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Cody

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Posts posted by Cody

  6. Structured Wiring My House

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    I've spent the last few months wiring my house, so I thought I'd share my experience and the process.

     

    The Goal

    My house was built in the 60's, so had no structured wiring of any kind. The telephone wires were 4 untwisted pair, which predated CAT3 by about 20 years. Lukily, just about every room in the house had a telephone drop, so I figured I could replace each drop with CAT6.

     

    Thinking about it some more, since I didn't already have cable to each room I figured I might as well bundle that in as well. The goal for phase one was to add 6 drops, each with 2 CAT6 and 1 RG6. Each drop was to terminate in the coat closet due to its central location in the house. This would become my network closet.

     

    The Materials

    1. 1000' CAT6
    2. 1000' RG6 quad sheild CCS (this was a mistake, more on that below)
    3. 100' RG6 dual shield pure copper
    4. 100' CAT5e
    5. 10 pack of 4-slot keystone wall plates
    6. 200 pack of CAT6 connectors and matching boots
    7. 25 pack of CAT6 keystones
    8. 8 pack of RG6 keystones
    9. 10 pack of blank keystones
    10. 10 pack of low voltage wall inserts
    11. Hinged 4U wall mount rack
    12. 24-port CAT5e patch panel
    13. 24-port CAT6 patch panel
    14. 2 desk grommets (2 3/8")
    15. 1 RG6 4-port splitter
    16. 1 RG6 8port directv splitter
    17. RG6 external enclosure
    18. Tools:
      1. Punch down tool
      2. RG6 compression tool
      3. RG6 cutter
      4. RG6 stripper
      5. Wire strippers (only needed to strip the CAT5e to connect to the telephone NID)
      6. Philips head screwdriver

     

    The Process

    I planned the following drops:

    1. Master bedroom
    2. Bedroom 1
    3. Bedroom 2
    4. Bedroom 3
    5. Kitchen
    6. Living Room

    I would also neet the following utility drops:

    1. Network closet to external enclosure for CATV and SATV utilities
    2. Network closet to Telephone NID

    This is what I was replacing at each drop:

    post-2-0-75869500-1408830666_thumb.jpg

     

    I estimated the distance between the drop location and the network closet, then added 5 to 10 feet to ensure excess, and in some cases, avoid electrical lines in the attic.

     

    I cut the RG6 and CAT6 from their spool and labeled each, then attached to the existing telephone line and climbed in the attic to pull through.

    post-2-0-46566500-1408831413_thumb.jpg

     

    Lucky for me, the following was true:

    1. In the 60's low voltage wires did not have to be stapled down.
    2. 2 CAT6 and 1 RG6 is just thin enough to fit through the 1/2" opening already drilled in the joist. Due to the sloe in the roof it would have been impossible to increase the diameter of these holes

    Punched down

    post-2-0-30144200-1408831425_thumb.jpg

     

    Compression fitting

    post-2-0-96287700-1408831391_thumb.jpg

     

    RG6 quad shield CCS was a bad choice for a couple reasons. First, Directv requires pure copper for the SWIM. That's why I had to get another 100' of RG6. Second, manipulating quad shield CCS is super difficult. That stuff is rigid. I wasn't able to pull RG6 through Bedroom 1 because that drop went down and made a 90 degree turn through a stud. The quad shield couldn't handle it.

     

    While RG6 CCS is fine for video, it sucks for pulling, and has the added limitation of more resistance than pure copper. If I did this again I would have gone pure copper dual shield.

     

    The finished product

    post-2-0-74335000-1408831313_thumb.jpg

     

    Next I drilled two 2 and 3/8" holes to drop into the network closet. I inserted the rubberized desk grommets to prevent insulation from falling out of the ceiling, and pulled through.

     

    post-2-0-02778500-1408831283_thumb.jpg

    The CAT5e is gray. I daisy chained this across the first 8 ports of the CAT5e patch panel. This allows me to patch through telephone to any one of my drops. Each telephone port supports up to 4 lines.

     

    post-2-0-98668800-1408830723_thumb.jpg

     

    You can see here I'm patching the phone into my office.

     

    After running the CAT5e for the telephone (and my internet). My speed changed from 7.26 Mbps / 0.92 Mbps to 7.28 Mbps / 2.20 Mbps.

  7. More Events

    in Feature Requests

    Posted

    See the updated CORE-1371. With this event, plugins are able to inject arbitrary markup into the head, top of the body, and bottom of the body, as well as set variables into the structure that could be used in conjunction with changes to the structure file.

     


    You may want to request a hook system then.  

    Those events just don't make sense (at least to me). Having the webpage load shouldn't trigger events.

     

    There's really no difference. A hook is simply a poor man's event. By the way, there's already an event that is triggered on every page load: Appcontroller.preAction. CORE-1371 improves on that event.

