Blog Jon

Beginning to Learn IOS Programing and Development: IOS4 Training Series Part 1

Jon — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:07:11 +0000

Due to a recent idea I had for a new iPhone/iPad app it gave me the interest in learning how to write apps. So after a bit of research I found Stanford University has a free lecture series on IOS 4 and 5 development. I figured this would be a good starting point to understand IOS application development and since it was free I had nothing to lose. I am starting with IOS 4 using the following video series, http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/developing-apps-for-ios-hd/id395605774 which starts out with the basics by creating a calculator.

The video lectures are very good to start with since it takes the step by step approach to writing an application, explaining what everything is along the way. These videos are available for your iphone/ipad or computer so you can take them with you wherever you are.

IOS4 Traning Lecture

IOS5 Training Lecture

Redhat/CentOS 4.x End of Life Yum Repository Stops Working: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo

Jon — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:28:29 +0000

The Redhat/CentOS version 4.x recently hit its end of life for software updates and support. Below is the error you are likely to see if the repository has not been updated.

[root@localhost ~]# yum update
Setting up Update Process
Setting up repositories
not using ftp, http[s], or file for repos, skipping - 4 is not a valid release or hasnt been released yet
Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: update
Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: update

If you still have servers out there and don’t want to upgrade to CentOS 5 or 6 then the repository file will need updating for yum to continue working.

Just copy and paste the following commands into the terminal.

mv /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo /tmp
yum clean all
wget http://www.jonathanmanning.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/CentOSVault.repo_.txt
mv CentOSVault.repo_.txt /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOSVault.repo

Now try using the yum update command.

How To: Remote CentOS Install Using VNC Over Internet

Jon — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 13:11:25 +0000

Having someone install a linux operating system for you is pretty tough if you try to walk them through it. Lucky there is an easy way so you can do the install from anywhere, you just need a person at one end to do a couple of steps. Here is a quick guide on how to get the remote install over vnc working.

1. First you will need a CentOS ISO to boot the computer, I was using CentOS 5.

2. Once the computer has booted to the install start-up screen you will type in what you would like to do instead of just pressing enter. This is the key part to telling the system to boot to a vnc install. Type in the following command.

linux vnc vncconnect=192.168.1.100

Where the ip address is a machine you are running a VNC listening server. I used a rackspace cloud Windows server and installed RealVNC to control the install. If you are going to do that just make sure to disable the firewall of the cloud server.

3. The next step is selecting the network configuration for the computer being installed, once it has network connectivity it will establish the VNC connection so the remote user will be able to install the OS.

4. On the other end where the VNC listening server is, the screen will pop up with the remote install screen.

5. Now the rest is easy, just click through the install just like you were sitting in front of the computer. See the screenshots below.

The install is now complete, just select reboot and the newly installed linux computer will have SSH access.

How To: Make DVD Movie on Mac with iDVD from AVI File for Free

Jon — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:28:21 +0000

I was pretty surprised how easy it was to make a DVD movie on my Mac with iDVD. It only takes downloading and installing Perian which will give Quicktime the ability to render different video codecs. Here is a quick step by step guide on how I created a DVD.

First thing you will want to do is download Perian and install it. Click this link and then download the dmg. This will install extra codecs for Quicktime to play DIVX movies and other high compression codecs.

The Perian control panel is found in the Apple System Preferences menu. See the red arrow in the image to the left.

Once the Perian installation is complete, restart the computer and then open up iDVD from the applications menu.

When iDVD opens up select the Magic iDVD option highlighted by the red arrow.

Next select the movie, or movies, you would like to add to this dvd. The movies added will show up under the drop moves here section in the project. Once all your movies are in the project click the create project button as highlighted by the red arrow.

Once the project goes to the preview screen, all that is left is to insert a blank dvd and click burn dvd button as shown. I would recommend using the preview button to make sure the audio and video playback before burning the project. There is also an option to save the project as an image. In the file menu of iDVD there is an option Save as Disc Image. This creates a disc image which you can test on the computer before burning to DVD using the Disc Utility application from the Utilities folder.

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Managing Social Media and Social Networks with Dashboards or Marketing Software

Jon — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:27:58 +0000

If you are like me and are the webmaster for various websites then ultimately you have many social network profiles to manage. With so many social networks out there and each with their individual niche it is important to promote your website on them but is a daunting task to keep them all straight. In the past when I was just using facebook and twitter, ping.fm was able to offer a single posting portal allowing status updates, and tweets at the same time. Now with google plus, linkedin, pinterest, foursquare, and the many other popular social media sites it is hard to update each of them one at a time. I done a lot of research on the subject to find out what services or dashboards are out there. Here is a quick summary of the ones that are worth looking at.

1. HootSuite (http://hootsuite.com)
Price: Free or $6 per month
The HootSuite service integrates with many of the popular social networks including linkedin, facebook, twitter, foursquare, and wordpress to name a few. This makes it easy to post out to multiple places all at once. There is also built-in analytic to show you the reach of your posting. Another great feature is the post scheduler to be able to send out anything when your readers are most likely to read it.

