Unfortunately that wasn’t the case with the next set of H4 bulbs I purchased, after one of the original bulbs died a couple of years later. Even though the light was sufficient, It seemed like the light coming from new set of bulbs, wouldn’t focus properly on the reflectors, causing bad light reflection and occasionally blinding the other drives. Therefore, I had to aim my headlights lower, reducing my road visibility.

3 years had passed on this second kit, when one of the bulbs decided to commit suicide. After some flickering, it started smoking and it was gone, leaving behind a veeeery bad smell and a smoked headlight housing!

After this second loss, I decided not take any chances again, purchasing a set of bulbs that could be underperforming. So this time  I decided to go a step further, install a high quality HID system, with a set of projectors to complement my Bi-Xenon lights and my car’s looks.

I did some research, I found a guy who had done a similar mod to his Glanza, but there were no details at all on the project, other than a small photo gallery. There are many projectors kits out there, ebay has plenty, but not only. Even during my recent trip abroad, I saw a guy selling projector kits on a stand in the street!

The right projectors kit should:

• Be of high quality. Like for every product nowadays, they come in a wide range of quality, and most of the times you don’t want to go cheap if you expect quality, as you always get what you paid for. Makes sense
• Be a reversible mod. Have you ever checked for a set of Glanza headlights? A pair of `98-99 specs headlights, goes for €200-300+ second hand on ebay! VERY EXPENSIVE considering they are just a housing carrying no technology. So permanently altering my original headlights was a thing to avoid.
• Fit. Glanzas’ headlights are pretty small. Also the engine bay behind the headlights is pretty packed, especially on the passenger’s side, limiting the size of the candidate projectors kit.

After plenty of research, I decided to purchase my kit from The Retrofit Source (TRS); a website dedicated to projectors upgrading and retrofitting, with high quality products and a big community to support it.

I have to admit that all of their kits look top quality. There are 4 Bi-Xenon kits available. 2 of them are larger and require very intrusive and permanent mods. So that left me with 2 options, the “Morimoto Mini H1 kit” and the newer “Morimoto Mini D2S kit”. Both mini kits were “plug and play” retrofits. The helpful staff of TRS also recommended me the Mini D2S kit, so I purchased it without hesitation.

I ordered the mini D2S kit with the following setup:

Bi-xenon Morimoto Mini Stage III Kit (D2S)

Projectors: D2S Morimoto Mini bi-xenon with clear lenses (Low & High Beams)
Wire Harness Relay:  H4/9003
Shrouds: E46-R (extended)
Re-sealing Glue
Projectors: RHD (UK, Australia, etc)
Ballasts: Morimoto 3Five (35w)
Bulbs: Morimoto 3Five 5000K D2S

It didn’t take long until my order was dispatched, keeping me drooling over the computer screen every time the package’s tracking status updated

Several days later, a big box of joy had arrived. Everything was in there safe and sound, perfectly packed.

The first thing to do as soon as I stopped jumping up and down out of happiness, was to test the projectors’ solenoids using a 12V DC power source. This is a small circuit comprising of an electromagnet and a shutter, which enables the high beams, by applying 12V to it and see if it responds. You don’t want to install your projector kit with a problematic solenoid. This will mean that you will have to reverse all work done, to take it out and replace it. Test was a success!

Then I started figuring out my installation approach and planning. Fortunately TRS has plenty of helpful resources available online for everything. In theory everything seemed pretty straightforwards… but as one of the many Murphy’s Laws state: Nothing is as easy as you think it is

Roughly, the procedure involves the following steps:

1. Install the wiring of the relay harness and ballast, just as for every other HID kit
2. Removing the first headlight
   
   
3. Removing the bulb, screws, the H4 bulb clip and cup, bases and whatever else can be removed
   
   
4. Cleaning it up a bit is recommended
5. Cooking the headlight in the oven (at 130ºC preheated oven, for 7 mins). Yes, you heard right. This mod involves some kitchen work This step is required to help melting the headlight’s sealing glue
   
6. Prying with tools and working your way around the headlight, separating the clear cover from the rest of the housing before the sealing glue becomes solid again
   
   
7. Preparing the shroud (surrounding) to fit inside the limited space headlight housing by cutting them to size. Apparently the E46-R Extended shrouds were pretty big for a Glanza’s housing. After plenty of cutting and trials I got the size right. Perfectly fitting the shroud inside the headlight was very critical, in order for the shroud not to push the projector to a direction. At the same time the shroud should be in touch with the bottom of the housing, for aesthetic and functional purposes (will analyze this further later on).
   
   
8. Inserting and fixing into place the projector assembly with shroud
   
   
9. Install the uncovered headlight to the car, and install bulb. Test bulb, ballast, solenoids again and adjust the light beam vertically and horizontally
   
   
10. Now remove the headlight from the car and put the clear cover back on. WARNING: if you own a pet, ensure that the glue and insides of the headlight don’t carry any pet fur! I had to learn this the hard way!
    
