I have been playing with Asterisk for a few weeks now, and had the worse time trying to get the meetme conference rooms to work. I read all over the internet with many people having the same issue and no where could I find a solution. The error that we see when watching asterisk using the asterisk -r command to connect to the asterisk server remote console follows like so when someone attempts to dail the conference. No application found "meetme". So what does this mean? This means that when Asterisk was compiled that the MeetMe application was not compiled at that time, and the reason that is would be because your system didn't meat the requirements in order to install meetme during the compile process. The easy way to figure this out is to run configure, once you have ran configure you should run "make menuselect" you may press enter to go into the applications that are to be installed while compiling. Anything with a [*] is going to be installed during compiling because your system has all the dependencies required. If you see XXX next to an application that means that you do not meet the minimum requirements. Highlighting the app will also tell you what you need in order to add the application. When I highlighted MeetMe, it said that I needed dahdi to be installed before I installed asterisk. DAHDI is the new zaptel, in Asterisk version 1.6 you will need DAHDI, not zaptel. I installed zaptel, so I could not get the meetme conference installed since dahdi was the dependency. I download dahdi from http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux-complete/dahdi-linux-complete-current.tar.gz Make sure you compile this before asterisk. One more thing to add is make sure you get the init script working, because you will need to start dahdi also. I am running Asterisk on OpenSuSE11, in order to get the /etc/init.d/dahdi script to work, I had to edit this script. I replaced redhat with suse everywhere in the script, I also removed the first function for finding the function library. I also had to replace action with echo everywhere in the script. Once all that is done and you can start dahdi, go back to your asterisk download and run "make menuselect" again, you should see that meetme is now included as an application. Compile or recompile asterisk. As long as dahdi is running, you should be able to use the meetme conference numbers. I hope this helps, if not please reply to this post and I will answer any questions that come up.

VMWORLD 2008 Las Vegas;

This was a fantastic conference, almost as good as Novell Brain Share.  The only problem was that it was way over crowded, although the sessions where outstanding.  The conference was held in the Venetian in a 5 story conference hall, with a huge vendor area, and extra large key note hall.  What I did not do was attend the conference party, which from what I hear was a real fun time.  First thing is that VMWare was really selling SLES10sp2 as the best OS to run on ESX host.  This is because of the Paravirtualized kernel that Novell has included in SLES10sp2.  I must have attended 5 sessions where the instructors mentioned SuSE as the best OS to be virtualized.  One other thing mentioned was Novells acquisition of Plate Spin, a virtualization management engine.  Plate spin has a few products and the ones that VMWare made sure we knew about was Power Recon and Power Convert.  I am currently demoing power convert, and it seems to do it's job very well.  Power Recon will take a look at your virtual environment, and then take a look at machines you wish to virtualized over a specified period of time to let you know not only if your virtual environment can handle the P2V workload, but also includes your savings in power and AC, very cool.  Power convert handles migrations of workloads from P2v, P2P, V2P, and V2V.  The nice thing about this, is that it works with Linux and Windows and does not require Active Directory.  The main thing I was looking for at vmworld where products that did all the cool stuff, that could integrate with LDAP and not require AD.  So what did I do at VMWORLD 2008.

Sunday: Arrived in Vegas, checked in to the Hotel, Meet up with my buddy Jack, his wife, and jacks boss.  Jacks boss whos name I shall not mention due to national security reasons was a very technical old school directory who new his stuff so well, you had to keep on your toes around him.  Lots of knowledge with a great outlook on the past to the present, and a great vision for the future.  It was very good to see Jack as this was the first time I got to see him in almost 3 years, he still looks as cute as he did 3 years ago.

Monday: Registration at 8am, no breakfast, no lunch.  Today is only for LAB's, no sessions.  There was a small vendor party at 4:30pm where the vendors opened the booths for the first time and served all sorts of junk food and soda.  Monday night was not a complete wash because I was able to spend a bit of time with my family that I brought with me.