2. Seesmic (https://seesmic.com)
Price: Free, currently in beta
Seesmic is a really great tool which will allow posting to any network from any device, so for example if you are at the beach and want to tweet a picture just load up the Seesmic iphone, blackberry or android app. There are already apps out there that do this but I would recommend at least checking this one out, and since it is free why not.

3. Nimble (http://www.nimble.com)
Price: Free or $15 per month
I haven’t actually used this app yet but I plan on trying the free version since it allows to cultivate your social media leads into a CRM. This could be a very useful tool where you are generating sales leads from your site. It allows for easy interaction with most major social networks and archives the data.

4. SproutSocial (http://sproutsocial.com)
Price: $9 to $899 per month
With SproutSocial you will get a bit of everything, monitoring, publishing, analytic, and location based reporting. It is an excellent tool for small and large operations, but don’t expect it to do everything, there are still some features you will need out of other tools. The location based module is a great feature and helps when promoting a local business.

5. MediaFunnel (http://mediafunnel.com)
Price: Free or $1 per user/network per month
Mediafunnel has a great pricing structure for the paid version it is $1 per month for each network profile you add, so it is possible to add all of your profiles into MediaFunnel and publish from a single dashboard. Although the feature list is very similar to the others it has simplicity going for it to get in publish and get out. It will also do twitter brand management where it will monitor for keywords and direct messages.

6. NutshellMail (https://nutshellmail.com)
Price: Free
NutshellMail is a ConstantContact product which is a mailing list management and publishing product. NutshellMail integrates linkedin, facebook, yelp, twitter, foursquare, citysearch and youtube to help centralize your publishing. This will also offer some reporting and analytics with the publishing aspect of the product. Best of all it is free so go ahead and try it out, no reason not to.

7. Crowdbooster (http://crowdbooster.com)
Price: Free to $99 per month
Crowdbooster is a great product to measure your twitter and facebook content. It shows the growth of your online community and reports on what content has registered clicks. This is a popular service used by many major companies such as JetBlue and Ben & Jerry’s.

8. Onlywire (http://onlywire.com)
Price: $10 to $99 per month
Onlywire has some similarities to other sites where it is able to schedule submissions and publish to multiple networks. What is unique to Onlywire is how many social networks it is able to publish to, it has a list of 45 compatible social media sites. Onlywire also has a wordpress plugin to install on your blog to help manage sharing content. If you are looking for a single portal to publish from Onlywire is your solution.

So here are many different tools to help you manage your social networks, unfortunately there is not a single one that will be able to replace everything you are doing it will need using at least a couple of them to get the reporting, analytics, and publishing functions required by webmasters.

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How To: IPTables Firewall Configuration for SIP/VoIP on CentOS Rackspace Cloud

Jon — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:21:31 +0000

Firewalls are very important for servers with internet facing interfaces, and configuring the firewall properly is even more important. This is a guide on how to configure a strong iptables firewall on a CentOS server. With some small changes to the configuration below it could be used for web servers, database servers and really any other server.

The first step is to install iptables if it is not already. Then start the iptables service so we can make live changes to the config.

yum install iptables
/sbin/service iptables start

Once installed and started flush out the default configuration with the following command.

iptables -F

Now save the blank configuration.

/sbin/service iptables save

Here is where we make the firewall secure from the outside world. Below is a list of commands to run which will make realtime changes to the firewall to lock it down. After that I will explain the line items and how to change them for you.

iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -s 10.22.5.0/24 -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -s 8.8.8.8/32 -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 10000:20000 -j ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT DROP
iptables -P FORWARD DROP
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
/sbin/service iptables save

-A INPUT -s 10.22.5.0/24 -p tcp –dport 22 -j ACCEPT – This line is opening up ssh to the source ip range of 10.22.5.1-.255 so any computer with a public ip address that matches will be able to use ssh. Using an ip address filter on ssh is a great way to prevent unauthorized access. This can be repeated for each range or single ip address needed as the line below it opens ssh to the ip address 8.8.8.8.

iptables -A INPUT -p udp –dport 5060 -j ACCEPT – Here is where SIP port 5060 opens up to internet without any source ip address filter. An ip address filter can also be put on this and I would recommend for stronger security but sometimes that is just not possible.

iptables -A INPUT -p udp –dport 10000:20000 -j ACCEPT – Opening up the media ports for the rtp stream.

iptables -P INPUT DROP – Using this command is very important because it changes the iptables mode to drop all packets unless they match the predetermined rules we have just entered. Without using this command all the work above goes to waste and the firewall is wide open.

