Statler's Rogue Valley Views

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/NIS.html

There are several ways to create a master iso for Linux that will install on different hardware.

Experiment with Spacewalk on Linux Mint first but seems to be for Fedora (RedHat) not Debian (Ubuntu), other posters say it will work.
https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/
This guy says it can be done and how to do it. Maybe have to have a Fedora distribution running in a VirtualBox.
http://www.devops-blog.net/spacewalk/registering-ubuntu-and-debian-servers-with-spacewalk

RemasterSys works but it seems to be defunked. The article has interesting info however.
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=36322

Ubuntu-builder might work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLgPcqA8Pm0

FSArchiver is a system tool that might do the job for me.
http://www.fsarchiver.org/Main_Page

The following features have already been implemented in the current version:

Support for basic file attributes (permissions, ownership, …)
Support for multiple file-systems per archive
Support for extended attributes (they are used by SELinux)
Support the basic file-system attributes (label, uuid, block-size) for all linux file-systems
Experimental support for ntfs filesystems (ability to create flexible clones of windows partitions)
Checksumming of everything which is written in the archive (headers, data blocks, whole files)
Ability to restore an archive which is corrupt (it will just skip the current file)
Multi-threaded lzo, gzip, bzip2, lzma/xz compression: if you have a dual-core / quad-core it will use all the power of your cpu
Lzma/xz compression (slow but very efficient algorithm) to make your archive smaller.
Support for splitting large archives into several files with a fixed maximum size
Encryption of the archive using a password. Based on blowfish from libgcrypt.

There are several limitations anyway: it cannot preserve filesystem attributes that are very specific. For instance, if you create a snapshot in a btrfs volume (the new-generation file system for linux), FSArchiver won’t know anything about that, and it will just backup the contents seen when you mount the partition.

FSArchiver is safe when it makes backups of partitions which are not mounted or mounted read-only. There is an option to force the backup of a read-write mounted volume, but there may be problems with the files that changed during the backup. If you want to backup partition which are in use, the best thing to do is to make an LVM snapshot of the partition using lvcreate -s, which is part of the LVM userland tools. Unfortunately you can only make snapshots of partitions which are LVM Logical Volumes.

Great article on VOIP phone systems. http://betanews.com/2015/06/26/voip-done-right-11-best-practices-for-moving-to-cloud-hosted-pbx/

VOIP and ISP latency, jitter and packet loss. http://www.dslreports.com/faq/12257

Test VOIP potential quality. http://www.ringcentral.com/support/qos.html

Test potential number of simultaneous phone calls. http://www.ringcentral.com/support/capacity.html

Here is my RFP to VOIP providers, partly based on the betanews article.

Revised Phone RFP

5    Basic hard phones (able to transfer calls via keypad)
1    Hi-fidelity conference phone
2    Admin interfaces (will use second computer screen for management and softphone for calls?)
1    Fax number (incoming and outgoing)
22  Regular softphones (Bria or Zoiper)

Transition process

There will be two phases of the transition from the existing phone system to VOIP.

In the first phase all the basic hard phones, Hi-fidelity conference phone and the Admin interface will be installed. In addition, all existing workstations and laptops (Windows based) will convert to softphones (16 softphones).

In the second phase, most staff will move their primary workstation to their home. All softphones will be switch to run on Linux desktops and laptops. This will add an additional 6 softphones for a total of 22.

Basic Questions

• What kind of support do you offer?
• What large customers do you service?
• Do we need any special equipment on site? Do you require on-premise PBX units or are you cloud-hosted?
• Can desk phones/soft phones work anywhere?
• What are the contract terms? What will it take to back out of the contract? What are the cancellation fees?
• Is pricing promotional or locked in?
• How many toll free minutes are included?
• How many fax pages are included?
• How fast do you implement new technologies?
• Do you have a trial period?
• What is your Service Level Agreement? What kind of reimbursements/credits do you provide in situations of non-delivery or outages?
• Are you guaranteed HIPAA compliant? Do you rely on the “conduit exception” under HIPAA regulations?

http://phpldapadmin.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

http://www.ldapbrowserlinux.com/

https://directory.apache.org/studio/users-guide.html

http://ldapwiki.willeke.com/wiki/LDAP%20Browsers

To make Microsoft’s obsolete Silverlight plug in work with Firefox on Linux there are work-arounds available.

First, Chrome can be made to work with some Silverlight sites using https://ieonchrome.com/welcome?install. Unfortunately it seems to fail with some site that want to open in a new window or popup. Test it.

Back to Firefox:

Install Wine

http://pipelight.net/cms/install/installation-ubuntu.html

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends pipelight-multi
sudo pipelight-plugin --update

http://pipelight.net/cms/plugin-silverlight.html

sudo pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight

Check for install errors

pipelight-plugin --system-check

Some websites will show you an error that your operating system is not supported. To get around this problem, you will need to install an user agent switcher as described here.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-overrider/