    
11. Cook again headlight it in the oven (at 130ºC preheated oven, for 7 mins), to melt the sealing glue
12. Make sure that the headlight seals as well as possible before the glue cools down and becomes solid again
13. Do any additional sealings required with a good sealing silicone
    
    
14. Headlight with projector is ready. Now you can mock your pet for not managing to ruin your mod
    
    
15. Install the headlight to the car, test and once 100% sure that everything works as expected, repeat the above steps for the other headlight

The procedure sounded easy and fun… but how little did I know??? At some point I wanted to put my head in the oven instead

The most annoying issue I came across, had to do with the alignment of the projectors. Not the horizontal, neither the vertical alignment, but their angle!

The Mini D2S projectors were designed to replace directly the H4 bulb. The kit even comes with a special ring with 3 pins, which ensures that the projector is place at the identical position of an H4 bulb. This is very smart and wise… but Toyota never designed this car’s headlights for projectors use. Therefore having a halogen bulb in the headlight housing at an angle, doesn’t affect the halogen bulb’s light output, as the light is reflected correctly where it’s supposed to go.

When installed correctly, the light output has a very very wrong angle! Check out the photo below. There was a 30 degrees angle on the output beam!

Thanks to this late discovery, I had to redo one of the headlights. Good thing that I didn’t finish them both before realizing this issue!

So at some point before step 8, I had to eliminate a small adjustment tooth on the inside diameter of the projector’s H4 metal ring (photo below), to allow the projector to rotate inside the housing. Doing so added one more parameter to alignment process.

The did the angle alignment by parking my car against a wall with the headlights normally installed and adjusted but without the clear cover in front (step 9). Then I was rotating by hand the projector until the projected cut off line on the wall, was perfectly horizontal. Then I glued the shroud on the projector with some epoxy glue, and that did the trick. In order improve your success chances at this part, you must make sure that the shroud has at least 2 points of contact with the bottom of the housing, before it is glued.

This was a major pain, before figuring out a solution. It’s so annoying when worldwide standards are not followed, leading into so much trouble. I hope this note saved someone from wasting his time and patience on this issue

Another problem I came across, was the packed engine bay of Glanza. It made it difficult to pass the short thick D2S plug to the right place. The same with the thick harness wiring, but that’s nothing impossible. It only took some planning and trials to figure out what’s the best path.

When all done, I did a quick alignment of both headlights on a camping table’s surface placed vertically in front of my car, in the driveway, and then went for a test drive. I was very impressed from the results, so impressed that at some point I was shocked! The 2 light cut off lines of the projectors were so perfectly aligned on the walls, that I thought one of the bulbs wasn’t on, making me rush out of the car to check!

There are long proper lights alignment procedures to ensure an accurate result, but require a large wall, decently even floor, and time. As of now, all these items are hard to find

Anyhow, I am glad to call this mod completed and successful! It sure gives a new look to the Glanza, and most importantly improves road safety. I would highly recommend this mod to anyone with plenty of patience and basic DIY knowledge. If you are into projectors’ retrofitting, then TRS is the place to visit!

Happy modding!

PS: At some point before step 11, while my headlights were wide open, I considered removing the reflective surface inside the housing leaving it all black, or even dressing it up with carbon fiber clothe. But the idea of an all-white car with all-black headlights stopped me. Someone might find it nice, or if you own a black Glanza, it might look nice. So feel free to try it out and send me some photos of your work

After installing a new custom ROM, I have full Internet connectivity over my service provider’s 3G network (Cytamobile-Vodefone), except for GTalk. GTalk kept failing to connect over 3G, but it was fine through WiFi. Of course my first thought was that the custom ROM’s GTalk client was problematic. Also GTalk is not treated as any application within the Adrnoid OS, since it’s considered one of its core apps, so root access was a requirement. I even tried upgrading the the custom ROM’s Beta version, hoping that this glitch is fixed. But despite all effort, at the end of the day, the result was the same! In every forum I checked, I couldn’t find anybody else facing the same problem.

Since the problem occurred only over the 3G network, I decided to take a look into the phone’s APN settings (Settings -> Wireless and Network -> Mobile Network -> Access Point Names). I noticed that for some reason, I was using the old APN settings of Cyta which were:

APN name: cytamobile

Username: user

Password: password

I found this very weird, since I was 100% that I always used the most recent, simplified settings, without a username/password. So I reverted back my settings, et voilà! My GTalk connected right away, and my 3G Internet was faster than before, as this APN seems to point to a newer, faster server.

Summing up, the CORRECT APN settings are:

APN name: internet

Username:

Password:



It’s really questionable WHY this is happening. Why the old server still exists but not operating correctly. But then again I though that this must be an old forgotten server the custom ROM creator found and used. So I didn’t bother myself much about it.

