Canmore's Blog

One of my users is the leading scientist of a project funded by the European Union. He "absolutely needed" a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. And (surprise, surprise) someone already had told him "the solution": Act! by Sage software (in Germany, you might order it from Amazon.de, for example).

Now, upon looking at this software, I decided it was actually a piece of very expensive crap (the distributors he had chosen would charge us 700 EUR for 5 licences...). Let me outline the facts:

• Act! is able to sync all kinds of textual contact data, such as address and phone number. You may even attach e-mails to a certain contact, such as the contact's correspondence. However, Act! is unable to sync attachments, such as documents or images. It does sync the hardlinks to these documents, which are of course unavailable on other computers.
• Act! needs to be installed and run under accounts endowed with admin rights.
• Act! is neither able to store data in the user's profile nor able to backup to network shares via SMB or (S)FTP.
• The sync protocol is (of course) purely proprietary and (of course) there are only Windows versions of the software. Some of the project's participants use Apple Macs, but who cares?
• Act! is able to sync via mail (just like Kolab). These mails are unencrypted, because Act! doesn't allow secure connections to mail servers and is unable to use things like GnuPG.

There are several other stupid details, which are just relevant for my department, so I won't bother you with them. So, what's the the bottom line of this? Well, it has taken me 4 (four!) weeks to convince my superiors of these facts. My solution is straightforward: Use Thunderbird with SyncKolab in conjunction with a mailing list every participant is subscribed to, and you're done. Congratulations, you just saved 700 EUR.

Note: Aethera, a Personal Information Management (PIM) software is also very promising. In the near future, I should have enough time to conduct some tests...

Sometimes, provided our very stable internet connection is working, people want to use VoIP services. The clients blessed with more money tend to use a FRITZ!Box WLAN with VoIP capabilities. However, the vast majority of the people living in my village tends to use a small box called HandyTone 286 ATA.

In theory, the box should be able to download its firmware upgrades via HTTP or TFTP from a server the user can specify. Most of the time (this is my personal opinion based on very few users), this does not work. To install a new firmware (which should "squash" some bugs), we had to set-up TFTP servers in the client's local network.

Since most people tend to use Windows, we are normally equipped with Windows tools when updating an ATA-286. A great free TFTP server is Tftpd32. Once downloaded, all we do is download the firmware from Grandstream, place it in the TFTP server's directory and configure the ATA-286 to use our local TFTP server. It is advisable to check whether Firewall rules are blocking TFTP traffic.

After a reboot, the ATA-286 should download the new firmware and install it...finished. So why doesn't it work if the ATA-286 is configured to retrieve its updates via HTTP? Even analysing the traffic with Ethereal didn't provide me with a clue. Can you solve the mystery?

Microsoft has released VirtualPC, which is a VMWare-like application, for free. Since I am using Windows at work (involuntarily...), I decided to run some test installations on several virtual machines. And the results are intriguing:

• The overall performance is great (tested under an fairly standard 2.4GHz Pentium IV system with 512MB RAM).
• FreeBSD 6.0 works smoothly. So does DragonFlyBSD.
• Project Honeypot LiveCD is usable.
• Windows versions such as 98 and 95 automagically detect my multimedia hardware so that I may use them for gaming^W research purposes

Finally, a screenshot (thus making my blog a multimedia blog ;-) ):