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Recent update of windows live messenger caused us problems as we filter downloads in our office and we couldn’t use the web installer of messenger to upgrade the MSN messenger.
search for an offline full installer failed, we had to find it ourselves.
so here is the full installer in case anyone need it:
Glad to announce a brand new tools which will be hopefully helpful in analysing different networking and system issues.
First set of tools are DNS related. you can find the DNS Tools right here at http://www.shukipel.com/dns-tools.
In these set of tools you can query information such as reverse lookup, mx records, domain lookup, whois information, ns lookup, spf records verification and dkim verification.
Recently I had to convert a database of a system that used UTF-8 encoding but the database was default created with latin1.
All worked fine until greek letters was needed… than all greek characters were showing question marks (????)
main problem was that I already had data in the tables, so just recreating the database wouldnt cut it…
Research everywhere got me to a lot of different information but only one was close enough to help me solve my problem, so I decided to share this here with you.
This is under the assumption that you application connection to the database use UTF8 (set names)…
The article that had me start this was: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Convert_latin1_to_UTF-8_in_MySQL
The simple steps there were (BACKUP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE!!):
1. Dump the database:
mysqldump -p --default-character-set=latin1 -c \ --insert-ignore --skip-set-charset crm > dump.sql
2. Convert the dump file to utf8 using iconv
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 dump.sql > dump_utf8.sql
3. Change table definition from latin1 to utf8 using perl
perl -pi -w -e 's/CHARSET=latin1/CHARSET=utf8/g;' dump_utf8.sql
4. make sure you didnt forget anything
grep latin1 dump_utf8.sql
5. Create a new UTF8 Database
mysql --user=foo -p --execute="CREATE DATABASE NEWDB_utf8 CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;"
6. Restore converted utf8 dump to the database
mysql --max_allowed_packet=16M -p --default-character-set=utf8 NEWDB_utf8< dump_utf8.sql
7. dont forget to grant privileges to application user
mysql --user=foo -p --execute="GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on NEWDB_utf8.* to 'some_user'@'localhost' identified by 'some_pass';"
Now you are basically done. change connection configuration to the new DB name and see it working, HOWEVER you might see some characters were not encoded correctly and now showing as gibberish. here comes dirty work…
you need to check which character is screwed in your table and change it, for example:
character (’) is screwed up, you need to check where it appears in the tables and change it’s unicode value(C292):
To find:
select count(*) from some_table WHERE subject REGEXP UNHEX('C296');
To Replace with utf8 equivelent E28093:
UPDATE some_table SET subject= REPLACE(subject, UNHEX('C292'),UNHEX('E28099') ) WHERE subject REGEXP UNHEX('C292');
same routine for (–) C296 to E28093
hope you won’t find too many of thes at least now you have a solution without losing your data.
we all know or at least heard about asterisk by now. an open source PBX, which provide small and big enterprises the opportunity to cut costs and improve their old fashioned telephony systems.
the problem with old fashioned pbx systems made by avaya/alcatel/etc. is that they are way over priced, For years they had the ability to set the price for their systems license for almost every component in the system , and most of the times also force us to use their proprietary phones.
PBX based on Asterisk is first of all free, all you need to take care of is the hardware, ranging from a free vmware appliance on your office server for your small business to a dedicated heavy duty server for your call centre.
I recently implemented an asterisk based pbx for a 30 people office, inter connect it with 2 other locations with SIP trunks, and I can tell you… what a joy!
easy to configure, extensions were bulk loaded, PRI took 2 minutes to activate with the operator, 30 SNOM300 phones were configured easy and the office telco is up and running, free features such as: conference rooms,softphone video conversations, fax to email, and many more, no more licenses! upgrades are free, the only cost is per extension is a physical phone roughly $100 and if that person want a headset it’s even free using a softphone on the computer.
the pbx software is used there was elastix, and it’s a very very fun tool to use.
how much it costs?
software/licenses: FREE
Hardware: $2500 (for small office can be summed up by $1000 with PRI support, we chose to have it ready for expansion)
Phone:$100
softphone: FREE
all together (30 extensions): $5500
having this one implemented successfully, we decided to switch our main office from the old digital/analog pbx to the same system.
about 80 people with expectation to grow, the system cost us only double than what we should have paid to increase the capacity on our old pbx.
Elastix PBX Config
to sum it up, if you are afraid of switching your office telecommunications to an open source product, fear not! that system and i am only a small example is being implemented every day in avery complex places and scenarios.
the costs cut is unbelievable.
to sum it up GO asterisk GO!
FLASH Operator Panel
If you are an experienced “networking administrator”, UNIX/Linux Guru or a php/perl programmer and you are looking for a place to host your wisdom, we will be more than happy to give you a stage, for your applications ,tutorials or guides.
Please drop me an email to lior@shukipel.com
