Chris’ Blog

Ekiga is a VoIP client for GNOME. I recently registered with SIPGate.co.uk as I am planning to have a go at setting up Asterisk sometime in the near future. Sadly it wasn’t a well documented process and after searching Google, SIPGate’s website and Ubuntu Forums for help I found some tips on debugging Ekiga. Armed with this knowledge ekiga --debug=[1-6] I managed to discover the required ports for successful NAT traversal. They are as follows:

• 5060 - 5100/udp
• 8000 - 8012/udp
• 5004/udp
• 10000/udp
• 3478 - 3497/udp
• 3478 - 3497/tcp
• 1720/udp
• 30000 - 30010/tcp

I am sure they could be refined and there maybe some that are unnecessary but it Works or Me™, use them at your own risk.

So, this is the second time I have tried to address the problem I was getting with some Subversion repositories I was trying to configure to be served by Apache. I was trying to use the SVNPath directive to serve one repository but it was not having any of it, so instead I ended up serving them as a temporary measure using SVNParentPath in the format http://svn.example.com/~name/repos/ which is not what I wanted. I am using the Location container in Apache configuration to configure up my repositories, the path I had specified was /~name/. This is where the problem comes in, I would try to checkout the repository over the network and be greeted with a 405 Method Not Allowed error like so:

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/~name'
svn: PROPFIND of '/~name': 405 Method Not Allowed (http://svn.example.com)

This stuck me as odd, it seemed the Apache was not serving the repository URI using the WebDAV module. When I gave up on an earlier attempt I reverted to using SVNParentPath and accessing the repository over the URI http://svn.example.com/~name/repos/ which worked perfectly and I couldn’t spot why. Turns out I made a single character mistake, my Apache configuration was set to use the path of /~name/ I should have used /~name because SVN truncates the trailing slash even if you specify it on the command line. Bugger!

Thunderbird’s default sorting is the wrong way around, IMHO. This has always annoyed me, I found out how to reverse it.

So for ages I have been using Thunderbird combined with server side mail sorting, what has been annoying me for a year or so is that Thunderbird only checks the Inbox folder. I had to manually check all the others and that got a little tedious, fortunately I discovered how to get around this.

The trick is to open the configuration editor (Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced) and set the mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new preference to true. Bingo!

I just upgraded this blog using a Subversion patch, seems to be working ok, will keep and eye out for any 404s see if I missed any new files and the like. I also started to burn my feed.

When you hard reset a Pocket PC device it runs a Welcome one time tutorial programme, this can be skipped, by hooking it up to a computer and deleting the Welcome shortcut inside \Windows\Startup. Took me a while to find this one out so I thought I would document and share.

In side news Microsoft’s value has plummeted, and is for sale at PCWorld: El. Reg

I made the Akismet plugin a little more sane after discovering it sent the entire $_SERVER array to akismets servers. I changed:

        $ignore = array( 'HTTP_COOKIE' );

        foreach ( $_SERVER as $key => $value )
                if ( !in_array( $key, $ignore ) )
                        $comment["$key"] = $value;

To:

        foreach ($_SERVER as $k => $v)
        {
                if (strpos($k, 'HTTP_') === 0 && $k != 'HTTP_COOKIE')
                {
                        $comment[$k] = $v;
                }
        }

I have made the decision to disable Akismet, after reading some hype about the new Wordpress 2.3’s plugin version check API, which turned out to be negative but reveals something interesting with regards to Akismet. The following code is taken from the official Akismet plugin for Wordpres.

        $ignore = array( 'HTTP_COOKIE' );

        foreach ( $_SERVER as $key => $value )
                if ( !in_array( $key, $ignore ) )
                        $comment["$key"] = $value;

        $query_string = '';
        foreach ( $comment as $key => $data )
                $query_string .= $key . '=' . urlencode( stripslashes($data) ) . '&';

        $response = akismet_http_post($query_string, $akismet_api_host, '/1.1/comment-check', $akismet_api_port);

The bit that worries me is the use of $_SERVER, the only item from this array not sent is HTTP_COOKIE, fair enough. But why do you need to know the full paths to the files on my server and other server environment variables Akismet? I do not have a problem with sending data to Akismet, just not this data!

Source

You can tell Linux to respond to broadcast pings by running this snippet from the console.

$ echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf to set the option permanently.