Friday, April 25, 2014

Sangoma A101 Shows Up as Wrong Device On FreePBX Distro

After installing a Sangoma TDM card (the A101DE, a 1 port pci-e PRI card) on a FreePBX Distro system, I noticed that the system was detecting the wrong card... 

lspci showed something like:


02:04.0 Network controller: Sangoma Technologies Corp. A200/Remora FXO/FXS Analog AFT card

 
After looking around for quite a while, I decided that I wanted to run this card through DAHDI and not through the standalone system that I've used for years with Asterisk. The goal was to make this card managed as much as possible using the GUI.


Here are the steps I had to take:


1. Update the drivers in the OS:

sudo yum update dahdi*
sudo yum update kmod-dahdi-linux
sudo yum install wanpipe
2. Configure the card:
sudo depmod -a
3. which requires a reboot 

sudo shutdown -r now
 4. Now, get wanrouter to load the right kernel module

sudo wanrouter hwprobe
5. configure the card:
sudo wancfg_dahdi      
Your configuration here will vary. Make sure it lists the card you have. This script really just ends up calling the setup-sangoma script. You'll have to choose what's appropriate for your system. Note: I selected the option at the end to simply save the config files and not restart the modules, as I found that the option to restart the modules failed.

You'll want to make wanrouter/wanpipe start on boot (yet another script question.)

6. reboot, again
sudo shutdown -r now 

7. Go into the GUI to settings -> dahdi config -> sangoma and enable DAHDI management of Sangoma

8. reboot the system

sudo shutdown -r now

Now, you should see the right card in the DADHI section of the GUI.
 

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Problems Joining OS X Mavericks to an Active Directory Domain

When joining a mac to an Active Directory domain, you might see this error:

Unable to add server. Node name wasn't found. (2000)
 One of the things that confuses people is that it asks for a clientid. This should be the computer name you want to use on the domain for the mac. Don't try to use your username or "domain admins" or anything like that.



 The other is the "server" field. If you were using LDAP for directory service, you would put in one of the LDAP servers. If you're using Active Directoy, put in the fully qualified domain name of your AD domain.

In this case, the time was too far out of sync on the Mac. Because AD uses Kerberos, the client machine's time must be within a few minutes of the same time as the domain controllers. By default in AD, this is five minutes. The time requirement is necessary as kerberos uses it as an anti-replay control.


Monday, April 7, 2014

Lenovo Thinkpad Laptops Failing to Connect to Wifi

I ran into a recent problem where a Windows 7 Thinkpad would not connect to wifi access points properly. It would connect to the Thinkvantage wifi profile, but networking was unavailable. Wired access worked fine, as did everything else. The problem ended up being the Thinkvantage tools.The advanced wifi settings of the network profile showed a power savings setting of maximum savings. Switching that to medium savings enabled networking. I suspect the laptop would have worked if the WAP was only a few feet away, but this user was over 30 feet away.