Tuesday:  Sessions begin, I did three sessions on Tuesday and learned a lot.  On the way to the conference I was handed free poker chips from Microsoft.  Those poker chips where attached to some card that I threw away.  I wonder what was on the card?  I spent the majority of my time in the vendor area, making contacts and calling Jack on his cell phone to bug him.  Jack filled his schedule up with useless classes and spent no time in the vendor area.  Tonight we all went to a small vendor party in a suit at the Venetian.  Free beer and free food.  Only problem is that I went to a buffet after the conference with a co-worker.  We went to the buffet at the Wynn, very awsome, very expensive.  You have to pay before you are seated, and you are also expected to your tip down.  What I did not like is that they wrote the amount you tipped on your ticket that you gave to the seater.  I think this set you up for seating and the service you would receive for the rest of the night.  We didn't tip great because it's a buffet, and I find it hard to tip when I don't know how the service or food is yet.

Wednesday:  More sessions, more vendor area, more Jack wasting his time in sessions and more me out getting free gear from the vendors.  I meet up with Jack and his wife, plus Avy to head off to the conference party.  When you see 17,000 people trying to load onto buses to go to a party, well it turns you off wanting to go.  We all decided to go out for a nice dinner and have a night on the strip.  Avy missed the gym so much he decided to use the treadmill at Baileys, I'm not sure but the treadmill looked a lot like a walkway to the casino.  In Avy's defence moving walkway or not he did get a workout at Baily's even if people walking past him thought he was drunk.  Before we went for our workout we had a good time at the Paris hotel drinking pina colada from what looked like a giant penis, descised as a ifle tower.  I don't know but long, hard, and full of white stuff fits the description of a penis if you ask me.

Thursday:  Final day of the conference, where I actually attended more sessions and learned lots about linux on VM.  Jack finally broke away from classes around 3pm, but we only had an hour and a half to run through the vendors to get free stuff.  The experience was a blast and I was so sad to say goodbye to Jack.  I think I may be going to Brain Share this year since VMWORLD 2009 is in San Fransisco.  Next time it's in Vegas I am there.

I stayed until Friday morning and we had a nice flight home.  I brought back many free t-shirts and a lot gained knowledge on ESX and host performance.  Make sure if you get a chance, go to a conference, they are a lot of fun.

Next time you are out, and it's cold out.  Ask yourself "Jackit On, or Jackit Off"?

Deploying FreeRadius against eDirectory coming soon.

Current Project: integrating Cisco Wireless Lan controller with Novell eDirectory

Status: Cisco Wireless Lan Controller hooks into FreeRadius that authenticates users against eDirectory. Single Sign on into eDirectory currently works with issues.

Issues: During login of 802.x across the wifi, the user is granted access into eDirectory, this happens quicker than the user gets an IP address. This means the users are not getting drive mappings or the container login script to run. About 5 seconds after login the user gets an IP address and can login a second time.

Schema extensions: none
Radius Server: SLES10sp2 X86_64
eDirectory/LDAP server: same SLES10sp2 X86_64 server
Client: Novell Client 4.91sp4 on WindowsXp

A few weeks ago I took my CLP/CLE10 upgrade test. It was a difficult test as I was asked to do some things that I have never done before, but thanks to common knowledge I was able to figure thing out and work my way to passing and becoming both a CLP10 and CLE10. As most of you who have taken these test know, CLE10 is Novell's top Linux certification based on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. I can tell everyone some tasks that I had to complete but I can not go into detail. The CLP covers advanced linux based tasks such as scripting, logging, creating users, and performing advanced tasks on user accounts. CLE covers services that can be ran on a Linux server such as nagios, DHCP, DNS, FTP, squid, and many other services that may be used on Linux. During my test I was asked to configure two DHCP servers in a fail over fault tolerant state. Not only was I asked to configure these servers to be fault tolerant but I was also tasked to perform advanced features within the servers themselves for DHCP. I was also asked to configure a syslog-ng server with some very advanced features for logging. My third tasks had to do with advanced configuration of LVM data groups and NFS for both client and server. Many of you would say NFS is simple, but there are many advanced features on the server side and client side that I was asked to perform during this test. I then had a request to perform a maintenance check on a certain part of the system and write a script to perform actions based on the different states the specified part of the system was in, these were not easy tasks and the script was very advanced itself to include sed and awk statements in order to work properly.

If you are thinking of taking the CLP and CLE, I suggest that you get all the training materials that you can and study each chapter to the point you completely understand every word. Build a lab and perform the tasks in each chapter over and over again. I have been working with Linux on a daily basis in an enterprise environment for many years now, and this test was extremely hard. I wish anyone that is looking to become a Certified Linux Professional or a Certified Linux Engineer the best of luck.