After spending countless hours tracing network cables around my workplace to figure out what switch port they go into, I finaly gave in and looked for a little LLDP tool, I was wanting something small and simple much like lldpd mentioned in my previous post.
I have found a neat little tool called LDWin that collects LLDP and CDP information; its small and simple and only requires admin access to listen on the interface. Great if you’ve got LLDP setup on your network switches and can save precious time tracing messy patch cabling.
If you’ve ever tried to locate a server’s uplink port on a switch then you’ve probably wondered why there isnt CDP/LLDP being utilised within the server networking world, well there are a few implementations but the easiest I’ve used is lldpd. This means you can now easily locate linux systems from your switches or figureout what switch port you’re in from linux all utilising lldp.
Just run the following command once installed and you get a lovely simple output.
After fidling around for a while trying to make FSRM work to connect to a 2012 R2 Core server as it kept complaining that the RPC server was unavailable even though other MMC snap-ins were working correctly; I finally found out it was the firewall blocking the ports.
Use this command if you cant make it work:
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group=”Remote File Server Resource Manager Management” new enable=yes
So it’s been a while since I last blogged about anything and today I’ve had a hell of a time with PulseAudio and Bluetooth and trying to find an actual solution to my woes (Jump to the guide).
I recently bought an Intel 7260AC Wireless and Bluetooth PCIe card for my laptop and also decided to try Linux as my main OS again. Now I prefer Debian as a distro but have found it to be a little stale in some aspects mainly surrounding it’s stable repos. I have in the past tried Ubuntu but it’s such a hassle removing the default crap like the horrid Unity Amazon integration and I dislike unity so that’s totally out of the question. I have however decided to try Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) as it’s 100% Debian testing compatible which is nice and actually cinnamon is a nice DM/GUI which has finally matured sufficiently.
Everything installed perfectly fine via the DVD and I was greeted with a very nice login manager (although I can see the screen refresh which I can’t be bothered to fix as its only a minor annoyance) and then a very simple and nice Cinnamon desktop manager. Cinnamon is a fork of GTK3+3 / GNOME developed for Mint with the classic gnome look and feel. The default layout is a single pane on the bottom of the screen and a menu bar, a few launcher icons, the task bar, notifications and a clock.
Everything surprisingly worked out of the box, including the WiFi, graphics and Bluetooth which are all things I’ve had issues with in the past.
The Problem…
But here comes my problem, I went to use one of my bluetooth speakers from my laptop to have a play around. I could pair the devices perfectly fine but then the laptop refused to use the bluetooth speakers as an output.
Now audio in linux isn’t an entirely simple affair and tracking down at what stage the fault was at was hard but I was fairly certain it was between PulseAudio and the bluetooth (Bluez), there is a packaged lib for pulseaudio and bluetooth called ‘pulseaudio-module-bluetooth’ which is reported to fix issues but it was already installed which meant the issue wasn’t with pulseaudio directly but something was meaning the modules were not being loaded correctly after the bluetooth was paired which wasn’t enabling the A2DP Sink, I tried manually loading the modules with no success.
I then stumbled across some posts about that discussed editing the way the bluetooth stack connects this involved editing a couple of core config files for bluetooth. I tried a couple of different configurations, some of which caused bluetooth to stop pairing all together but I finally found a working config.
The Solution…
So if you’re struggling to get a bluetooth speaker or headset to work after pairing it then try the following:
su
nano /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf
add the following underneath [General]
Disable=Socket
Enable=Media,Source,Sink,Gateway
Save & exit
service bluetooth restart
This allowed me to re-pair my device and have it show up correctly in PulseAudio.
So a couple of weeks back, I started my new job and one of the first issues that I was tasked with was to fix some printing issues.
The main issue was when somebody printed, was, it was missing out letters from the actual print out but only for certain documents and only ‘random’ computers.
After investigation, it was found that it was Windows XP based computers and the main letters that were missing was t and i if they were together ‘ti’ so for instance ‘Function’ printed as ‘Func on’ other issues arose when specific characters were used such as \ and / etc.
We found a post on spiceworks that detailed the same problem and a post only containing single link to a Microsoft KB (KB2642020) article was actually the issue specifically with Windows Server 2008 Print Servers.
I popped the simple registry fix in via group policy and push to to Windows XP machines only via WMI filters.
