iomem

I'm not going to mince words here: I can't stand telemarketers. I don't care whether they are charities, political organisations or just run-of-the-mill salespeople, I simply have neither the time, interest nor will to waste my own neurons talking to them. It particularly infuriates me that technology - auto-diallers and voice-over-IP - combined with minimum wage staff, has made it so easy for telemarketers to misuse my time, while making a fortune from it. Even being on a do-not-call list hasn't fixed the problem completely; there's so many exemptions that I still find I get unsolicited calls far too often.

Of course, technology can be fought with more technology, and fortunately those of us who move in the free-software sphere have been graced with the marvelous gift of Asterisk, which presents many opportunities to waste the time of these people, as they try to waste ours. The equipment needed to run this is all fairly basic, by today's standards: I have a Snom-300 IP phone on my desk, a Linksys SPA-3000 adaptor to connect my PSTN line into my household ethernet (and can also drive a standard PSTN phone) and finally an old-whitebox PC as my Asterisk server.

So if you're being driven insane by students reading from canned scripts wanting your money, here's five ways to use Asterisk to get rid of them and maybe even slow them down in the process...

Author: Paul Dwerryhouse <paul@dwerryhouse.com.au>

OpenSolaris 2008.05, Sun's community-developed open-source Solaris distribution, was released in May of this year, to much fanfare. While I began my system administration career in the Solaris field, I've found myself more and more in the Linux arena in the last few years, and haven't had a good look at Sun's flagship product since back in 2005, when Solaris 10 was released. With this in mind, I decided to pull down an ISO and see just how much going open-source has improved the product.

While a large proportion of the world's webservers are currently using Apache, a competitor has been steadily gaining popularity on many high-usage sites. Lighttpd, pronounced "lighty", is a small-footprint, high-speed webserver, and is notably used by sites such as Sourceforge, YouTube and MiniNova. Netcraft state that Lighttpd is currently being used on 1.38 million sites, and is steadily gaining on Sun's share of the market. This introductory article provides a guide to getting Lighttpd installed and configured.

The release of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), back in June, brought not only a new desktop system to the Linux world, but also a server system with long-term commercial support. It has one key advantage over similar offerings from Redhat and Novell; the flexibility of the Debian dpkg packaging system.

This was of particular interest to me, as a system administrator who generally installs Debian, if given a choice. One of the annoying problems with Debian has been its potentially short support lifespan; essentially as long as it takes to get two more releases out. Admittedly this hasn't been a real problem, to date, but not having firm dates has been an issue in some environments in which I've worked.

Another was its perceived lack of commercial support, which often made it very difficult to bring into a corporate environment. While I've worked in situations where I had complete authority to use whatever OS I chose, I've also been in workplaces where it has been made clear that Debian simply would not be used, due to the lack of a commercial organisation providing security support.

Ubuntu's server release solves both of these problems, so I installed a copy to see how it held up.

QEMU is well-known as a free replacement for VMware, allowing users to run a PC within a PC. What isn't so well known about QEMU is that, in addition to emulating x86 architectures, it can emulate AMD64, Sparc, MIPS, PPC and ARM CPUs.

In the case of the ARM architecture, QEMU provides a convenient, if slow, environment in which development can be done for embedded systems.

This article describes the process involved in building a Debian/ARM server running under QEMU. It assumes that Debian is also being used as the host server.

Since QEMU's arm emulator has no ability to emulate either IDE or SCSI disks, it will be necessary to install the server on an NFS exported partition.