Worked with Martin on this. Left code that grabs all posts as comments in include file as well as active code the grabs only announcements.
Category: "Activity log"
March 6, 2007
March 1, 2007
Helped Stew and Greg with an emergency install and configuration of the Dialang application on all the lab machines, for Marie-Josee Hamel's session tomorrow
February 20, 2007
Update to this task.
Crossroads-B is rebuilt. And it shall be known as Parsnip.
Apps (Firefox, Foxit PDFreader, 7-Zip, Robocopy and .Net2) and updates (SP1 etc.) are installed.
Second disk installed. Data transfer begun.
January 26, 2007
This problem is not new.
Context:
* I run the ghost console against the labs from within a virtual machine running Windows XP.
* VMWare's vmnet NICs (virtual devices) are bound to one physical NIC.
* The host OS (Linux) is configured so that both gigabit NICs are using the research network.
* Ghost server needs a static IP and access to a variety of ports.
The problem:
When configured as above the ghost console does not seem to send any packets. I currently have a request in for NETS to look in to this. However, when I swap all ports and settings to run on the 100baseT network (on both host and guest OSes) everything works perfectly.
Why this is a problem:
Having two different physical networks on a single machine requires having two default gateways set. I believe this is called dual homing, and it just doesn't seem to work. If I define two default gateways, the whole host machine runs on one network - invariably, the slow one.
January 19, 2007
FacMan has delivered the cart all modded up for our videoconferencing pleasure. I've mounted all the devices, plugged them in and done some very basic testing. I'll need to run a proper video conference to be certain, but so far so good.
There is still a bit of work to be done: FacMan wants to put something to tighten up the strapping on the codec.
December 21, 2006
Further to this, the app-on-linux thing is the result of Skype not having video capability on linux yet. They're working on it apparently.
The driver was relatively straightforward, although it wasn't installed in Ubuntu by default.
I had to pull the UVC driver source from svn, build the module and insert it into the running kernel, like this:
- $ svn checkout http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/linux-uvc/
- $ cd linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
- $ make
- $ sudo make install
posting Stewart's minutes on testing webcam
December 20, 2006
We've acquired a couple of Webcams as part of the process of investigating communications technologies that might replace all or part of the functionality of the labs. Spent some time today with Greg and Stew testing these out with Skype:
- Seamless instant functionality on Windows (didn't even install the driver).
- Same on OSX, although when Skyping between OSX and Windows, it appeared that the Windows-connected camera was feeding better quality video out. Possibly needs some configuration.
- Problems finding an app that could use the camera on Linux, although Ekiga seems to work OK with the camera.
So on Win and Mac at least, Skype works well for audio, video and simultaneous chat. We now need to test conference calls to establish the maximum effective numbers of stations on one subnet which can participate in a call, with and without video.
December 7, 2006
The network in the labs has always been a bit flaky. I think there are a variety of issues here, such as faulty cabling in the labs (think C16 and transfer speed being half the going rate) and perhaps ACL issues on the switch.
I've made a request at the Helpdesk to look in to our own VLAN with our own ACLs etc. but I'll also need to track down the other problems. Task coming in next.
I've acquired 6 or 7 17" CRT monitors from the UVic bookstore. There is no cost other than delivery (FacMan charge). They are apparently in good condition.