But just yesterday, a friend of mine had a brand new gorgeous Samsung Galaxy Note, and she was facing the exact same problem with her stock ROM! Thanks to my bad experience above, I immediately found the problem and her GTalk worked. It’s an I.T Miracle! Therefore I decided to post the solution to this common issue, as I highly doubt Cyta’s support line, or any third party will be able to help you in case you face this problem

I hope my quick post was of some help to an Android fan out there

Every modern company wishing (and willing to pay the premium) to move forwards in regards to their electronics communication with the rest of the world, has definitely thought of the Microsoft Exchange Server.

That was my case at my current job position as a network/system administrator. Among a reasonable amount of available mailing systems, Microsoft’s Exchange Server was a very strong candidate, fulfilling our requirements.

There were many parameters involved in the final decision (eg. once off price, recurring fees, scalability, stability, functionality, management, value adding services etc), and Exchange Server’s biggest disadvantage might have been it’s high licensing price. But since my company was willing to pay the additional cost, I was more than happy to carry on with this project.

As the post’s subject indicates, our previous mailing system was  Alt-N’s MDaemon (v11.0.3 Pro at that time), and that’s where my odyssey begins! Migrating 100+ mailboxes, as transparently as possible to Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2010 SP1! Any kind of email loss was definitely out of the question. The same goes for any kind of office hours service disruption, and hopes migrating all the accounts throughout a weekend, were soon proven daydreaming material.

I’ve been through various migration tutorials, but some of them were risky, others were incomplete and some others unclear. Despite not having any straight forward procedure to follow, all the reading I went through, gave me a better general idea on how to make my own migration plan from the one mailing system to the other.

Right now I have just completed this project has successfully, so I decided to make this write up, trying to provide as straight forward instructions as possible for a complete MDaemon to Exchange Server migration. I hope you will find my information useful.

To start with, Figure 1 shows a basic diagram of the original mail flow within the company’s network. Any other L2 & L3 devices in between, not affecting the mail service, have been left out.

Roughly, our domains’ MX records, point to a specific public IP address of our firewall, which is NAT’ed to the mail server. This means that all incoming emails are downloaded first by the firewall, where they are virus scanned and checked again anti-spam databases and other static rules.

All valid emails, are then forwarded to the MDaemon server’s internal IP address, which does its own checks, and finally delivers them to the corresponding user’s mailbox and a third party email archiver.

Due to the large amount of user accounts, as well as their high volume of data in each mailbox, direct migration was out of the questions. So I followed a server co-existence approach (Figure 2). In this scenario the two independent mailing systems work simultaneously, both serving users under the same domain name.

To achieve such a scenario, you need to perform the following configurations on the two servers:

• Setup MDaemon to relay all emails sent to non-existing users, to another server, the Exchange Server in our case. Navigate to Setup -> select “Default Domain & Servers” option and highlight the “Unknown Mail” tab  (Screenshot 1). You have to enable advanced options, and enter your Exchange server’s hostname or internal IP address and receiving port. You might also have to drop some NDR (Non Delivery Report) settings, to avoid possibly false undeliverable notifications. NDRs are controlled by the top boxes under the same tab (“Incoming mail sent to local users who don’t exist should be…”). In my case I unticked all 3 of them.

• Setup MDaemon to accept emails relayed from the Exchange Server, to other local or Internet recipients (Screenshot 2). To do this, you have navigate to Setup -> select “Security Settings” option and highlight the “Relay Control” tab. There, you have to loosen up the relay security settings, and allow TRUSTED hosts/IPs relay through MDaemon. Then make sure that you add your Exchange Server’s Hostname and internal IP address under the “Trusted Hosts” tab.

• Setup a receiving connector on Exchange Server, to trust and accept emails relayed from the MDaemon server, for domain’s mailboxes unknown to MDaemon. This is done from Server Configuration -> Hub Transport -> Receive Connectors. Enter MDaemon’s IP address as the remote server, under the Network tab (Screenshot 3). To simplify things, I chose to allow Basic Authentication (under the connector’s Authentication tab), for all groups.

• Setup a send connector on Exchange Server (Organization Configuration -> Hub Transport -> Send Connectors), of SMTP type and * as the Address Space. Under Network tab, select to route emails via a smarthost, and enter your MDaemon’s address as one (Screenshot 4). You can also set your preferred Authentication Method, by pressing the “Change” button below. This connector will be used to relay all outgoing emails via the MDaemon server, for mailboxes not existing on the Exchange server. * Remember: after every Hub Transport configuration, the corresponding Windows “Microsoft Exchange * ” service, requires a restart to apply the changes.

At this point, if you are using a software or hardware email archiving solution, you must be careful. Even though all incoming/outgoing emails pass through MDaemon server which is configured to archive them; the internal communication between users residing on the Exchange Server, is just local. Those emails never reach MDaemon, therefore not archived.

But at the same time, having both servers archiving your emails, can results into duplicate copies. There is no easy solution for this issue, so you have to compromise some email archiver space. After all, typically such software/appliances have advanced compression algorithms, saving up space from duplicate copies. So, as soon as some users have been migrated to the Exchange Server, it’s wise to setup the email archiving (journal) functionality (Screenshot 5).

