Steve Seymour's Blog

Just a reminder to myself, when you install a BES 5 server, you end up with specific URL's for the Administration Service (BAS), the Monitoring Service and the Web Desktop Manager.
All run under SSL on your BES server but no "homepage" is create on the https://mybes.company.com URL.

I wanted to just add a homepage on this URL with links to the 3 other services and I traced the most appropriate location for the "index.html" to be here -

C:\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\BAS\jboss\ejb\server\default\deploy\jboss-web.deployer\ROOT.war\index.html

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Steve Seymour June 12th, 2011 19:08:53

As many of you may know, a week ago I returned from a two week charity building project to Malawi, Africa. Our trip was self funded & all 13 members of the team fund raised enough money via JustGiving to cover the building costs and local builders for our project.

Many people were kind enough to make a donation via our JustGiving page (http://www.justgiving.com/malawi2010) So far we have raised £4666 and the minimum we needed for our project was £3900 - so thank you to everyone who donated. The additional money raised goes to the Joshua charity, who will divide it between buying additional resources for the feeding centre and sponsorship for children to go to school (which costs around £75 per year). We would also like to thank everyone who donated books, toys, pens, pencils etc These items got handed over to the schools and feeding centre on our last day.

We lived and worked within the small rural village of Khola, about 10km outside of Blantyre in southern Malawi. Khola has had no help from a charity project before, so the community were very happy to see us. Our aim was to build a kitchen block and two long drop toilets to compliment the Orphan feeding centre. In the dry seasons, the ladies cook for the orphans on fires outside however in the rainy season this is impossible, as is keeping the maize dry. The kitchen will enable them to cook all year round and store ingredients away from the elements.

We all learnt new building skills, brick laying, plastering & pointing "African style" and we also spent time redecorating the interior of the feeding centre so that the volunteers that run it now have the Alphabet, Numbers, Colours etc painted on the walls to help teach the kids. All of the children know their alphabet and numbers parrot fashion, but now they can be shown what they actually look like.

Our team worked in partnership with Joshua Orphan and Community Care (http://www.joshuainmalawi.org.uk) who work in 19 villages around Blantyre supporting the feeding centres and clinics. We worked closely with the local community and made some good friends. The children were great - most under the age of 5 and we also spent time with the youth group. Whilst the village was fairly poor, the most needy were the children at the feeding centre for whom the one meal provided could be the only meal they got for the day. All of the community support this and there is a great feeling of everyone looking after each other. Older brothers and sisters (age 5) carrying around siblings on their back (age 2 or 3) and really looking out for each other.

We completed our project on time and celebrated with the locals at a handover ceremony. You can see a selection of my photos from the trip at http://photos.steveseymour.com/Travel/Malawi2010/14226761_GtH6o

More details of the project and what we did can be found on our main website at http://www.malawi2010.com and any further donations are always welcome. If you would like to know more, please get in touch.

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Steve Seymour October 25th, 2010 07:48:24

Well, been back 3 weeks now but only just got the photos uploaded!.
Fantastic week, very memorable - good people to be away with.

My Photos are here : http://photos.steveseymour.com/sweeden1
Other Photos are here : http://photos.steveseymour.com/sweeden2

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Steve Seymour September 25th, 2007 23:09:38

For work I have an O2 3G data card. Whilst this normally works fine, it can also be quite expensive - charged per MB of data transfer. O2 don't do an "unlimited" tarrif (or rather one, with a high acceptable usage limit) - they still seem to think that 400MB of transfer could be all you would need in a month.

T-Mobile recently announced their Web-n-Walk service which is their data offering. Its available to add onto a monthly account or on it's own for £30 per month - unlimited (well, 3GB on the Plus service or 10GB on the max service which is £44 per month). However, I don't want to be come a T-Mobile customer with a monthly fee. They also have a Pay as you Go (PAYG) offering where Web-n-Walk data is enabled by default. The key thing is there is a maximum charge of £1 per day. T's & C's say you should only use it in a phone (not in a laptop etc) and the limit is 40MB per day - measured monthly. Thats still 1.2GB per month. Not too bad .... Also, PAYG requirements are to make a call or use a service every 180 days to keep the SIM active.

So, I sent off for a SIM card (all of 50p) via the web, added £5 of credit and put the SIM in my o2 data card. Created a new profile to use the APN name "general.t-mobile.co.uk" - no Authentication, and it connected first time. I only had 1 bar of coverage on 3G at home however the download speeds were very impressive! I shall continue to try it out over the next few weeks instead of my o2 card - perhaps it may end up worth taking out a monthly contract if it continues to perform well.

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Steve Seymour July 7th, 2007 20:01:19

Recent work equipping Comms room's for a client required the sourcing of some 16Amp adaptors - namely Y-Cords and splitters.
RS were ridiculously expensive for these and therefore I did some searching on the web to find an alternative.
The company I ended up using who charged very reasonable prices was "Essential Supplies" - on the web at http://www.essentialsupplies.co.uk/
The 16 Amp commando range of adaptors I used were - http://www.essentialsupplies.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_16A_Adaptors_93.html

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Steve Seymour June 29th, 2007 13:00:00

Whilst working for a client in Chippenham recently, I was using the local Starbucks to do some preparatory work. As I per normal, I logged into the T-Mobile hotpot there to get online, collect mail etc. Part of the work I needed to do required me to use the Windows PPTP VPN Client. It connected fine however I was not able to actually connect to anything. Some web pages worked, replication would start but not complete, remote desktop would connect but not login. All symptoms of TCP/IP MTU issues. (See Wikipedia "Maximum Transmission Unit - MTU")

MTU within windows can be manipulated for LAN Interfaces fairly easily - this quite often has to happen for ADSL Broadband connections etc - see Google.

