Patrick’s Blog(2)

The Nokia N95 SIP client works fine with Asterisk 1.4. My N95 is the 8Gb model and has the 15.x.x.x firmware. Here are some tips.

On the N95 in the SIP settings use:

Profile name:
Service profile: IETF
Default access point:
Public user name: <username_configured_in_asterisk>@<hostname_of_asterisk_server>
Use compression: No
Registration: Always on (or else you can not be called via SIP on the N95)
Use security: No
Proxy server:
Registrar server address:
Realm: asterisk (or set it to whatever you set it in the N95 entry in Asterisk’s sip.conf)
Username: <username_from_n95_config_in_asterisk_sip .conf>
Password: Transport type: UDP
Port: 5060

On the Asterisk server use something like this:

[1250]
type=friend
context=local_phones
username=1250
callerid=Patrick N95 <1250>
secret=test
host=dynamic
canreinvite=no
dtmfmode=rfc2833
disallow=all
allow=alaw
allow=ulaw
qualify=yes

I also got it to work with MD5 Digest authentication. On the N95 enter the realm. Default with Asterisk is asterisk. Use the Asterisk config below.

[1250]
type=friend
context=local_phones
username=1250
callerid=Patrick N95 <1250>
md5secret=892a7c48966629c86decbcc36118be3e
host=dynamic
canreinvite=no
dtmfmode=rfc2833
disallow=all
allow=alaw
allow=ulaw
qualify=yes

In a terminal you can create your md5secret with:
$ echo -n “<number>:<realm>:<pass>” | md5sum

The md5secret above is the result of the following command:
echo -n “1250:asterisk:test” | md5sum

In Red Hat Magazine is a nice short introduction of Python by Noah Gift. Worth a read.

Happy New Year! Hope you all have a wonderful closing of 2007 and an excellent (start of) 2008.

This past weekend I took a swing at reworking one of my sites using XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1. Everything was going well. Firefox 1.5.0.7 and 2.0 were happy campers as was Opera 9.0.2. In between I goofed around a bit and bumped into a truly amazing script called “ies4linux” made by Sérgio Luís Lopes Júnior that installs IE 5.0, IE 5.5 and IE 6 on a Linux box. It even throws in Flash if you want to. In my case I installed it on my laptop running Fedora Core 6 and Wine. You can find the “ies4linux” script on his website at tatanka.com. First I installed Wine with yum, downloaded the script, started it and answered a few simple questions. The script went on its way to download some files and installed all three IE browser versions. Once finished I had 3 IE icons on my Desktop. I double clicked on the IE6 icon and lo and behold IE6 started fine and browsing websites worked like a charm. I quickly tried the two other versions and they worked too. Kudos to the Wine folks and Sérgio.

But then came the agony. I fired up IE6 again and browsed to my newly reworked site. Oh the horror. It looked awful. The entire layout was messed up and margins and padding took a whole new meaning. Next I tried IE5.0 and IE5.5. Both made an even bigger mess than IE6. I had read about all the IE horror stories and this time I had my own to tell. What were the Microsoft developers thinking when they released these abominations into the wild?! How is it possible that they got the crystal clear box model wrong?! Even IE6 is chock full of embarrassing bugs (have a look here for a nice overview). Do the Microsoft developers take no pride in their work? One can only hope that IE7 will fix this mess but googling around it seems they still have some work to do. Sigh.

It took me more than 2 hours to find, understand and fix all the ugly hacks for IE’s stupid bugs. And that was only in the front page. Now it looks fine in Firefox 1.5.0.7, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.0.2 on Linux and IE5.0, IE5.5 and IE6 on Wine :-) I don’t have a Mac to check but I’m sure I will hear about it soon enough once the reworked site is launched.

Microsoft has announced here the end of support for Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows XP Service Pack 1. According to several articles on the Net, like this one from Zdnet, this will boost Desktop Linux. It remains to be seen if consumers will flock to WinXP or will decide to try Linux. For those that have finally had enough of the trojans, malware, virii and security leaks in Microsoft products there are a number of great free Linux distributions like Red Hat’s Fedora Core, Novell’s OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. Try them out and if you need help, just ask in the abundance of mailing lists, forums or your local Linux User Group (LUG).