It’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted an update – mainly due to the lack of camera phone.  I finally lost it with my XDA Stella which I would say is an excellent PDA – but probably the worst mobile phone I have ever had.

Grumble over and back to the chilli’s…

After bringing Huey Dewey and Louie into the house I have disable Chilli Cam 2 as there was nothing on display. I did think about putting the camera on Gus our puppy but he needs his privacy.

I can report that Huey has a flower !

The current sizes of these plants are as follows:

Huey is now 6.5 inches high

Dewey is a massive 8 inches high

Louie is the shortest at 6 inches high

Other news Bill and Ben are doing well and have a number of chillis that are quite large now and a number of new guys on the way.

Mick

We have decided to call the little guys “GUS”. He is now coming up to seven weeks old and he’s a real bundle of fun.

Attached is a gallery of the first photo’s we’ve taken of him playing with my son.

Also the toy we got him which he photographed playing with has also been an absolute hit.

More photos to come as days move on.

Due to the cold overnight temperatures Huey Dewey and Louie has been brought indoors.

Huey is now being looked after by my daughter on her bedroom window.

Dewey is on the window ledge in my work room.

Louie is on the kitchen window ledge.

From the pictures you can just see two lines on the sticks in their pots. The highest of the two lines shows the height of the plant when it came inside the house. All three have grown at least one inch (2.54cm in new money).

Just a quick note about sftp.

It makes good security sense to change the ssh port on servers that are Internet accessable. To take advantage of this using ssh is quite straight forward as their is a parameter -p to support this eg:

ssh -p 3432 mick@mickvaites.com

Unfortunately the same is not true for sftp (secure file transfer). To achieve the same result with sftp we need to use specify an option of “Port 3432” eg:

sftp -o "Port 3432" mick@mickvaites.com

Once done log it as you would normally.

Our bundle of joy has now arrived … now the fun really begins.

SoHo workers now share their lines with other PC’s in the house. The following is a config snippet from my router to provide some protection for my VoIP and business traffic.

!
! policy and classes to mark local incoming traffic
!
! whilst QoS pre-clasify should be used I have found it
! unreliable on certain IOS releases.  Also this allows us
! to be more specific about how we want to handle our traffic.
!
class-map match-all BIZAPPS1_VLAN1
 match access-group name BIZAPPS1    ! an acl to match biz apps
!
class-map match-all BIZAPPS2_VLAN1
 match access-group name BIZAPPS2    ! an acl to match biz apps
!
class-map match-all SCAVENGER_VLAN1
 match access-group name SCAVENGER   ! low priority stuff
!
policy-map VLAN1
 class BIZAPPS1_VLAN1
  set dscp af21                      ! low drop probability
 class BIZAPPS2_VLAN1
  set dscp af22                      ! med drop probability
 class SCAVENGER_VLAN1
  set dscp cs1
!
! Policy and Classes to on outbound connection
!
class-map match-all BIZAPPS
 match  dscp cs2  af21  af22  af23   ! all business aps
class-map match-any VOICE_SIG
 match  dscp cs3                     ! new dscp values signalling
 match  dscp af31                    ! old dscp value signalling
class-map match-all SCAVENGER
 match  dscp cs1                     ! unwanted traffic
class-map match-any IPCONTROL
 match  dscp cs6                     ! routing protocols etc
class-map match-all VOICE_RTP
 match  dscp ef                      ! voice packets
!
! Based on using no more than 30% for voice traffic this policy
! is enough for two voice calls (52k). DSL has a fixed uplink speed
! so I have used percentages to make carving up easier. Where a pipe
! which is likely to have speed changes it might be easier to use
! absolute 'bandwidth' statements to simplify calculations.
!
! NB: You cannot mix absolute and percentages in the same
! policy-map so decide up front what you are going to use.
!
policy-map V3PNWAN
 class VOICE_RTP
  priority 52 5348            ! 52k for 2 voice calls
 class VOICE_SIG
  bandwidth percent 5         ! 5% for call control traffic
 class IPCONTROL
  bandwidth percent 5         ! 5% for routing protocols etc
 class BIZAPPS
  bandwidth percent 30        ! 30% for business apps
 class SCAVENGER
  bandwidth percent 1         ! limit scavenger to 1%
  class class-default
  fair-queue
!
! The device snippets are just enough info to show how the
! policys are applied and any other relevant settings.
!
interface ATM0
no ip address
no ip redirects
no ip unreachables
no ip proxy-arp
no atm ilmi-keepalive
dsl operating-mode auto
!
interface ATM0.1 point-to-point
 bandwidth 384                   ! your upstream speed
 pvc 0/38
 vbr-nrt 384 384                 ! your upstream speed
 tx-ring-limit 3                 ! tx-ring set to 3
 encapsulation aal5mux ppp dialer
 dialer pool-member 1
 service-policy out V3PNWAN      ! associate to phys interface
!
interface Dialer0
 ip tcp adjust-mss 542           ! make tcp packets much smaller
!
interface Tunnel0
 qos pre-classify                ! allow acls based on pre-encrypted data

Good luck

Mick

By default Cisco Unity Express only reports the called number in your message for internal calls.

It’s quite simple to change this so that all calls (where a number is available) have their numbers reported.

Router# service-module service-enable 1/0 session
Trying 192.168.n.2, 2066 ... Open
se-192-168-n-2#
se-192-168-n-2# conf t
se-192-168-n-2(config)# voicemail callerid
se-192-168-n-2(config)# end
se-192-168-n-2# wr mem
se-192.168-n-2# exit

Session closed

[Connection to 192.168.n.2 closed by foreign host]
Router#

Simple really.

There is something definately in the water as those Northern Cousins are enormous.

This is more of a memory jogger for me as I’ve been using this excellent site for years. So for my benefit as well as anyone else who needs it the URL is :

http://www.samknows.com

This is an excellent site originally setup by campaigners to find the latest information on broadband pre-registrations. Since then things have changed dramatically in the Uk. This site now contains excellent information on what services are via your own local telephone exchange.

This site will now be added to my links … !

Note to self:

These are the ssh escape commands from within an ssh connected session.

%~?
Supported escape sequences:
 ~.  - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)
 ~B  - send a BREAK to the remote system
 ~C  - open a command line
 ~R  - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
 ~^Z - suspend ssh
 ~#  - list forwarded connections
 ~&  - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
 ~?  - this message
 ~~  - send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

The ~ (tilda) is normally accessed by keying [shift] + [`]

To pull up the list as above send a Tilda + Question Mark ~?