Some other helpful steps I performed are listed below. They are not compulsory for the migration process:

• To make the Exchange Server directly accessible from the outside world throughout the migration process, so users can access their new mailboxes, I assigned it its own public IP address. Also made sure that the firewall will allow access to important ports (eg 25, 110, 443, 465, 567, 993 etc), to enable use of OWA/IMAP/SMTP etc services from outside the company.
• Getting an SSL certificate from a CA, is highly recommended (if you are paying for a fully licensed Exchange Server, this is not the part where you cut back costs). Useful instructions on how to get the certificate installed can be found here.

Up to this point, you should have a functional co-existence setup. You can create some Exchange mailboxes and run some internal tests and external tests to verify its correct operation.

The only thing missing, is your data! You can say we are “half way there”, but when you are done with this project and look back on how much time you spent struggling with each and every mailbox to migrate as transparently as possible, this parts feels like FOREVER! But anyway, stay focused and pay attention to the following steps. We can finally start the actual data migration!

• Export MDaemon’s accounts list. Click on Accounts -> Exporting -> Export accounts to a Comma Delimited file. This might take a while, but eventually you will have a list of all mailboxes, including their username and password in a CSV format (Screenshot 6). This might not sound very secure, the server admin knowing every user’s password, but comes handy in situations like this.

After spending some time, researching for an email migration solution, to make my life easier, my research quickly came to an end with only a small amount of tools promising to help me carry out the task. Most of the tools were carrying a high price tag, per migrated mailbox. Other tools were too intrusive, involving the user’s Outlook Exporting his/her mailbox(es) into PST files and then Importing them to the Exchange Server mailbox via Outlook again.

Finally, the most appropriate tool for the task was just under my nose. IMAPsync is included in Ubuntu’s repositories and of course it’s free and open source under WTFPL license. This tools could be ran from the server or any PC, and would login into 2 IMAP accounts and synchronize their contents. It’s a higher level migration than I was hoping, over the IMAP protocol, therefore slower; but I was happy as long as it worked! It’s a great tool, don’t forget to donate!

Oh the irony… migrating to a Microsoft product, using Linux!

• Installing IMAPsync under Ubuntu, is as simple as typing:

sudo apt-get install imapsync

in a terminal window. Then you can read its manual, typing  ” man imapsync ”   in the terminal window again. Alternatively, you can save your time, and use the same command I used and provide in this post, at a later stage.

After this, we are ready to migrate our first mailbox. Here is a the process I followed for each mailbox migration:

1. Create a mailbox for a new/existing Active directory user on Exchange Server (eg. user@example.com). In the mailbox’s properties, add any email aliases and forwardings you might require.
2. Make sure that you know user’s both MDaemon (exported earlier in CSV) and Active Directory credentials (you will have to ask the user for this, or reset the password yourself)
3. Rename the MDaemon email account to something else (eg. from user@example.com to user-0@example.com), so all new emails for user@example.com will be forwarded to the Exchange Server account.
4. Find the MDaemon’s maillists the renamed account (user-0@example.com) is member of (in account’s settings, Options Tab).
5. Open individually every mail list, and replace the renamed account (user-0@example.com) with the account’s original name, eg. user@example.com (has to be typed/added manually).
6. Remove any aliases/forwardings assigned to the MDaemon mailbox, and add them to the Exchange Server mailbox. Skipping this step can lead into tricky situations, where emails are not sent or received.
7. Migrate the MDaemon mailbox to Exchange account using the IMAPsync tool. I used the following command command:
   imapsync –host1 MdaemonIP –user1 MDaemonUser –password1 MDaemonPass –host2 ExchangeIP –user2 ExUser –password2 ExPass –authmech2 PLAIN –syncinternaldates
   MDaemonIP: MDaemon server’s internal IP address
   MDaemonUser: migrating mailbox (eg. user-0@example.com)
   MDaemonPass: the account’s password exported earlier
   ExchangeIP: Exchange Server’s internal IP address
   ExUser: Active Directory username
   ExPass: Active Directory username
8. Meanwhile, you can setup the user’s new Exchange mailbox to his Outlook, while it is being populated by old emails, as well as newly arriving ones, so he will still be able to work.
9. Ideally the user should not move any emails around folders during this process.
10. In case of a huge mailbox, if the user needs to access some old emails, you can correct the MDaemon’s IMAP account’s credentials in Outlook (eg. set account’s username to: user-0@example.com).
11. User should NOT move/delete any emails from MDaemon mailbox, while migration procedure is taking place.
12. When IMAPsync process has completed, it is safe to disable the MDaemon account, and remove it from the user’s Outlook.

Plenty of loooong endless days/weeks/months later repeating the above procedure, you should be done! I know it’s not the fastest method, but it’s the safest one, since you gradually move forwards to Exchange Server, troubleshooting any issues coming up and avoiding repeating possible mistakes.Using IMAPsync you can perform a mass migration, but personally, I wouldn’t risk it!

When you are done migrating user accounts, remember to recreate the Distribution Lists on Exchange Server, and disable them on MDaemon.

