Well, i’ve been very busy reacently, so busy i haven’t had time to blog so heres a bit of a roundup of what’s been going on:
OSPF:
OSPF dynamic routing protocol – me, matt and martin implemented this across our VPNs so that if one of us adds a subnet it’s instantly routable by any of us. Unfortunatly it works on a system of trust – i could add a subnet which is the same as one of matts and all those routes would propagate and really screw up. This sort of happened when some routes which shouldn’t be served were being served so the VPN tried to send VPN packets down it’s own tunnel! Once some filtering was sorted this now works fine and is quite an elegant solution to the problem. It does mean however we have to co-ordinate use of subnets though.
SyncToy:
Now that i’ve moved my desktop back to windows running on the 160Gb RAID-0 array for speed i have put one of the spare 160Gb IDE drives in the same machine as my backup disk. While searching for a backup solution i came across the windows Xp Powertoy – SyncToy, which is actually quite advanced – it supports bi-directional sync of changes/new files etc, one way copies (as backup), a contribute where files from both sides are combined and never deleted and a couple of other options. Running it with the -R flag just runs the backup automatically so i have it set up to run when i log in, though perhaps it should be when i startup instead. I’m also going to use it to sync the music collection on the laptop in the car.
Car Startup Controller:
I have been searching for some time for a mecahnism to auto-boot the laptop in the car, now, this can be done quite simply with a relay, resistors and a couple of capcitors but this is quite inflexible, the problem is that the relay has to close then open again after a short time as you can’t just hold down the power button on the laptop all the time as it won’t boot.
So i used one of the little picaxe microcontrollers – 08M, when it starts up, it waits 60s, closes the relay, waits 1s then opens it again. The best part of this solution is that it is reprogrammable – i can just plug it into my computer and upload a new program.
The Design – just a regulator on the 12v input down to 5v, the 3 resistors to ground on the serial in pin, then a transistor on the output pin with the relay and a protection diode.
Work:
Things have been hectic with all sorts going on, i’ve had 3 major projects to deal with in quite a short space of time -
1. Wrestle with the DirectX SDK to provide recording, playback and live interfacing to AXIS video servers – which use Mpeg4 over RTSP/RTP. Now that i’ve done it, i can now interface with almost any other DirectShow video source with minimal of fuss – simply a matter of changing the filters.
2. Alter the way our VHF recorder uses the windows waveOut/In devices for enumeration and record/playback. We had landed ourselves in a situation where we had a soundcard which had no mixer device – which we were previously using for enumaration and setup and also assumming that the waveOut/In ID was the same as the MixerID which in fact they’re not. So this required some alteration to the way we were using the API. As a side effect it actually makes the program more robust in situations where soundcards arn’t always as expected (one wave in, one wave out and one mixer device)
3. Dongle Licensing Protection – i have designed and implemented a dongle based protection and licencing scheme which will eventually interface into a full customer/order database system.
As well as those, we now have a need for a calandering solution so i looked at Scalix mailserver, but for us, all it really offers over our current setup is the calander, outlook connector and webmail. Since none of us in the office use webmail or outlook it is of limited use. Plus changing the MTA to postfix instead of sendmail didn’t seem all that simple. Instead i setup iCal’s on our WebDAV server which seems to work pretty well using the thunderbird lightning plug in. When i get around to it i’ll set up a private WebDAV area for each of us to use for our iCal plus a public one.
Apart from that there’s nothing much else going on at the mo, i’m moving house in 6 weeks back to manchester which should be…interesting to say the least.
