Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Happy 4th of July!

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1207099_32402919 It’s July 4th here in the United States and time to celebrate our Independence Day.

July 4th is often referred to as the birthday of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th (for the historians out there I know that it wasn’t actually signed on July 4th so please don’t flame me) and led to the American Revolutionary War as the colonies sought independence from Great Britain.

fireworks_big_burst_md_wht Please remember to thank the veterans and current day military men and women this weekend. While we all certainly don’t agree on the politics of world diplomacy it’s the men and women of the armed forces that  provide the umbrella of freedom and democracy that we enjoy every day.

Cheers!

WordPress – Love It or Hate It!

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I’ve made some significant progress tonight in getting the new WordPress installation up and running. There are still wp-2.0-button some issues with the content from the migration that need to be addressed. We did manage to migrate all the comments so I’m very happy about that. This evening I managed to get AdSense setup and running along with Feedburner. I also setup the Google sitemap and added this site in the Google Webmaster Center.

I still need to redirect visitors from Blogger over to this site. That might take some time and testing.

Cheers!

Update: July 2, 2008

I’ve finally added the redirection code from Blogger to this site. It seems to be working but there are a few URLs that are not redirecting properly so I’ll need to “fix” that. I’ve also submitted changes to Google Webmaster tools and changed the robots.txt file to block the search engines from indexing the old site. I’ll just need to wait for the search engines to index the new site.

Update: July 18, 2008

I’ve added a WordPress plugin called WP-Polls that will allow me to conduct some basic polls. I’ve also had to play with the CSS style sheets to try and clean up some formatting issues. It’s a sure way to learn CSS/XML by getting your hands dirty fast. I’m fairly happy with the current design of the site and the quality of the content. I’m still patiently waiting for some of the more popular search engines to catch up with the fact that I’ve moved.

It’s alive!

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1207509_60357288Yes yet another WordPress installation!

Things are coming along… it’s amazing how someone as simple as a blog can grow so quickly. I’ve got all the content in here, although I desperately need to clean up the tags and categories. I like the ability to puslish “pages” and I think I’ll write up a few FAQs for those high volume questions regarding VoIP.

I still need to make the actual cut, insert the redirection code into blogger, fix Feedburner, fix Adsense, submit the sitemap to Google and the other search engines removing the current search index entries for the old blogger site.

I also need to play with the style sheets… the site is just too “grey” right now… and the article text is hard to read, too light against a white background in my opinion.

Cheers!

It’s time for an upgrade or two…

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I’ve decided to make the jump… to my own domain. I’ll be using GoDaddy for now along with WordPress. I’m currently in the process of migrating the content from Blogger to WordPress. Once I’m happy with the content I’ll setup a redirect from Blogger to my new domain.

If you would like to have a preview try this http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com.

dell8200 On a different note my trusty Dell 1.4Mhz Pentium 4 8200 (purchased in 2002) appears to be finally on it’s last legs. So I’ll need to either purchase a new machine or build a new machine from scratch. Here are the components I’m thinking of using;

  • Antec Mini P180 Case
  • Antec NeoPower 550 Power Supply
  • ASUS P5Q LGA 775 Intel P45 Motherboard
  • Intel Core 2 Duo Quad Q6600
  • Corsair Dominator 4GB DDR2 1055 (PC2 8500)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA Hard Disk
  • EVGA 512-P3-N801-AR GeForce 8800GT 512MB Video Card
  • Samsung 20x DVD+-R Burner SATA
  • Microsoft Windows Vista 64-Bit Home Premium

I’ve priced these components on NewEgg and they come in just around $1,000.00. I’m trying to build a machine that isn’t bleeding edge but will last the test of time. I would welcome any thoughts or suggestions.

Cheers!

DHCP Parse Error

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It would seem a great many people are running into this error so I thought I would post a quick article that would help all those looking for a solution to their problem. The Nortel i2002/i2004 (any Nortel IP phone) will return the error “DHCP parse error” if the DHCP server returns DHCP option 128 with an invalid format.

In one of my first blog posts entitled “DHCP Options (VoIP)” I outlined the DHCP options and the format that the phone expected. Kenneth quickly pointed out that I had fat-fingered the example DHCP string omitting the semicolon between the values for the primary Call Server (S1) and the secondary Call Server (S2). (I’ve since fixed the original post)

Here’s the format the DHCP option code 128 which the IP phones expects to be returned from the DHCP server when the IP phone is configured for “Full DHCP”;

Nortel-i2004-A,iii.iii.iii.iii:ppppp,aaa,rrr;iii.iii.iii.iii:ppppp,aaa,rrr.

Where the following values are;

  • “Nortel-i2004-A” = Option #128 begins with this string for all Nortel IP phones
  • “iii.iii.iii.iii” = the IP Address of the Call Server (S1 or S2)
  • “ppppp” = port number for the Call Server
  • “aaa” = the Action for the Server
  • “rrr” = the Retry Count for the Server

The IP Address must be separated from the port number by a colon (:). The parameters for the Primary (S1) and the Secondary (S2) Call Servers are separated by a semicolon (;). The string must end a period (.).

If you are using an ISC DHCP server (this is generally included with any of the Linux distributions) you can refer to my article entitled “ISC DHCP Server (Nortel VoIP)” for information on how to setup and configure the ISC DHCP server to work with Nortel IP Telephony.

Cheers!

Update: Wednesday January 28, 2009

I just came across a “DHCP Parse Error” that actually had nothing to-do with the DHCP string. We had a phone that was using the same DHCP template as 9 other i2002 phones but it was displaying “DHCP Parse Error” when it booted up (this only surfaced after we upgraded to 0604DCG). The phone was actually configured incorrectly. It was suppose to be configured for a Voice VLAN and configured to get the Voice VLAN via LLDP-MED. The LLDP-MED option had been left set at “0” (disabled) so the phone was trying to make a DHCP request looking for Option 191 while the DHCP server was only configured to return Option 128 as detailed above. It only took a few minutes to fix but I can see how someone could spend hours stuck on this.

Cheers!

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