning

profile aaa default
  method 1 local
  method 2 none

context ip router

  interface eth0
    ipaddress dhcp
    tcp adjust-mss rx mtu
    tcp adjust-mss tx mtu

context cs switch
  national-prefix 0
  international-prefix 00

  routing-table called-e164 RT_FROM_PSTN
    route default dest-service SIP_LOC_SER MAP_CALLED_NR_101

  mapping-table called-e164 to called-e164 MAP_CALLED_NR_101
    map "" to 101

  interface sip IF_SIP
    bind context sip-gateway GW_SIP
    route call dest-interface IF_PSTN_00
    early-disconnect
    use profile tone-set UK

  service sip-location-service SIP_LOC_SER
    bind location-service SER_LOCATION

  interface fxo IF_PSTN_00
    route call dest-table RT_FROM_PSTN
    loop-break-duration min 80 max 300
    disconnect-signal loop-break
    use profile tone-set UK

context cs switch
  no shutdown

authentication-service SER_AUTH
  realm 1 smartnode-gw
  username 101 password 101

location-service SER_LOCATION
  domain 1 smartnode-gw
  match-any-domain

  identity-group default

    registration inbound
      lifetime default 3600 min 1 max 4294967295

  identity 101 inherits default
    display-name 101

    authentication inbound
      authenticate 1 authentication-service SER_AUTH username 101

    registration inbound
      lifetime default 3600 min 1 max 4294967295

context sip-gateway GW_SIP

  interface WAN
    bind interface eth0 context router port 5060

context sip-gateway GW_SIP
  bind location-service SER_LOCATION
  no shutdown

port ethernet 0 0
  medium auto
  encapsulation ip
  bind interface eth0 router
  no shutdown

port fxo 0 0
  use profile fxo gb
  encapsulation cc-fxo
  bind interface IF_PSTN_00 switch
  no shutdown

port fxo 0 1
  shutdown

Create the admin link in ‘365 admin

Start rclone.

Choose to create a new remote

choose onedrive (type 31 35 at the time of writing)

We don’t have a client id or client secret yet so leave blank as per the defaults

at the end you can say No, to editing the advanced config. After that you should be offered the option to sign in via a browser. Do that and use your admin account.

Back in the command prompt, continuing the rclone setup..
For the config_type, choose number 6 (“Type in SiteID“)

Open up the admin link from earlier in your browser, and grab the site ID from the Sync button in the Onedrive web-folder view.

You can either see this in dev-tools in the network request history (chrome F12), or you can Copy library ID from the middle of the screen and extract it from the url there (that is easiest). It’s url-encoded but that’s fine. Just take everything after &siteId= up to the next &, so for example here is an extract from one I just did. We would want %7bea……..%7D:
&siteId=%7Bea459e9b%2D37fd%2D44b5%2Da5f3%2D4434244cd813b%7D&webId=%7B86f7034

Type that in for your site ID in rclone.

Then rclone will find the OneDrive business drive and let you choose it (number 1 in the list below)

All good. Now you can sync it to your file server or whatever.

I use a scheduled task running rclone as below:

c:\rclone\rclone.exe -v --stats 30s copy james-onedrive: D:\OneDriveBackup\James --log-file=C:\Sharepoint-backup-log.txt

Despite restarting the computer, this app would not install, instead stating “Restart Required, a computer restart is required”

Slightly frustrating that the supplier of the software was not able to resolve the problem and it was left to me to try to figure it out for our customer.

The supplier / developer ought to know exactly what it is checking when it says Restart Required. I could see that their support team had checked the usual PendingFileRenameOperations stuff. I checked anything else I was aware of too such as Windows Update RebootRequired.

In the end I used process monitor to capture all registry access, filtered by the installer application. There were of course 10s – 100s of thousands of rows to sift through, but I filtered for ‘update’ or ‘restart’ etc. and found the part of the trace where it was doing these checks, and one by one looked at them in the registry.

In this instance it was HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Services\Pending

I changed this to notPending, and lo-and-behold all good.

I’ve spent two days* and printed so many labels. Piles and piles of labels, and I continue doing the same remotely from home and checking the Image Buffer through my browser to see what the printer at the office is producing. All I wanted was a scalable non-bold font! SST Thai is inbuilt and would do nicely, but could I get the font aliasing to work? No way. Well, yes, now finally. What a relief.

Of course it doesn’t help that you have to restart the printer every time you alter or edit the alias file (or do you? see below), and there is no information or debugging for this sort of thing, all you can do is try a print and see if it works.