When this last step is finally completed, it is time to kill the MDaemon! Make sure that you perform this task during non-working hours! As Murphy’s law states: “If anything can go wrong, it will!”

What’s left to be done is simple. But if anything goes wrong, it means downtime on the mail services. Something personally I couldn’t risk.

1. Remove the MDaemon-specific send/receive connectors, and setup your corresponding connectors to communicate with the Internet directly. Restart the Transport Service
2. Change the NAT (or whatever method you use) of the MDaemon’s public IP address, to also point to the Exchange Server.
3. Specify to the firewall, to relay emails to the Exchange Server’s internal IP address from now on, and remove/replace any other MDaemon instances in its configuration
4. Cross your fingers and send plenty of external test emails, from various webmails to your company’s mailboxes
5. Unplug MDaemon server’s network connection for the next couple of days, just to make sure that everything works smoothly, and have MDaemon standby, in case something goes wrong, to revert back to (mailflow-wise).

That is all more or less! This is how I spent my “free time” for the past several weeks/months!

My name is Frank, and I have been MDaemon-free 10 days now!

I hope someone out there will find my experience useful, and benefit off it!

Frank

This is just a minor update from my previous CarPC v.2.0 setup, but I decided to document it in order to add further details and photos missing from my original post. The only hardware changes in this new setup are: the removal of the laptop DVD drive, since I never used it all these years. the replacement of the ancient 2.5″ 60Gb IDE HD, with a 2.5″ 250Gb SATA one.

In addition to the above changes, I created a custom bay on the dashboard out of the housing of an external 2.5″ USB HD, where the DVD drive used to be, to easily eject/insert the SATA hard disk.

Since I had to reinstall Windows XP from scratch, I took my time to unload a big list applications and services normally starting on every boot, to avoid stressing the under powered 1.2GHz Celeron processor.

There is not much more to add, I will let you enjoy the long overdue pictures of the project. More information and specs can be found in my previous post (CarPC v.2.0)

Before I start, I would like to emphasize that i am not a “hacker”, neither a security expert. I am just another judgmental, pretty-disappointed Cyta subscriber, who enjoys messing around

It hasn’t been long since CYTA received a serious security blow, when all of their subscribers’ DSL Access and Cytanet credentials, including email passwords leaked to the public. Oh wait…actually that has been a while ago, back in 2001! Damn time flies by! :/

Back then the chaos began with the Code Red worm, affecting IIS of Windows NT/2K servers, which allowed attackers to easily gain access to a server and browse around its files. So their server affected by the worm, was the DSL Access authentication portal and all subscribers’ credentials, were stored in its log files! Oh the joy!

“Shit happens” you might think. Security is an infinite game of vulnerabilities and patches.

The sad thing though, was that the specific server wasn’t patched until almost TWO (2) YEARS LATER!!! The response time was UNACCEPTABLE!
This insecurity was affecting me as well. My email accounts’ passwords were in public view and there was nothing I could do! I tried notifying them, also escalating to their management with proofs etc, but nothing! Nobody seemed to care. Their only response was that the people supporting their platform from Israel, were notified and they will handle this issue!

Out of their SO MANY overpaid employees, an outsourced Israeli technician was needed to install a *bleep* Windows update for them? So so so sad, making me wonder where our hard earned money go!

Anyhow, the past is the past. I’ve been one of the first a Cyta DSL subscribers, and they remain my ISP, although I strongly believe they are not worth it.
On the way, other security issues came up… eg. the weak Wireless encryption (WEP) set by default on their modems. Also the easily calculatable Thomson/Speedtouch wireless keys (thanks to Thomson’s leaked algorithm).

These are clearly not Cyta’s fault, but there are many things they could do to secure their devices! But yet, recent subscribers get a modem preset with WEP encryption and the typical SSID; therefore anybody with minimum knowledge can obtain the default wireless key! In other words, your modem can serve the neighborhood with free internet, making your connection crawl if you are lucky. Taking a more extreme case, someone might perform illegal activities through your Internet connection, leaving you responsible for the consequences.

And finally, we come to the present! Just recently, Cyta has started forcing its subscribers to MANUALLY upgrade their modems’ firmware, by blocking all of their http requests to an internal site with upgrade instructions! So… no “upgrade” = no internet!

I have worked in an ISP’s network department for several years, and I know for sure that this is not how it’s supposed to be done
Obviously they have no central management of their devices… but let’s live with it! No harm done, other than showing some level of unprofessionalism and lack of organization on their behalf, and wasting some of the average user’s time (“some”, if everything goes well with the upgrade), and confusing the less skilled users.

So, what is this “upgrade” about? Do they fix the “free” Internet access points they have spread all over Cyprus? Sadly… NO!

This messy upgrade procedure is performed so they can just change their modems’ WAN_Admin password!!! And even this task, is performed as poorly as it can be done! Once again the insecurity masters have done it!
By simply viewing the contents of their compressed installer, you can see all the source code, the various firmware’s libraries along with their their customized “patch”!