Asterisk 1.8 Install Script for CentOS 5 on Rackspace Cloud Server

Jon — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:47:27 +0000

Since Asterisk version 1.4.x is scheduled for end of life on 4/21/2012, I decided to start testing Asterisk version 1.8. I choose to start working with Asterisk 1.8 because it is a long-term support release which extends its life to 10/21/2015. I modified my install script to work with dahdi and version 1.8 so that it is a simple one step install for Asterisk. There are a few changes with version 1.8, such as the mysql cdr add-on no longer exists. Instead the use of odbc libraries connect to a MySQL server or other database server. I made the changes to my script to adjust for Asterisk 1.8 and tested it on a Rackspace cloud server.

If you are not using a Rackspace cloud server and are running the script on a standard CentOS install be sure to comment out the following line from the script:

export KSRC=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-274.12.1.el5xen-x86_64

Install the following packages before running the script.

yum -y install bind-utils curl-devel doxygen gcc gcc-c++ gtk+ gtk+-devel gnutls-devel httpd kernel-xen kernel-xen-devel kernel kernel-devel kernel-smp-devel kernel-smp libxml2-devel libtermcap-devel libtool-ltdl libtool-ltdl-devel make mysql mysql-server mysql-devel mysql-server-devel mysql-connector-odbc net-snmp-devel neon-devel newt-devel ncurses-devel ntp openssl-devel openssl perl-suidperl php-mysql system-config-securitylevel screen texinfo unixODBC unixODBC-devel wget

Now just download and run the script which will do all the heavy lifting of compiling Asterisk.

wget http://www.jonathanmanning.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/install_asterisk18.txt
chmod +x install_asterisk18.txt
./install_asterisk18.txt

Headway Theme 3.0 for WordPress Released

Jon — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:37:39 +0000

Headway Theme 3.0 was released last month and comes with a host of new features for the WordPress theme. The developers of Headway built version 3 from the ground up by writing all new code. The interface is familiar to existing users of Headway but include a lot of new design differences. For example there is now the option to use a grid layout to design the GUI of the website. The new version also includes the ability to use child themes giving more flexibility to the framework.

All of the features from pervious releases of Headway are still included and allow for more flexibility. So far I am very impressed with the new version of Headway but I will have a full review of the new version in the coming weeks once I have had time to design a site with it.

Click here to get more information on Headway… Headway Theme 3.0

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How To: Install and Compile Ruby 1.9.3+ from Source with libyaml on CentOS

Jon — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:37:58 +0000

If you are looking to install Ruby 1.9.3+ on a Linux system this will guide you through compiling the software. There is always the option to use yum to install ruby packages but the versions in repositories will be older, not the latest stable. This guide is using a Centos 5.x base system without any packages installed and all commands run as root.

1. First the system will need the appropriate packages to compile and install the source code for ruby. To do this run the following command.

yum -y install make gcc openssl-devel zlib-devel gcc gcc-c++ make autoconf readline-devel curl-devel expat-devel gettext-devel ncurses-devel sqlite3-devel mysql-devel httpd-devel wget which

2. Now that a compiler package is installed move on to download, compile and install the libyaml library.

cd /usr/src
wget http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
tar zxf yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
cd yaml-0.1.4
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make && make install

3. The next step is to download, compile and install Ruby 1.9.3.

cd /usr/src
wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p0.tar.gz
tar zxf ruby-1.9.3-p0.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.3-p0
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-install-doc --with-opt-dir=/usr/local/lib
make && make install

4. Upon completion of steps 1 through 3 ruby is accessible via command line. Test ruby by running the following command.

[root@new-host-2 ~]# ruby -v
ruby 1.9.3p0 (2011-10-30 revision 33570)

The guide will help get Ruby working on a CentOS system, later I will cover what you can do with Ruby.

Rackspace Cloud Server Implementation for Small Businesses

Jon — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 01:28:44 +0000

The use of cloud based servers is on the rise in businesses and for good reason. Cloud servers offer many advantages which include removal of physical hardware from data centers, cost savings and scalability, just to name a few. One such service provider, Rackspace Cloud, has changed the landscape of how dedicated servers are offered for businesses in need of a dedicated server or data center environment. Rackspace has long been a provider of collocation, hosted physical servers and many other services but recently started a cloud offering. Their new cloud server product has picked up traction with businesses looking for a flexible infrastructure.

A cloud server is a virtual machine or guest, running on top of multiple physical servers or hosts, which are linked to each other to host countless virtual servers. The advantage is the virtual machines are sharing the resources of the physical hosts. This allows for better reliability by less reliance on a single physical host. The virtual machine can float from one physical host to another if a host in the cluster failed. Having this redundancy can be very helpful when working with high availability applications.

Rackspace offers a variety of cloud services, all from the Rackspace Cloud control panel. The cloud server is truly the flagship product offering. There are such options to choose from as 19 different operating system images and 7 memory options ranging from 256 MB to 15872 MB. These options allow for a variety of customization to make sure the environment will meet the requirements of the customer’s application, thus appealing to a larger audience and increasing implementation in the business world.