Anyway it turns out that despite the Honeywell documentation (what little I could find) stating that the ZSIM.FNT alias file should be placed in /home/user, this is incorrect. In fact the alias file should be placed in /home/user/fonts

I have more good news. Now that I have the thing working, I can confirm that a restart is not required between changes. I was tinkering with the ZSIM.FNT alias file and I noticed that the change was picked up immediately.

The following ZSIM.FNT appears to do what I need:

Z#SST Thai#100#

That means: replace font Z with SST Thai, with magnification factor of 100%

Wonderful. I am so happy to have finally worked it out. This is now genuinely the highlight of my week.

_{*OK I was doing other stuff too, like trying to get a tiny FSC logo to be readable at 300dpi.}

This is on a Poweredge T110 II

Trying to upgrade a 2012 (non-R2) DC to 2022.
That jump isn’t possible, so I am upgrading to 2012 R2 first.

After in-Windows initial phase (which took ages), upon reboot there was the windows logo and twirls for a moment, then screen off (DPMS), then screen back on, but no mouse cursor and nothing happening, no display.
No disk activity.
Keyboard responding – num lock , caps lock, but can’t do anything.
waited ages.
powered off and back on, forced VGA / low-res driver, no difference.

System was already using Microsoft Basic display driver anyway, and no other unusual drivers present as far as I can tell.

Gave up.
Solution:
Upgrade to 2016 first instead. Much much faster initial phase of upgrade too – doesn’t run though and try to reconcile every hotfix and update that has been installed. What took almost an hour on 2012 -> 2012 R2 is taking 10 minutes.

The option to keep settings and apps is not present if the current edition (as returned by DISM /online /get-currentedition) is ServerSolution (a.k.a Essentials)

use DISM to upgrade with the KMS key to 2012 R2 standard:

dism /online /set-edition:serverstandard /productkey:D2N9P-3P6X9-2R39C-7RTCD-MDVJX /accepteula

then do in place upgrade to 2022.

Remember 2022 essentials *is* 2022 standard now. It’s a STD product key.

You can’t use EVAL media to upgrade either.

The official line from MS is that you can’t have multiple accounts from the same organisation signed-in to office at the same time. You can’t use the Office account switcher in the top-right. If you try to sign in with another user from your org, you will get the following message:

..and your only option is to sign-out the first user, possibly disconnect the Work or School account. Unfortunately, if the first user is the only one that has a license to activate the office desktop apps, then you probably do not want to sign-out of it.

The trick is usually to add your secondary account into Outlook, and allow Outlook to add it as a Work or School account. This results in both accounts showing up in the Office Account Switcher, and you can click between them, with the apps staying activated, OneDrive / Sharepoint, cloud settings and recent files working properly, even if the secondary account only has a basic license without desktop apps.

I recently had an issue where this didn’t work, and for the life of me I could not get it to work. I could not get the secondary account to add itself in to the account switcher without signing out of the main account first – which de-activates Office. It seems that if you do things in the wrong order, it’s nearly impossible to get it right again. The ability to choose your identity within the same org can be quite important, and not just for activation purposes.

Here are my notes from just now, to save myself the hours of messing next time.

On a new computer or new user profile, it seems that if you start out by adding the fully licensed (Business Standard or Premium) email account to Outlook, and activating the product with the same, then you can add the secondary account to Outlook during the Outlook welcome screen, and both accounts will stay active in the account switcher in all office apps.

If you somehow end up with it not working (e.g., accounts added in wrong order, or main account signed-out), then it’s a nightmare to fix. After much trial and error, this seems to work:

• Disconnect both work or school accounts
• Remove outlook profile
• Delete all of HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office
• Delete %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneAuth

Then proceed as per new computer / profile above. The requirement to use Outlook might have something to do with the main email account corresponding to the entry in LicenseIdToEmailMapping

There are many times when it seems that you have it working, but then closing and reopening Word or Excel a couple of times causes the inactive account to be removed, and the apps become deactivated.

Script scheduled to run every minute.

:local time [/system clock get time];
:if ($time >= "19:00:00" || $time <= "06:30:00") do={
	:foreach i in=[/caps-man interface find where disabled=no] do={:log info "Disabling CAPsMAN interface $i due to out-of-hours time"; /caps-man interface disable $i}
} else={
	:foreach i in=[/caps-man interface find where disabled=yes] do={:log info "Enabling CAPsMAN interface $i due to workday-hours"; /caps-man interface enable $i}
}

Yes, both the T30 and T40 will boot from an NVMe SSD fitted to an adapter in the PCIe x16 slot.

You don’t need a USB stick to boot the machine or any other quirky workarounds. The BIOS / UEFI firmware will boot properly from the NVMe SSD, in a simple, cheap (£10) PCIe to m2 adapter.

Tried and tested.