However, manipulating this for PPTP VPN connections was slightly more tricky to work out however a big of searching found the details. The registry key requiring modification is :
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NdisWan\Parameters\Protocols\0]
"TunnelMTU"=dword:000004b0
"ProtocolType"=dword:00000800
"PPPProtocolType"=dword:00000021

Full details at : http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;826159&Product=winxp

I found an MTU of 576 (decimal) was what was needed for PPTP at T-Mobile hotspots. I then also found a reference to this at "The Air Source" (although in relation to Linux configuration)

Attached is a .reg file that creates the above key and sets the MTU to 576.

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Steve Seymour June 20th, 2007 11:00:00

Useful tool ...

This package provides ThinkPad Keyboard Customizer Utility for Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP users.
ThinkPad Keyboard Customizer Utility enables predefined assignments for:
- A Windows key and an Application key on the ThinkPad keyboard.
- Audio volume control buttons, mute button, ThinkPad button/Access IBM button, Suspend/Hibernate, Wireless Radio Control, EasyEject, Full Screen Magnifier, and Presentation Director on the external keyboard.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-44185 

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Steve Seymour March 28th, 2007 14:35:31

During our recent re-decoration at home, I decided now was the time to run a new arial feed from the roof around to our back room so we could have  decent freeview reception on our TV there. My desire to do this properly led me on a search for -
1. Quality coax cable
2. F-Type crimp connectors (F-Type make a much better connection than normal arial connectors)
3. Crimp Tool
4. Cable Stripper

RS Components had most of the bits but seemed very expensive but a little more digging found me -

http://www.tvaerials.com
where I bought ...

1	Black Clips
20	CRIMP "F" Connector
1	PROception Screened Outdoor 2 Way Splitter
1	Webro 100m WF100 Black Coax Cable

and ... http://www.dataconnectsolutions.com
where I bought ...

Order Inventory:
Product: F-Crimper for RG6/59 and CT100
Product Code: DCS-106H Price: £7.65

Product: Coaxial Cable Stripper RG6/59
Product Code: DCS-312A Price: £3.75

Product: F-Connector Termination Aid
Product Code: DCS-224D Price: £2.00

All the things I needed to sort out my cabling! (The Termination Aid is a fantastic tool!)

Comments (2)
Steve Seymour March 26th, 2007 21:15:00

Well, we have recently had the challenge of finding a good plumber in Harefield to help us out with capping a pipe and twisting a tap. Simple jobs when you have the right tools and know how! After trying various people from a Yell.com search ... no luck. We even had plumbers who promised to come but never did.

However, we were passed a tip by my mum who had seen a van driving around locally with signage for "www.oddjobmen.com".  My first thought was - I hope their work is better than their website!
I gave them a call on 020 8428 0557 and they said they could pop around the next day. After checking out the requirements, getting the parts and coming back the next day they got the job done brilliantly. They have even popped back and re-sealed a tap that we were a bit worried was damp/leaking. Great service and thoroughly recommended.

They are based in watford and seem happy to cover Harefield, Northwood, Ruislip etc. They also do a lot more than just plumbing so give them a call.

Comments (1)
Steve Seymour March 26th, 2007 21:10:02

A few notes on installing VMWare ESX Server 3.0.1 on an IBM Blade HS20 (Type 8843) when you have an onboard LSI 1030 Adaptor. We are using the LSI to do hardware RAID 1 on 2 local Mini SCSI disks then a DS4300 SAN for the VMFS storage.

The reason for writing this down ... Ive been struggling with it all week! ... and I don't want someone else to have the same problems. Im very familiar with VMWare - including the ESX range having installed it multiple times in various situations ... however, never on a IBM BladeCenter.

After various aborted attempts to complete this install, this is the final set of working steps. The biggest problem I had until now was that the ESX Install could see the SAN Space but NOT the local mirror - even though it had the correct driver etc.

1. Use the latest version of ESX - in my case, 3.0.1 - rather than the 3.0 CD we had to hand
2. Ensure all Blade Center firmware is totally up to date - for the Chassis 8677 - http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01004c/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-54597&brandind=5000020
3. Ensure all Blade Firmware - including the LSI controller are totally up to date
4. Login to your Fibre Channel Switches and DISABLE the ports for the blade you are working on - remember to do both switch modules!
5. Use the ESX CD (real CD - not ISO otherwise you will have to do some funky stuff to make the CD contents availbale via HTTP/FTP/NFS) and boot the install - I used graphical but it doesnt really matter.
6. Choose the LSI device to install on - I was happy to use the default layout
7. Reboot at the end of the install and install the license file, set the hostname, IP - other basic config settings.
8. Re-enable the Fibre ports for the blade
9. Follow the guide "Implementing VMware ESX Server 2.1 with IBM TotalStorage FAStT" (linked at the bottom) to provision a LUN on your SAN for VMWare. - Note - the doc is aimed at ESX 2.1 but the SAN config advice is still valid. (Key thing is setting the host type on the HBA's to be LNXCL)
10. Reboot the ESX Server
11. Load the VI Client, login, go to Configuration. Check Storage adaptors now show up the HBA's and the allocated LUN from the SAN (note - if you have dual path - it will show up twice - this is ok.
12. Now go to Storage, Add Storage, Disk/LUN ... your LUN from the SAN should show up, choose it and Next, Next through the setup. I would suggest naming the Storage something sensible to make it clear where and what it is. Also, rename the local storage.

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Steve Seymour March 17th, 2007 18:33:35