Getting Pidgin and Microsoft Lync to work nicely.

In the Windows centric company that I work at we use Office Communicator. Therefore I use Pidgin and the SIPE/SIMPLE plugin to be able to communicate.

Recently, they've started changing the version of OC to the latest Lync version. All of a sudden, my Pidgin would fail logging in. I checked on a Windows system and I still couldn't use the Lync client so I figured things were in transition and I didn't bother too much with it.

However, someone came to ask me about it and when I tried the Window Lync client again, I suddenly was able to log in! I tried Pidgin again and it would tell me that I was using not the right version. So I started searching around. I found that: Microsoft allows administrators to block older version of OC from connecting to the server.

So I started searching a bit more and found that others had the same problem and were looking for a solution. I then stumbled upon a very useful link.

This page describes how to set the user-agent in Pidgin so that you could connect as a certain version of OC. However, when I tried the same version on the post, that version didn't seem to work. So I started searching for a newer version and I found it...

To get Pidgin to work use the following UserAgent:

UCCAPI/4.0.7577.0 OC/4.0.7577.0 (Microsoft Lync 2010)

Tada! I'm able to chat again!

-P

Back on Linux! And how to get Citrix ICA Client on Linux 64bit...

I was finally able to switch my laptop to Linux. Windows 7 was too problematic and I really didn't like it. However I must say that it was better than Vista. I still had some of the issues with W7 as I did with Vista, but it was at least 64 bit and more stable.

I'm still getting everything setup on my system since so much depends on Windows specific processes, software and one of these is that being able to get into our Windows Terminal Server was starting to become a little problem. I needed to install the ICA Client on my laptop but I installed 64 bit Ubuntu. (Why use a 32 bit OS now-a-days?)

Well, I found that Citrix doesn't have a 64 bit client and it turns out that getting the 32 bit client running on here wasn't hard to do, just hard to find the solution. Amazingly, the information is actually on the Ubuntu website, but whenever I searched, nothing linked to it.

I'm posting this information to make it easier for people to find the solution.

The link to the Ubuntu instructions is here. And basically what I did was:

I downloaded the 32 bit Citrix tarball. I ran the installer:

sudo ./setupwtc

This installed the software in /usr/lib/ICAClient. You are then suppose to run from that directory a program called wtcmgr.

However it failed because it was missing libmotif3 which if you apt-get install, you get the 64 bit libraries. You therefore need to install the 32 bit version by download the 32 bit version and installing it manually.

I downloaded the package from Ubuntu's site and then I extracted the files and copied them over to the 32 bit lib directory.

sudo dpkg -x libmotif3_2.2.3-4_i386.deb /tmp
cd /tmp
sudo mv usr/lib/lib* /usr/lib32/.
sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libXm.so.3.0.2 /usr/lib32/libXm.so.4

Then I went back into the ICA Client directory and ran the file.

Tada! Things work.

I love Linux!

-P

Update April 06 2012: I just re-installed on my machine so I could totally remove the Window 7 install. When I came to do the Citrix installation bit I was happy to discover that version 12.0 of the ICA client comes in a 64 bit deb package. Though I still had to do a thing or two. I had to manually install nspluginwrapper which installed a bunch of stuff and then the ICA client installed ok. It was great though because it worked as soon as I completed that. I didn't even have to restart Firefox (however I had copied my profile over from my backup so that may have had some info already setup.)

-P

Ubuntu 10.04 will be out today!

I'm waiting, I'm waiting, I'm eager to try it out.

I'm not going to upgrade though, I'm going to do a clean install. In part because I want to document this for my other blog - Linux on your Mac.

I'll try go show all the steps I go through from the beginning. (I'm not going to bore people with the backup of my home directory or the application list.)

Lets see what happens.

-P

Useful MegaCli commands

As I mentioned in an earlier post, finding the manual for the MegaCli command was rather hard. I've decided to put some of the more useful commands I've discovered/started using.

MegaCli -AdpAllinfo -a0 -- shows you firmware versions, serial number, and LOTS of useful information.

MegaCli -CfgDsply -aALL -- Also very cool and useful.