  10. 'reply To All' And 'reply' Possibilities When Answering The Ticket

    in Feature Requests

    Posted

    What Denial Of Service ? People are having conversations all the time like that!

    What You suggest in situation when conversation is with client, his developer and developers boss?

    Maybe the client could rely the information to the developer and developer's boss? Whose to say that the content of the ticket may not contain confidential information that the client doesn't wish to share with the developer? It could then be easy to accidentally send confidential information to third parties!

     

    Just reply to the client that "our ticketing system developers says that CC will lead to dos, and we won't reply to all of You" ??? Are You kidding me???

    No, I'm not kidding. It would be trivial to create an email that CC'd 10,000 people. Now you want Blesta to log all 10,000 CC addresses and email each one whenever the ticket is updated? That would clearly cause a denial of service that could effect not only your server, but also your mail service.

     

    > "Moreover, you suggest anyone CC'd should be able to reply to the ticket. That's a security concern."

    That's not a security concern, it's people taking part in the problem solving.

     

    It's a security concern because it allows a multitude of users to reply to a single ticket. Blesta verifies the integrity of a ticket reply by evaluating the subject line. Allowing multiple people to reply to the same ticket can be a security concern as the reply is associated with the client and may not have necessarily come from the client.

     

    Ok, receiving separate mails is not end of the world, because blesta has the "merge" feature. But "reply to all" ???? How should I reply to all the people that have to be posted?

    Maybe a feature request to allow ticket replies to be CC'd to other contacts that are already set for the client account?

     

    Do You know that such "rules" of not making incredibly simple features does not let us to ditch simple mail?

    Every few tickets we have to reply via mail, because our ticketing system does not support simple "reply to all".

    I wouldn't say this is an incredibly simple feature. Like I said, it has inherit problems. Those could probably be dealt with in some way to mitigate their effects. I don't know.

     

    p.s. kayako has this feature for ages. I haven't heard that it has any security issues with it

    There are a lot of things in Kayako that Blesta doesn't do, but it's easy to use Kayako with Blesta.

  11. 'reply To All' And 'reply' Possibilities When Answering The Ticket

    in Feature Requests

    Posted

    Blesta is not going to keep track of every CC address attached to an incoming email and reply back to all of them. That could easily produce a denial of service. Tickets are one-to-one. They come from one address, and are received at one address.

     

    Moreover, you suggest anyone CC'd should be able to reply to the ticket. That's a security concern.

     

    The ticket system isn't a mailing list, so I don't think it should necessarily act like one.

  12. 'reply To All' And 'reply' Possibilities When Answering The Ticket

    in Feature Requests

    Posted

    Sometimes more than 1 user participates in problem solving from client side, and all of them may reply to the same ticket.

    It would be nice to be able to 'know' how much users are getting mail when support staff is replying ticket (email list).

     

    I don't understand. You can view all emails a client has received under their account, or view the mail log under [Tools] > [Logs].

     

    Also, it would be nice to be able to choose to 'reply to all'  or just to one person.

    You mean select multiple tickets and reply with the same response all at one time? I don't know about that, since there's no way to know what the last response is for every ticket selected, since that's not listed on the ticket listing page.

  13. Aborted: Error Parsing Headers: Duplicate Header 'content-Type'

    in Bugs

    Posted

    Upgraded to 3.2.2. issue not fixed.

     

    Are you sure you overwrote all of the necessary files? Specifically the files affected by CORE-1349 are in /components/invoice_templates/. What would happen before CORE-1349 was that PDF invoices would send headers and output the PDF document, but execution would continue. This would result in additional headers being sent which produced an error of "cannot send headers, headers already sent".

     

    As of CORE-1349, all invoice templates shipped with Blesta (default and quickbooks) now terminate execution immediately after the PDF is output, which completely prevents additional headers from being attempted. Moreover, no headers are sent prior to PDF output, so if CORE-1349 doesn't resolve the issue for you, the issue must be with either custom changes, or outside the control of Blesta (e.g. server related).

  18. Coupons & Tax

    in Bugs

    Posted

    Yes, this is a known issue, CORE-861, that we're currently discussing in private on how to resolve.

     

    I know this issue sounds simple on the surface, but is complicated by the fact that a coupon can be applied to multiple services at a time, some of which may be taxable and some that may not be. So the issue is with trying to resolve how best to calculate and represent the discount.

    One such solution is to add multiple line items, one for each service that the coupon applies to. This, however, can't be done if the coupon is for a fixed amount discount.

  20. Component Api (Download Invoice Pdfs Via The Api)

    in The Marketplace

    Posted

    A number of users have requested the ability to download invoice PDFs using the API. I've always said how easy it is to build a plugin to do this, so here it is.

     

    Actually, I took it a few steps further and made it more abstract than that. This plugin allows you to invoke any component in Blesta using the API, so it's quite powerful. Invoices are offered for download and stream through the browser using the InvoiceDelivery component.

     

    Documentation for this plugin can be found here..

    component_api.zip

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