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Sunday 30 May 2010

Front room project

This was done in 2008, but thought I'd post for prosperity ..

The cyclic decorating had come round to the front room.  Apparently if you do one room a year it never catches up.  Thank you to Julian for putting that on the agenda !

The 10 year old rear projection TV had to go and my 13 year old Pioneer AMP had just died .. So I spent some time and settled on a 50" Pioneer plasma & Onkyo receiver.  I say settled, that was probably 3 months of deciding ..

So, the rules are TV on wall, no cables - simple.  Yeah but if we put the TV there then the radiator is in the way ..  oh .. trip to The Radiator Gallery and returned later with a big hole in my wallet.

This was a massive job, it probably took two solid weeks of work running the cables and making good.  I'd certainly do it again but next time would get a plasterer in to finish the walls ..


Monday 24 May 2010

iPhone Cisco VPN 3030

The iPhone has a default MAC OS VPN client which I easily got connected to the corp VPN appliances we have.  Cisco 3030.

Trouble was I could'nt seem to get the proxy settings to kick in on Safari.  When connected on the VPN I could browse external sites but nothing internally.  I Installed a few more network apps, ping, ssh etc and narrowed it down to DNS not working.  And not working only for some apps ! ie Safari !

A Quick Google and I stumbled across a post advising to set the local domains in the split DNS names part of the IPSec group config, under the client config tab.  Did this and everything works a treat ..


 
 


Official Apple support for the 3xxx series is vague, but it works fine ..

Update : 24/05/2010

Tested against ASA 5540 with IPSec VPN and it works fine.  The Same issue with DNS exists.  Add the domains to the ASA Group Policy assigned to the IPSec Connection Profile ...


Apparently the next release of IPhone OS supports SSL VPN .. If it does I'll try it ..

Tuesday 18 May 2010

iPhone duplicate contacts


Note entirely clear on this, nor can I reproduce it .. But I'm writing it down so next time I can try the same method.

With my Blackberry I could sync my Gmail & Domino contacts perfectly using the native BB OS and Google sync.

On the the iPhone Google support contact syncing with Active Sync.  And seeing as the OS only supports a single Exchange ActiveSync, which on mine is configured for our corp email - Lotus Notes Traveller(LNT), then I needed plan B.

I opted to disable LNT contact sync and make use of the iTunes Sync to Gmail.  This was all working fine until one morning I noticed my phone contacts had 5 or 6 duplicates.  They where identical in content although on some the fields where in different order.  Some of the duplicates contained lots of information and some just an email.

Regardless of what I did I couldn't remove them.  Theres plenty of hits on google none of which resolved.

In the end I picked on one of the contacts and deleted it from the phone and gmail.  Sync'd the device, contact gone, good.  Added them back as a Gmail contact, synced the device - warning, you are changing >25% of contacts.  Odd, I have a backup so clicked yes.

Bingo, all duplicates gone !

I've since tried to reproduce the problem, edited local contacts, Gmail contacts etc  .. But each time the sync works fine, and as expected.

Will keep an eye on it ... to be continued ...................





Saturday 15 May 2010

The irony


This is exactly as I found it.

The Newham magazine, source of continued political debate, The Mayor - Highest paid in the country, an article on recycling, all left in the gutter ...
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