Thousands of subscribers have to carry out this task, because many people got to know the modems’ original admin password. But the newly set password is thrown in clear text in an archive??? Unbelievable! WTF is happening here? In a multi-million semi-governmental company, there wasn’t a single person to say that THIS IS A MISTAKE?
What’s wrong Cyta? You are not paying your employees enough, to be bothered to work? (I highly doubt this last statement…. just its first part though) 

I know from first hand that the Authority employs some knowledgeable and worthy people. But on the other hand, this small amount of people in such a huge company, can’t be everywhere. The point of this post, was just a quick roadmap of failures of the Authority, and to express my bitter disappointment of how things work in such organization in Cyprus. I “suspect” that the situation is similar in most  (semi/)governmental organizations on the island.

Ever since I came back to Cyprus, I’ve been checking Cyta’s vacancies for a decent position, hoping I could live the “Cypriot Dream” some day, but had no luck.
<sarcasm> Apparently they are fully staffed and doing great! </sarcasm>

UPDATE: if you get stuck at the “need to upgrade” screen, and you are not willing to go through this ridiculous password-resetting process, simply visit: http://upgrademodem.cytanet.com.cy:81/?modem=ECI

By visiting this link, Cyta will register that you are using one of the old ECI brand modems, and allow you resume your browsing.

UPDATE (months/years later after this problem has been known):

From: support@cytanet.com.cy
Subject: Important Announcement – Σημαντική Ενημέρωση
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:42:08 +0300

English message follows

Η CYTANET ΕΝΗΜΕΡΩΝΕΙ ΚΑΙ ΣΥΜΒΟΥΛΕΥΕΙ

Για την ασφάλεια της ασύρματης Wi-Fi σύνδεσής σας στο διαδίκτυο αλλάξτε τον εργοστασιακό κωδικό WPA του αποδιαμορφωτή σας

Αγαπητοί μας,
Αν χρησιμοποιείτε την ασύρματη σύνδεση Wi-Fi για να συνδέεστε στο διαδίκτυο, πρέπει να αλλάξετε τον εργοστασιακό κωδικό WPA του αποδιαμορφωτή σας για την ασφάλεια της σύνδεσής σας.
Οι οδηγίες για αλλαγή του κωδικού WPA (PSK ENCRYPTION KEY) βρίσκονται στην ιστοσελίδα της υπηρεσίας DSL Access της Cytanet στο www.cytanet-dslaccess.com.cy. Για ευκολότερη πρόσβαση Πατήστε εδώ.
Αν κατά τη διάρκεια της αλλαγής του κωδικού αντιμετωπίσετε πρόβλημα ή χρειάζεστε βοήθεια, παρακαλούμε όπως επικοινωνήσετε, χωρίς χρέωση, με το Κέντρο Τηλεφωνικής Εξυπηρέτησης της Cyta στον αριθμό 132, επιλέξτε Τεχνική Υποστήριξη (επιλογή 3) και μετά Υπηρεσία DSL Access (πάλι επιλογή 3).

Ομάδα Cytanet

Σας ευχαριστούμε που επιλέξατε την υπηρεσία Cytanet για την πρόσβαση σας στο Διαδίκτυο
Σκεφτείτε πριν να τυπώσετε
Cyta © 2011. All Rights Reserved.
INFORMATION AND ADVICE FROM CYTANET

For maximum security of your Wi-Fi wireless Internet connection,
change the modem’s factory settings for the WPA code

Dear customer,
If you connect to the Internet using the Wi-Fi wireless facility of your modem, you must change the factory settings of the WPA code to ensure maximum security for your connection.
Instructions on how to change the WPA (PSK ENCRYPTION KEY) code of your modem may be found on Cytanet’s DSL Access website at http://www.cytanet-dslaccess.com.cy/. For easier access Click here.
For assistance, please contact the Cyta Call Centre, free of charge, on 132, select Technical Support (press 3) and then DSL Access (again, press 3).

The Cytanet Team

Thank you for choosing Cytanet as your Internet Service Provider
Think before you print
Cyta © 2011. All Rights Reserved.

While looking for methods for making an inventory of the Windows/Office  licenses in a 100+ PCs network, I came across Spiceworks. A free inventory and monitoring tool, rapidly developed over the past years.

After using it for the first 10 minutes, I had to stop because I was salivating on my keyboard, out of IT-happiness

Spiceworks is the ultimate tool for any system administrator! It offers a huge range of useful features to help you monitor and manage your systems in any size of network, enabling you to run a proper IT helpdesk.

Some key features in a glance are:

• Active Directory integration (started from its latest version, 5)
• Detailed Hardware and Software inventory of multiple networks (CPU/RAM/HD/maker/licenses/installed programs etc)
• Devices’ monitoring and alerting (server going down, low ink in printers, disk space running low etc)
• Helpdesk page for users to raise support tickets and get remote assistance (via LogMeIn)
• Has a huge community (1+M people) behind it, providing excellent support via forums
• It is installed on a server and it can be fully managed from anywhere over web interface

Words are not enough to describe how helpful Spiceworks is, for the IT department’s daily tasks.