MegaCli -PdList -a0 -- give you the disk information which shows media errors which will help if you're having problems with your disks.

Frustrations of the MegaCli tool

If you have ever used the command line tool for Dell PERC controllers, you'll know that MegaCli can be a powerful tool.

The frustrating bit is that the output of MegaCli -h means you're stuck guessing for what each parameter does. Some you can guess, but wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to guess?

I found a post about the exact same frustration and someone posted the following link to the LSI MegaRAID SAS User's Guide

This is exactly what I was looking for - particularly starting on page 126.

-P

TTG - Text Traffic Grapher

Have you ever wanted to know how much bandwidth you were using this instant? Do you like CLIs? (i.e. Command Line Interfaces) Then this utility is for you!!!

I found this utility the other day and discovered that it's one of those tools that I don't know why it's not included in most distributions. It's actually at the very bottom of that page, but it's very good.

You provide the name of the router or switch you want to monitor traffic on, the RO community string (usually public) and then you can type "list" to see the interfaces you can monitor and their status. Once you know, use that and you'll see the most recent traffic utilization through that interface.

e.g.

ttg switch public gi1/0/1
Found "GigabitEthernet1/0/1" at index 10101:
[09:44:59] current throughput: in 411.9 kB/s out 218.8 kB/s
[09:45:00] current throughput: in 405.9 kB/s out 247.4 kB/s
[09:45:01] current throughput: in 485.4 kB/s out 342.4 kB/s
[09:45:02] current throughput: in 523.7 kB/s out 357.5 kB/s
[09:45:03] current throughput: in 538.3 kB/s out 350.8 kB/s
[09:45:04] current throughput: in 486.4 kB/s out 302.4 kB/s

---- ttg statistics ----
in out
maximum throughput: 538.3 kB/s 357.5 kB/s
average throughput: 475.3 kB/s 303.2 kB/s
minimum throughput: 405.9 kB/s 218.8 kB/s

Nice huh? This will definitely help me when trying to figure out bandwidth utilization over a short interval.

And there's loads of things it can do ... try the help.

-P

Ubuntu isn't perfect, but it's damn close

I have everything working on my new MacBook Pro. I installed Ubuntu Hardy (i.e. 8.04) like I mentioned in the previous post and after using it for a few weeks for my day to day tasks I can honestly say that it's 99% there.

I've discovered a few annoying issues that are slowly being worked on by the Linux community at large and I hope will fix my problems once they release the new version of these applications.

Which applications are causing problems? Well the two worst issues are the ones that unfortunately I think are quite important. One is something I need to have for daily use - a softphone. Now there are several applications out there: Ekiga and Twinkle are two of the Open Source ones that are available for install - Ekiga being the default. However I found that there were a few times where they didn't work. When I used Mac OS X I would use X-Lite, then I discovered Zoiper and used that instead. Well, Zoiper runs on Linux too, so I've installed it as well to test. I also found WengaPhone which I installed and tested too.

The reason for testing all these applications is that I would always encounter a problem or on a different application, a different problem. On Twinkle, my audio drivers would not work if some other audio application (or itself) crashed. With Ekiga, I couldn't get it to work over the VPN. I tried different settings and maybe I missed something, but on a VPN it doesn't work. With Zoiper - I thought that being on a familiar application I would be able to troubleshoot it better and get it to work. Well, that didn't work either. I also tried WengaPhone which worked much better, but had the same problems as Zoiper - the audio would sometimes fail and I wouldn't be able to hear or talk to anyone. I think this may be due to the applications being 32 bit while I'm on a 64 bit installation. I have the compatibility libraries - including sound, but still no go.

Anyway - while I'm in the office I'm going to use Twinkle and just have to reboot if the audio driver fails (what a pain.) A possible solution which I haven't tried yet is finding a way to reload or reset the audio drivers. If you have an idea of how I can do this easily, let me know. I may just have to script the rmmod, insmod for the sound modules.

