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Jun 12 / Greg

Manually Install Certificate On Zimbra

Man I love the internet! I recently had to upgrade the cert on a Zimbra server and I kept getting failure messages, so a quick google search and this article fixed me right up!

Jun 11 / Greg

TheBrothersWISP 5 – Future Proof Your WISP and Fiber Terminations

This week we have Andrew, JJ, Justin and myself(Greg) on the call! Brothers Unite!

We are talking about future proofing your WISP.

  • What equipment we choose
  • Why we choose it
  • Techniques we employ
  •    
    We speak about fiber optic cable.

  • How we terminate
  • Where we use it
  • why we use it
  •    
    We also give a war story or two.

    Jun 3 / Greg

    Memories Of A Cabling Fiasco

    So back in the day I worked for a company called UCS. I won’t go into the poor employee moral or the way we were treated…I’m taking the high road. What I will talk about is a particularly bad night…err early morning.

    So we had a lot of old cat3 50 pair running through the building.

    We were tasked to decommission some of it since it was unused and we could scrap it to make a few bucks. So we set on our merry way pulling out the unused cable. I was working with a fellow named David D. I’ll just call him double from here forward. David was and I’m sure still is and interesting guy. He has the best/most alienating vocabulary you will ever encounter. Beyond that he is a hard worker and always good intentioned…which is what I had to keep telling myself that night.

    So we had been pulling out cable and I had lined up double to continue the work while I left for the day. Not too big a deal. At about 6:45 I get a call saying “Greg, I’ve accidentally cut through one of the cables that was meant to stay.” These cables ran some remaining lines for our call center, which means we were in a bit of a pinch when these guys arrived in the morning. I say “David, just meet me me at 5 in the morning and we will splice it back together before they come in at 7.” Ugh, a couple hours of splicing cables is pooh, but I figured I would survive…then I get another call.

    It is about 7 or so and I answer my phone “Greg…I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ve cut ANOTHER incorrect cable.” To this I say “David, put the cable cutters down. Please don’t touch anything else. Meet me in the morning at 3 and we will fix this.” Needless to say I was a little agitated…hehehe.

    So we show up and start to work at 3AM. I strip one cable and begin splicing while double starts working on the other. I start by soldering the connections, but quickly realize this is going to take far too long, so I just start twisting cable together and wrapping it with electrical tape. We finish everything up about 5 minutes shy of the call center opening…juuuuust in time. Miraculously all the lines were working! No one even knew what had happened save for a couple of other guys in the office.

    Fast forward about 5 years later and I’m working some place new as is double. Some friends of mine bring me a special delivery. It seems that they finally removed the remaining cables and found these massive wads of electrical tape on a couple of sections. They were kind enough to bring me one of them 🙂


    Oh the memories.

    May 31 / Greg

    TheBrothersWISP 5-29-12 Podcast – Monitoring and Backup

    We discuss what we use to monitor our equipment, what we use to backup and thoughts on training.

    Go over and have some funzies watching. We also now have direct audio podcast feeds!

    May 31 / Greg

    Mikrotik V5.17 Released

    What’s new in 5.17 (2012-May-28 12:34):

    *) files – fixed problem when directories disappeared after reboot on usb or sd flash;
    *) webfig – make QuickSet scan list work in Firefox v12;
    *) webfig – fixed problem in QuickSet when changing country or channel-width in AP
    mode would enable NV2 protocol;
    *) webfig – fixed skins when hiding first tab may make other tabs inaccessible;
    *) winbox – fixed packet raw data view in packet sniffer;
    *) winbox – fixed problem when router could be DoS attacked through winbox port; This is a biggie!!!!!!
    *) ports – add option “/port firmware ignore-directip-modem”
    which will ignore modems ip interface
    and modem’s serial ports will be made accessible to users;
    *) ipv6 pool – allow pools with prefix equal to prefix length;
    *) ping times improved on Nv2 high data rate wireless links;
    *) tool email – added starttls option;
    *) snmp – allow multiple ip ranges for each community;
    *) serial console – added channel support;

    May 30 / Greg

    Mikrotik RB951-2n

    This is the 750 formfactor but has built in B/G/N wireless.

  • 300MHz CPU
  • 1.5dBi
  • 3W power draw
  • 32MB RAM
  • B/G/N wireless
  • MSRP of $45
  • I’ll personally be buying and using these pretty extensively…depending how good the reception is. I’ve no doubt you guys will be doing the same 🙂

    May 24 / Greg

    TheBrothersWISP 5-22-12 Podcast – WISP Security

    We talk loosely about WISP security, bonding multiple connections across the internet, and Ubiquiti open lower frequency channels. Jump on over and have a listen 🙂