Personally, it has saved me tons of time until now, and made part of my job much easier. It is a MUST-have tool and I highly recommend it to any IT professional or hobbyist. Give it a try today, after all this golden piece of software is FREE!

After going through an odyssey to install, I finally managed to boot Red Hat… but my experience ended there more or less. My crappy modem (MWave 28.8K, ISA… good times!  ) wouldn’t work under Linux, so I gave up.

More than a decade later, I came across Linux again. This time at my work environment, where Linux (Fedora) was my department’s primary Operating System.

I really liked what I saw. All the handy network tools, rock solid stability, great applications with a €0 price tag, etc! Of course we are in Cyprus, where nobody seems to care paying for software, but why using illegal methods to have something that already exists in free form?

After a quick research, Ubuntu seemed to be the most popular distribution, so I downloaded it, tested it for a while off a live-CD, and installed it on my primary PC …and no, I am not skipping any steps, the process was as quick and easy as I described

Back in 90′s I never thought this process would ever be simpler than installing Windows. When installing Linux, deep inside, I knew that I was compromising ease and simplicity, for a freely distributed, more complex Operating System.
But nowadays, THIS IS NOT THE CASE!

I was amazed on how much Linux installation had simplified over time. As a matter of fact, I knock my head on the wall, for not trying again with Linux earlier.
Having a fully functioning OS running off a Live-CD (no installation required) with a FREE copy of Open Office (as opposed to the so expensive MS Office) pre-installed, would have saved me from a lot of frustration during my university years!

There were so many times, my Windows (Vista, supplied by the Uni) went nuts, and I was up all night long troubleshooting, so I can get back precious system up and running to finish my assignments. Oh… “good” old times!!!
Even if you are not considering switching to Linux, I highly recommend to everybody and especially students, to have an Ubuntu CD handy. It can really save you!

For the past years Ubuntu has been my primary desktop and netbook Operating System, and my experience with it was very pleasant. There is a lot of serious development taking place behind it, and support can be easily obtained, if needed, through various forums.

The purpose of this post, is just for a quick introduction Ubuntu into my (blog) life. Future posts with helpful tips will follow, trying to gather together a list with the most useful Linux/Ubuntu utilities, apps, tools, etc.

Maybe a Linux based CarPC is on its way too

Until further Linux-related posts, here is a small list with my favorite  penguin-powered sites:

• Ubuntu Forums
• UbuntuGeek
• GetDeb

Since she has a thing for the symbol  ॐ  (wikipedia’s explanation wasn’t very insightful on this matter I can say), I focused my design around it.

Basic parts/tools of the whole design were:

• small plastic project box
• semi-transparent perspex
• the obvious electronic parts blue LEDs/switch/battery holder
• patience
• black glossy paint
• black paper
• etc

Hope she likes it

HAPPY BDAY YIAN!

So far it’s been very tiring and very time consuming, but very entertaining… thus I decided to write a quick post to show my findings.

It feels so great when it’s time to upgrade your PC, and you put away that old piece of hardware in order to install your new toy. But it’s even greater, when 3…5…10+ years later, you come across that old hardware. It brings back memories, as well as questions like “WTF???”.

Since I haven’t posted much in my blog lately, I felt like sharing this little experience

My first interesting finding, was a 3  button Genius mouse. As you can see from the pictures, it advertises an astonishing 200dpi resolution, has a DB-25 RS232 interface, and requires no pad! WOW!

It looks like new, and I found it boxed, maybe I can throw it on ebay?

Most probably it was a late upgrade to my 8086 PC, and my new 286 PC didn’t have a DB-25 type of RS232, so it remained boxed and stored

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My ancient trackball. What was I thinking? But really…what happened to trackballs? I haven’t seen any around for a looong time!

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Then I found this “good” old unreliable mean of storage device, the 5.25″ floppy. A.k.a last millennium’s DVDs

I wonder if it’s still working…but I can’t be really bothered!

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The below device, I remember I found it on a thrown away workstation, years ago. It’s an IDE CD-Changer ROM for PC!?!? It’s 25% longer than a normal CD ROM drive, and you can insert up to 6 CDs simultaneously. By pressing the front buttons, you pick the CD of your choice. It was the first time to see such a device, so I took it. Sadly, it only supports Windows 95.

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While at storage devices, here is a more recent miracle of technology…a 16Mb XD flash card, next to a 3Gb hard drive. Sadly, long time ago I gave away a 4Mb SD card I used to have, and a 100Mb 5.25″ hard drive. Those would look way cooler

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Let’s talk about more recent innovations. The Internet and means to connect to it. This huge modem is as long as a normal ATX case (a bit longer too)! It even has jumpers and volume dialer to satisfy every customer.