The other issue that I have is related to the wireless connectivity. At home I setup my wifi to use WPA+WPA2 for protection. I was able to get our wifi printer on the network, our Nintendo Wii and the two other computers. My MacBook Pro on Unbuntu sees the network requests the key and then doesn't do anything. It seems to connect to the network, but doesn't get a DHCP address. I've tried using a static IP address, overwriting Network Manager, but that worked once and then stopped working. I even had created a profile for "home" so I could just toggle that and have a static IP at home... but nothing!

For now I'm tethered via a network cable. Not the best solution, but it'll have to do until I find a solution.

By the way, I did disable the WPA+WPA2 settings and went with JUST WPA and then with JUST WPA2, but in both situations I had the same problem that I don't quite complete the connection and don't get an IP address from the router's DHCP server and I can't get the static IP address to work either.

Anyway - all in all - I'm very pleased with my Ubuntu installation.

-P

Great UNIXy tips

I've been using Linux and Unix for a long time and I am always trying to make people that aren't Linux users change and go to Linux. One of the things that I like about Linux is the command line and all the tools available to speed things up using just one line (or maybe a few lines.)

Here's an example:

You want to build a complex directory tree of ... I don't know, say 20 directories and subdirectories. Now instead of typing

mkdir first-dir/ ; mkdir first-dir/first-sub-dir ; first-dir/first-sub-dir/first-sub-sub-dir

You can do:

mkdir -p first-dir/first-sub-dir/first-sub-sub-dir

Nice... But how about those twenty directories in a more complex arrangement? That's easy too!

mkdir -p first-dir/{first-sub-dir/{first-sub-sub-dir,second-subs-sub-dir,\
third-sub-sub-dir},second-sub-dir/{another-dir,one-more},\
third-sub-dir/maybe-one-more-dir}/last-dir

Yes, that was one line! (Or multiple lines separated with a \ so that the command continues in a new line.)

What does that look like?

ls -R first-dir/
first-dir/:
first-sub-dir second-sub-dir third-sub-dir

first-dir/first-sub-dir:
first-sub-sub-dir second-subs-sub-dir third-sub-sub-dir

first-dir/first-sub-dir/first-sub-sub-dir:
last-dir

first-dir/first-sub-dir/first-sub-sub-dir/last-dir:

first-dir/first-sub-dir/second-subs-sub-dir:
last-dir

first-dir/first-sub-dir/second-subs-sub-dir/last-dir:

first-dir/first-sub-dir/third-sub-sub-dir:
last-dir

first-dir/first-sub-dir/third-sub-sub-dir/last-dir:

first-dir/second-sub-dir:
another-dir one-more

first-dir/second-sub-dir/another-dir:
last-dir

first-dir/second-sub-dir/another-dir/last-dir:

first-dir/second-sub-dir/one-more:
last-dir

first-dir/second-sub-dir/one-more/last-dir:

first-dir/third-sub-dir:
maybe-one-more-dir

first-dir/third-sub-dir/maybe-one-more-dir:
last-dir

first-dir/third-sub-dir/maybe-one-more-dir/last-dir:

So what do you think? Neat huh? Try doing that within your gui!

By the way, I found this on a page at IBM's site a long time ago. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-badunixhabits.html

There's tons of them, search the site for "Speaking unix" and Unix tips. There are tons of things that you can find. Some of them you know, some I'm sure you don't.

By the way, one thing of importance... remember not to put any spaces between directories. If you have a directory with a space in it, quote it!

mkdir -p test/{test ing} will not create a test directory with a test and ing subdirectory... ;)

-P

MythTV strikes again

Not everyone has heard of MythTV, however I am surprised how MOST geeks (and I mean it in the nicest way possible - I'm one of you) have.

For those that don't know what it is: MythTV is an Open Sourced application that with the correct hardware, will record TV shows. http://www.mythtv.org/

It's a really neat application that I have been keeping an eye on for a while now and I'm in the process of deploying an installation at home.

The main issue is hardware compatibility with Linux. The Linux TV team is doing a great job of getting hardware to be compatible and developing those drivers that aren't being made by the people that know the hardware the best... the hardware manufacturers.

However, I vow to get this box up and running soon and I'll post a screen capture for you.

-P