I used to use an old pc running smoothwall connected to a little wireless router I was given. I moved away from the Linux solution (I kind of wished I hadn’t now) cos: a) The disk on the old pc was starting to go a bit flaky and b) I had to run a cable upstairs as there was no room for it near the phone socket.

The Livebox wasn’t to bad (apart from a crap wireless signal strength), until i tried to connect my Wii to it. The Wii connected to the web fine under my old setup, so I thought it would under this one. I was mistaken.

Doing a scan reveled my network ok, so i gave it my WEP key, it did it’s test and kept coming back with a variety of error message. I did a quick Google on the matter and it turned out that other people have had the same problem. I tried a couple of there solutions but all they did was result in a different error code.

I was certain is was something to do with security, and just befor I turned of all the encryption on the livebox i noticed something on the Wii, on the screen where you input the key. It said the security was WPA-PSK (TKIP, as you can see from the screen shot

As far as I could tell, the Livebox was using WEP. So, I hit the Change security settings option, selected WEP, input my key and it connected! Problem solved, more by luck than judgment.

As soon as I ran it, it found my external disk, and said it could repair the partition on it. It did its stuff, I saved the partition back to the disk rebooted and I could see the disk again.

It only cost $40, so its well worth it!

It started to get mightily hot in there, at one point it got up to 38C, we had various fans in there but nothing seamed to be getting rid of the hot air. The best thing seamed to be getting a long foil tube, putting one end over a large fan situated at the back of the racks, and the other end out of the door. This got rid of a lot of heat until the portable air con’s turned up.

We managed to get away with very little initial problems, the watchguard firewall overheated, switched itself of and lost its config, various server lost disks and everything was reporting heat warnings.

The only complete failure was a Dell poweredge 750 server that was running websites for our editorial system. This went down, and refused to power up again while it was still in the rack. We moved its services onto another server, and when it got a bit quieter we took the server out of the rack. When we got inside it, we found a section of the main fan had broken off completely, and fan blades had been tossed all over the server!

So we got the fan out of the housing, and it looked as though the bearing had gone, so the fan was lose in the casing. Presumably the blades had hit something and this is how they snapped off.

We then looked into Dell IT assistant and one of its last temperature warnings was at 88C, no wonder a couple of hours later the CPU was still to hot to touch.

So let this be a lesson, always make sure your air con and its backup units are in working order!

We read up about fax over IP, it does exist but apparently its not very good, the line has to be clean with no noise otherwise the fax machines cant handle the call. Due to the fact we would be using the VOIP network we decided not to pursue this route, and to attach an ATA device to the VOIP network and then to a normal analogue modem. The ATA just lets you use normal analogue phone/faxs/modems on the VOIP network.

What we then wanted to test, was if we could get caller ID information out of the modem, the idea being that if caller ID was working then we should be able to get out the number the customer has called, so we know where to route the email.

Using a Hyperterminal session to the modem, we called the modem. If the caller ID is being passed then, between the first and second ring the caller ID info should pop up. This is where the real fun began.

The first few times we rang it nothing came through. Doing a bit of research, quite a lot of modems didn’t support caller ID in the UK, and most of them didn’t have the feature turned on by default. Looking round the web, we found a couple of commands to try on the modem to turn on caller ID, they were

AT#CID=1
AT%CCID=1
AT+VCID=1
AT#CC1
AT*ID1

After now managing to turn it on, we rang the modem, and hey presto the caller id came through! Just as we thought we were getting somewhere we found another problem. If we rang the modem, hung up and rang it again within about 5-6 seconds the caller id didn’t come up. Wait about 15 secs and it worked again. We tried this with two different modems and the same things happened again.

So the caller id was’nt very reliable going over the VOIP network and through the ATA box. We then got the VOIP guy to try and get it to send the called number anyway, he turned it on, we sent a fax but the info didn’t come through to Windows Fax services. At this point we started to realise our idea might not work very well.

Next week we will probably play about with it a bit more, but looks like we are going to have to do it another way. The other ideas we have or try and use Fax over IP to see how well it actually does work, you get get some modules for Hylafax etc so we might try that. The most likely option i think we will do is use a ISDN30 , attach the lines to that and put a card in the server. We know this option works as one of our other centre’s currently uses this method.

1. First thing, make sure you change the local admin password on the source sever if you dont know it already.
2. Pull the second disk out of the source server (normally 0:1), this will break the mirror.
3. Pull both disks out of the server you want to build. Put one of the disks into the source server so it re-builds the mirror.
4. Turn off the destination server. On the destination server, put the disk from the source server into the first slot (normally 0:0)
5. Boot the server, go into the bios. and turn off the network cards so it wont conflict with the existing server
6. Once the os has loaded, login, delete any network teams you might have setup, re-name the server to its new name and pull it out of the domain. Reboot.
7. Before the server reboots, go into its bios again and re-enable its network
8. When the os has loaded, login (you’ll have to go in as the local admin, I hope you changed the password!), re-create any network team you might have and re-join the domain

Once you have done this you should have a copy of the source server, easy! The main problem with doing this was to re-create the mirror on the destination server. Normally you’d just put the disk back in and it would re-create the mirror.

Problem is you cant just put it back in and it re-mirrors because its already got a signature from the previous server.
Sometimes as the server comes up it will recognize the new disk and re-create the mirror, but sometimes you have to go into the controller card (ctrl+m on the dell) and set the new disk to be the secondary, it will warn you its going to blow the old disk away but just ok it and it should re-sync the disks.

You might have noticed that quite a few of the rack mounted and stand alone models come with an extra ethernet port, with a spanner icon above them.
We had noticed these ages ago, but never really paid them much attention. We have recently started to look at them, and they are very useful indeed.

They have various name (ERA, DRAC, RAC) but basicly they give you bios level access to the machine, even when the OS has hung/crashed and you cant use normal remote access tools like VNC and Microsoft’s in built remote desktop (when using remote desktop use a /console switch on windows 2003 to get to the servers console session).

You assign the RAC card an IP address (you can do this in the dell server assistant or when the servers booting), then connect to the ip address in a browser and you get low level access to reboot the server, power cycle it, turn it off etc without ever getting in the car and driving to the site!

It will also give you some server logs and other config options. The remote access tab should let you actually control the pc (even the POST screens) over a VNC like connection, but this doesn’t always seam to work very well. Hopefully a new revision of the firmware will fix that.

I trawled though the logs (no mean feat considering i’m a windows user, and hardly know Linux at all!), and managed to sus out it was something wrong hardware wise with my usb modem, or my isp was having problems.

When I left my PC plugged straight into the modem, I had no problems. So I was going to try and replace the usb card in the pc. Before I did that I thought it might possibly be a power issue (the pc that runs the firewall is quite old and only has an atx mini power supply), so I bought a cheap powered usb hub to run the modem of to see if that helped.

Well, it did! I’ve ran the firewall up for nearly 2 days now and not one disconnect. This might mean my firewall hardware is on its way out, but at least I solved my problem short term!

More info on smoothwall can be found at www.smoothwall.org