technology, networking and IP telephony
Posts tagged MOTOROLA DROID
Motorola Xoom and Lyme disease
1October 6, 2011
I recently contracted Lyme disease from either working around the house or training in Valley Forge Park. Unfortunately, I was on my back and in bed for almost an entire week and a half. I only went to the hospital (doctor’s office was closed that day) after running a fever for 5 days, that fact not withstanding, the triage nurse didn’t think very much of me for coming to Emergency Department (they don’t like to call it an Emergency Room anymore) with just a fever, sweat, chills and some aches.
It was ironic because once I made it past the triage nurse the physician’s assistant, who was very nice, she took a quick look at me for a few minutes and said Lyme disease. She asked me if I had any spots and asked me to stand up at which point she found a red blotch on my back at my waistline that she felt was probably the originating spot. The physician’s assistant explained that she had diagnosed more than 30-40 cases in the past month and later we started to hear about all our friends and neighbors that had recently been infected and diagnosed.
Ultimately, the physician assistant’s diagnosis was confirmed with positive blood test 3 days after my visit to the hospital and by then the antibiotics I was taking were starting to kick in. It would take me almost an entire 2 months to get my strength and stamina back to where it was before I got sick.
While laid up in bed I quickly grew tiered of managing the heavy laptop and the smartphone display was too small so the wife went out and purchased a Motorola Xoom for me. I’ll admit that I had put the bug in her ear about it (Thanks Kim!)
Motorola Xoom
I’ve had the Motorola Xoom for about 3 months now and I’ve been very impressed with both the hardware and software. I just recently finished reading my first eBook, Web Operations:Keeping the Data On Time written by John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins via Google Books. Not much unlike my Motorola Droid 3 (Google Android 2.3) the Motorola Xoom (Google Android 3.1) does a great job of managing all my personal and work contacts including my email and calendar. It’s very fast and responsive and the ability to view Adobe Flash content is a big key to using the device to view almost any website.
What tablet are you using and what for?
Cheers!
Motorola Droid – Gingerbread 2.3.5
5September 7, 2011
I recently upgraded from the original Motorola Droid (December 2009) to a Motorola Droid 3 thanks to Verizon Wireless’s buy one get one free (BOGO) offer. That left me with the opportunity to experiment on my legacy Motorola Droid so I went in search of information on how to “root” it and what custom builds/ROMs of Android were available outside of the stock Android 2.2.2 that Verizon currently offers on the Motorola Droid.
I was able to “root” my original Motorola Droid which was running 2.2.2 by using SuperOneClick written by CLShortFuse. Then I stumbled across Peter Alfonso’s port of Gingerbread 2.3.5. I was able to use ROM Manager along with ClockworkMod Recovery to install the custom ROM and I had my old Motorola Droid running Gingerbread 2.3.5 in a very short time.
Anyone have any recommended or favorite Android ROM for a Motorola Droid?
Cheers!
Google’s Android – Root and Intermediate Certificate Issues
2July 14, 2011
I recently helped stand up a pair of NetScaler MPX 7500 appliances as a public Internet facing front-end to large Citrix implementation. The goal was to utilize the NetScalers to provide basic Access Gateway functionality similar to the legacy Citrix Secure Gateway (CSG) and Citrix Access Gateway (CAG) solutions. It’s not rocket science by any means and it was pretty straight forward until we started testing some Google Android devices and quickly found that as usual nothing is ever that simple.
I had two devices with which to test, an original Motorola Droid (Verizon Wireless) running Android 2.2.2 and a Motorola Xoom (Wi-Fi Only) running Android 3.1. The SSL certificate installed on the pair of MPX 7500s was purchased from VeriSign and issued from an intermediate certificate authority – “VeriSign Class 3 International Server CA – G3″ (February 2010) which was in turn issued by “VeriSign Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority – G5″ (November 2006). I’m was guessing that the November 2006 certificate is probably part of the base Android operating system but the February 2010 is probably missing. Unfortunately there’s no way to actual view the installed root certificates on either device? What’s up with that?
There are some well documented issues here and here with Google’s Android around the inability of the operating system to import private or additional root and intermediate certificates. It appears that you can import additional root certificates for VPN and wireless authentication but not for web based SSL or email authentication. That’s essentially what I found on both the Motorola Droid and Motorola Xoom, however, a friend showed me a Motorola Blur running Android 2.2.1 today that actually allows you to import additional root and intermediate certificates and it appeared to work for both web browser SSL sessions as well as the Citrix receiver. Is this an add-on feature by Motorola that’s not included in the base operating system? Is there anyone reading this that can enlighten me?
In the end I discovered that the certificate installed into the NetScaler wasn’t chained properly to the VeriSign intermediate certificate. SSL Shopper has a great tool to check the certificate chaining. And thanks to this post from Jason I was able to configure the NetScaler properly and now both the Motorola Droid and Xoom can make an SSL connection without any certificate warnings.
Cheers!