It’s somewhat ISA interface, has a Xilinx FPGA chip (wow), and using it, you will be able to attain Internet speeds up to 4800bps… 4.8Kbps… 600 BYTES PER SECOND!

Jee! How did they download movies back then?

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Moving further to more core system components, I was unable to find several 286/386/486 I used to have

All I found was a Pentium CPU…but please note that it is WITH MMX technology! Yeyyyyy!

Also a big bag of EDO and SD RAM, proves that quantity matters

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This card is a Creative DX3 PCI adapter, used to hardware encode/decode MPEG2 streams. It’s not a retro component, but it lies in the redundant category. Also it was pretty rare back then. Ahhh useless stuff we all buy.

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My good old HP SCSI scanner. I was working all Summer long to buy this scanner 15 years ago or so. Its ISA SCSI adapter wasn’t supported by any OS further to Win98, the same with the scanner driver. So despite purchasing a better PCI SCSI controller, it remained useless, until I installed Ubuntu (PENGUIN POWER!!!).

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Oh memories memories! I never thought I would see my Sega Game Gear again. Sonic, Shinobi, Mortal Combat, Super Monaco GP… so much joy!

I just realized that Game Gear requires 6 AA batteries to operate, and as far as I remember they wouldn’t last long. I suspect that’s the reason my parents very rarely took me for holidays abroad. I was wasting all their money on batteries

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My super cool white Sega Saturn. Not that much of ancient history as my Atari would be, but still a pretty rare item. Most people back then would prefer the Playstation (pfff, ignorants ).

In the second picture you can see that ultra rare VCD card, which allowed your console to decode MPEG1 streams, and watch VCDs on it. Games and accessories used to cost a fortune. No ebay back then. If I had saved my money back then, I might had my Lexus by now

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During today’s tiding up session, I came across several more outdated tech items, but unfortunately they saw their way to the bin before I take a picture of them for this post.
But anyway, the lesson of the day, is that we have lot’s of expensive crap, wasting our precious space

It’s been a year already since I purchased my beloved Canon EOS 1000D which despite being an entry level model, it never stopped to amaze me.

As I expected when purchasing back then, it’s hard indeed to carry around with you all the time, thus I kept my good old Fuji F30 compact camera. But it’s so awesome how easily you can take great shots with the 1000D (and any other SLR camera I guess), that I’m trying to have it with me whenever possible. At one point I even found my self carrying it around at the beach,  or even on a roof top while raining, risking getting it wet, but the result was totally worth it!

For the past year, I’ve been on an endless shopping spree of accessories

• Canon 50mm f1.8 lens
• Sigma 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 lens (coming soon) *
• 0.21x Fisheye lens adapter
• UV filters (Kenko & Massa)
• Kenko Pro1 Circular Polarization filter
• Star effect filter
• +1, +2, +4 & +10 Macro filters
• Remote trigger
• Cokin P gradient color filters
• Neoprene camera bag
• Neoprene lens bag
• Cleaning kit
• 1.5m tripod
• Hand grip
• etc etc

The Canon 50mm F1.8 lens is one of the cheapest lenses available. It’s even solely made out of plastic, but I have to admit that its quality is superior compared to the stock 18-55mm lens kit. It’s a cheap step towards quality. I’d definitely recommend it to anybody seeking for quality photos without losing an arm and a leg in the process

As for the reasons behind choosing the Sigma 18-200mm lens, I just wanted an all around lens, with some additional zoom. Definitely I don’t have great quality expectations from this lens, but I consider this lens as a replacement of my 18-55mm lens.

*UPDATE: My 18-200mm Sigma lens eventually arrived right on time for my Xmas vacation. During that week it was extensively tested with impressive results! I expected nothing more quality-wise than my stock 18-55mm Canonlens, but I was so wrong… The photos’ quality (especially landscape ones) is great. This lens is definitely a keeper!

The most entertaining accessory I got until now, is the fisheye lens adapter. With this adapter on my 18-55mm lens, the view is so wide that I can see my lens’s barrel in the view finder/photos, up to ~30mm. But yet it’s so much fun to take weird cartoonish round photos of people

My choice of 0.21x was a bit extreme though, I could have settled for 0.3x or even 0.4x, but anyway.

Sometimes it’s great to take a single photo containing almost the whole 180 degrees view. Then you can get a useful image out of that, by eliminating the fisheye effect using the appropriate software (eg. GIMP).

Now that the newer Canon entry level SLR, EOS 500D is out, I might consider an upgrade. I never had problems in the past selling my older compact digital cameras in order to upgrade. But I think this task is going to be a lot harder for the bigger SLR cameras.

I was always interested into photography, and since purchasing the 1000D it definitely boosted my interest towards this hobby. I’d highly recommended it to any photography enthusiast who believes that he can take amazing shots with his compact digital camera, and thinks that SLR cameras are bulky overpriced devices

*UPDATE*: Don’t you love it when everything go as planned? As I hoped in the original post, my EOS 1000D was sold in the beginning of January 2010, so I purchased the 500D!

So far it looks great, but further details will follow in future posts.