The customer is the king.

That means, that the customer will always get what he wants.

You know how customers could be. At this moment, I have a customer who got a new computer and now misses the FTP connections in his FTP client. Unfortunately he is not able to enter the login credentials by himself. So now I need to login remotely to his machine and enter the details to the specific input fields. During this, the customer will tell me the login details, because I don’t have them, but he has. That is so inefficient.

Some days ago, I got a message from a colleague that my phone number always gives an “user is currently not assigned” message. Today I had some spare time for this issue.

I am customer at dus.net. There I’ve 5 SIP accounts (1x master account and 4x sub accounts) and 11 phone numbers. One SIP account is setup for Fax2Mail, 3 accounts are setup for VoIP endpoint devices and one SIP account is for PBX interconnecting by using IAX. Each SIP account has its own extension and because of that, I have some spare numbers, which I’ve routed to the PBX-SIP-IAX-Account. Unfortunately my PBX is currently offline and on the way onto new hardware. Therefore this account should be offline. This is a known, expected and planed behavior.

This PBX-account get calls for all unused phone numbers, so far, so ok. But the system should redirect all calls to all other endpoint devices. So far, so ok. It is not a big deal to divert a phone call to another destination. Exactly this was not working anymore. All endpoint devices were reachable, but calls to unassigned phone numbers, which in fact are routed to the PBX account and from there to the endpoints, were not diverted.

So, I created a ticket at dus.net helpdesk at 9:21am and some hours later (I was at the local mart and got a lollipop for free, btw :-) I got the issue solved at 2:01pm. It seems, that today is indeed a great day.

Thanks a lot to Mr. Paolo C. from dus.net.

Actually I use VirtualBox as product to run my virtual machines. It is easy to store a VM on an external hard drive and use the drive on several locations. So I shut down my VM at home, go to the office, start my VM there again and I’ve the same desktop with my utilities.

But over the last few days, I installed QEMU-KVM on my workstations at home. Somehow VirtualBox and KVM don’t work together on Debian Squeeze. In Wheezy it works by the way.  So I decided to give KVM a try. For this I installed some libvirt packages, as well as the kvm and qemu-kvm packages. But now I also need my VM in a compatible format to use it on KVM.

First I converted my VDI data file to a RAW format:

vboxmanage clonehd --format RAW WS-COMPILER-DESC-01_System.vdi /home/desc/kvm/WS-COMPILER-DESC-01_System.raw
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
Clone hard disk created in format 'RAW'. UUID: 85e425c4-4693-4fc6-8162-4b374d2111ca

This would need a while, as vboxmanage first will create the target datafile, fill it with content and afterswards convert the source data into the new target container file. Depending on the size of your VM-disk, you may run out of physical disk space. ;)

Afterwards, you have a RAW image file. In theory you can use it for KVM, but better to convert it back to a more feature-full format like “qcow2“.

cd /home/desc/kvm/
qemu-img convert -f raw WS-COMPILER-DESC-01_System.raw -O qcow2 /media/elements/kvm/WS-COMPILER-DESC-01_System.img

This may need really a while.  I used “qcow2” because it supports some fancy features, like AES encryption and transparent decompression. As I am limited in disk space, I need compression. My workstation is fully encrypted with LUKS, so I can ignore the AES encryption of “qcow2” at this moment. But it may be a nice benefit, if I need to transport the VM, or give it out later.

When done, you can create a new VM inside virt-manager with the .img files for storage devices and start your virtual machine.

As I am a native German speaker and resident of Germany, there are probably some occurrences, which are only interesting for my German audience. By this, it make sense to write something in German. In example, the Imprint page and his sub pages, are required for german-based websites.

Over years, I have installed WordPress on my website, but never tried to run it correctly. Everytime I found something which didn’t fit to WordPress. In most cases it was the Theme. Some were fancy, but had not the layout I want. Some were uptodate and provided fancy features like Google Web-Fonts and HTML5, but their handling was miserable.

Now I’ve a WordPress theme, which is relative new, doesn’t provide so much, but just the basics and is looks also very clear. This maybe is the beginning of the end (to search a theme that fits).

So let’s hope that I’ll find some time to produce some content here. I do.

(Probably I just need to change some little few things inside this theme… ;-)