The latest in solutions to your information management problems and needs https://www.pbnj-solutions.com Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:04:59 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 https://www.pbnj-solutions.com/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png https://www.pbnj-solutions.com The latest in solutions to your information management problems and needs https://www.pbnj-solutions.com/career-opportunities/developer/foss-developer-opening.html In spite of the economic downturn, or perhaps because of it, PBnJ Solutions is growing and so are the number of opportunities to come work with us. You won't find .NET work here though - we are (almost exclusively) FOSS tools based although that does not mean that our coding results are necessarily covered by GPL variants. Instead we use these FOSS tools and platforms to provide our clients with unique and cost-effective solutions to achieve their goals. Perhaps a few examples will give you a flavor of the kind of work we do... One example would be the PERL (http://www.perl.org) programs that were developed for a large subsidiary of CitiBank which helped them route their massive email flow (100,000+ AFTER the SPAM filter) through a pair of machines which effectively duplicated each message and sent the clone on to a Microsoft Exchange Mailbox set up for archiving purposes. Then there is the PHP-based component for Joomla! (http://www.joomla.org), a Content Management System (CMS), which helps a medical office manage its barrage of PDF submissions to credentialing organizations. Or perhaps the Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org) implementation of a psychological profile questionnaire management system. This is not to mention the myriad of smaller tools we develop for our clients in the process of building Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org)-based phone systems controlled by sophisticated PHP logic or outright command line utilities to manage commercial software packages such as Symantec NetBackup. Read on to learn how you can contact us to work with PBnJ Solutions to work with the tools you love and earn a living too! Career Opportunities - Developer Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:32:12 +0100 https://www.pbnj-solutions.com/infrastructure-design/performance/vmware-virtual-nic-choice-and-syspreping-templates.html Under ESX 3.5 an enhanced NIC choice called vmxnet became available but only to 64-bit VMs. The idea behind this new virtual device is that by publishing itself as TCP/IP offload capable, the Windows OS will not bother to encapsulate data into a TCP/IP packet before handing it to the ethernet driver, instead leaving that task to the (virtual) hardware. As a result, the vmxnet device no longer has to parse and strip the TCP/IP packet information so it can hand the payload off to the *real* physical NIC and everybody wins. This improvement was big enough that numerous VMs have been changed to 64-bit even if the guest Windows OS was still 32-bit; all just to gain access to that more efficient NIC. But guess what? No good deed goes unpunished and indeed neither does this one. When one of my customers came to me a few weeks ago with a scenario that prevented her from SYSPREPing a VM she tried to create from a template even after installing every SYSPREP CAB's contents into all possible folders, we, as well as VMware support, were stumped. Finally we discovered that the reason the option to customize the template deployment was grayed out was because of the mismatch between a 64-bit VM and a 32-bit guest OS! All we had to do was convert the template to a 32-bit VM and everything worked as advertised. My biggest gripe here is that the VMware GUI gave absolutely no feedback to this effect. None. Zero, Zip, Zilch. Ah well, live and learn. Infrastructure Design - Performance Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:20:17 +0100 https://www.pbnj-solutions.com/communications/security-and-privacy/iax2-a-bit-more-official.html After many years of hard work the Inter Asterisk eXchange protocol version 2 (IAX2) has been published under the auspices of the IETF as RFC 5456 (http://www.rfc-editor.org/authors/rfc5456.txt). Note that the editor uses the second sentence to clearly define this document: "It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind." Then again, it took the SIP RFC (http://www.rfc-editor.org/authors/rfc3261.txt) a long time to get to the standards track as well. Communications - Security and Privacy Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:46:20 +0100 https://www.pbnj-solutions.com/information-security/compliance/the-six-dumbest-ideas-in-computer-security-and-how-apple-computer-side-stepped-at-least-one-of-them.html Some of you may have heard of Marcus Ranum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_J._Ranum), a top flight security guy currently working at Tenable Security, developers/underwriters of Nessus amongst other tools. Recently someone forwarded me a link to a web-page Marcus wrote a few years ago called The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security (http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/index.html). I invite you to take a moment and read it now before proceeding on to my comments on how his observations apply to Apple Computer's iPhone platform. Information Security - Compliance Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:41:10 +0100 https://www.pbnj-solutions.com/is-availability/monitoring/barracuda-monitoring.html Barracuda Neworks (http://www.barracudanetworks.com) makes a fine line of inbound (and outbound?!) SPAM filters deployed in-line with your email server and the outside world. These devices provide a web interface both for management and configuration as well as for end-users to trawl through suspect quarantined e-mail searching for treasure. You can see how the device is performing under its current load right from the front page of this built-in website and then it can also send scheduled e-mail messages with various statistical reports. Unfortunately, what it does not do, is alert you of odd behavior in any meaningful pro-active way. After all, who has time to read through all those daily statistics reports from all their devices?! The obvious answer to this problem then is to monitor the device through our facorite Open Source monitoring platform, Zenoss (http://www.zenoss.org) but that is where we run into a glitch. It turns out that Barracudas cannot be probed with SNMP, the standard way such devices are probed until you get to the 400-series and even then, the exposed MIB is not an enterprise specific one with Barracuda goodies but just the generic OS one, courtesy of the underlying Linux engine. Ah, you say, but doesn't Barracuda make a REST-based API (http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/downloads/BarracudaAPI-v3x.pdf) available? Well yes, they do, but now we're writing a command based datasource and even then, this feature is not available until the 400-series and up. Read on to learn how PBnJ Solutions built a Zenoss ZenPack to monitor Barracudas (http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/barracuda) from the 200-series on up, now allowing everyone to not only get an alarm when the inbound queue is overflowing but also collect some great SPAM statistics over time. IS Availability - Monitoring Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:02:06 +0100