New Year, New Theme

Having realized that I haven’t looked at WordPress theme development in nearly a year, I decided to search around and ended up switching over to Mystique. The theme offers a wealth of features and even obsoletes some plugins and widgets I was previously using. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it long-term but it’s certainly a very polished product. Fidgetr may need a few upgrades to keep up with the times… Let me know in the comments if you spot anything broken!

I’ve put quite a few custom CSS tweaks in already, some of which I’ve listed below. Others who use the Mystique theme may find these changes helpful.

  1. To hide the websnapr feature add “.webshot{display:none !important;}” to the user CSS section.
  2. Fidgetr’s comment display depends on sidebar overflow so I added “#sidebar {overflow:visible;}” as well. Secondary sidebar overflow would need #sidebar2

Parsing A CRL With OpenSSL

Short and sweet. This command will parse and give you a list of revoked serial numbers:

openssl crl -inform DER -text -noout -in mycrl.crl

Most CRLs are DER encoded, but you can use -inform PEM if your CRL is not binary. If you’re unsure if it is DER or PEM open it with a text editor. If you see —–BEGIN X509 CRL—– then it’s PEM and if you see strange binary-looking garbage characters it’s DER.

OpenSSL and IDN Certificates

As internationalized domain names (IDN) proliferate more people need to test with, and ultimately purchase, IDN certificates. If you need to generate a CSR or even a self-signed certificate for an internationalized domain follow these steps:

  1. Take the UTF-8 characters and paste them into a punycode converter (also known as ASCII compatible encoding, or ACE).
  2. The resulting converted text will be a fairly long string that starts with “xn--”. Copy the entire thing.
  3. Now run this command.

For CSR generation1:

openssl req -new -nodes -out mycsr.csr -keyout mykey.pem -newkey rsa:2048

For self-signed certificate generation2:

openssl req -new -nodes -x509 -days 3650 -out mycert.cer -keyout mykey.pem -newkey rsa:2048

Either way, follow the prompts and when you reach Common Name paste the text you copied from the punycode converter. Now you can submit your CSR to a certification authority or install the self-signed certificate for testing.

  1. We are generating a 2048-bit CSR
  2. This will generate a 10 year self-signed certificate.

Set Up Linksys/Cisco PAP2T-NA With Gizmo5/Google Voice

Gizmo5 (recently acquired by Google) gives you a SIP phone number that you can link to Google Voice. This lets you use the Gizmo5 application to receive phone calls. But what if you want to use a real phone? Enter the ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter). Using a VoIP ATA you can hook in a normal telephone and receive calls from your Google Voice number like a landline!

For this tutorial I’m going to give the configuration requirements for a Linksys/Cisco PAP2T. Unfortunately, ATAs have a myriad of settings so it’s difficult to say exactly what you need to configure if you’re not using this model, but hypothetically speaking the settings should be similar.

With that caution out of the way let’s get started…

Prerequisites

To do this you will need an ATA (preferably a Linksys PAP2T-NA), a Gizmo5 account, and a Google Voice account. If you don’t have a Gizmo5 account you’re out of luck for now, because new signups are closed. If you meet these requirements then you’ll need to look up your Gizmo5 SIP number (starts with 1747). This can be found in your account overview at my.gizmo5.com. Write it down or copy it to a text file because we’ll use it in a few different places.

Configuring your Linksys PAP2T-NA ATA

Connect your PAP2T-NA to your network. It will obtain a DHCP lease, but you need to know the IP so you can look at the web interface. To find this, you can typically go look at the “device list” on your local router (which is frequently found at http://192.168.1.1). The ATA should show up named “LinksysPAP”. Once you’ve found the IP, type it in your browser and you will see this screen.
pap2t

Now you’ll need to click admin login, then click advanced view, then click line 1. This will bring you to this screen:
pap2t-advanced

Now scroll down and find the following options. Make sure they’re set as follows (don’t touch any other settings)1.

Sip Port: any port from 5060-5099
Proxy: proxy01.sipphone.com
Use Outbound Proxy: no
Outbound Proxy: leave blank
Use OB Proxy in Dialog: no
Register: yes
Make Call Without Reg: no
Register Expires: 60
Ans Call Without Reg: no
Use DNS SRV: no
DNS SRV Auto Prefix: no
Proxy Fallback Intvl: 3600
Proxy Redundancy Method: normal
Display Name: Your Name
User ID: 1747####### (Gizmo5 ID)
Password: yourgizmo5password
Use Auth ID: yes
Auth ID: 1747#######
Preferred Codec: G711U
Use Pref Codec Only: no
DTMF TX: Auto
Dial Plan: ([2-9]xx[2-9]xxxxxx|011xx.|1[2-9]xx[2-9]xxxxxx)2

Now click regional and change the ring waveform to “sinusoid” and the ring voltage to 90.

Finally, you’ll need to set up STUN support under the SIP tab. At the bottom of the page set the following settings:

STUN Enable: yes
STUN Server: stun01.sipphone.com
EXT RTP Port Min: 3478

Click save settings and let’s move on to configuring Google Voice.

Configuring Google Voice and Gizmo5

Head to the Google Voice website, click settings, then click “add another phone”. Select Gizmo, put in your 1747 number from earlier, and follow the directions. When it calls you to verify the number the landline you’ve connected to your PAP2T-NA should now ring. Once you’ve verified the phone you are done. To test you can call your Google Voice line yourself, or use the Google Voice website to call someone else! Enjoy your free phone.

  1. Hat tip to this thread for the requisite settings.
  2. The dial plan is only required if you wish to enable direct dialing of outbound calls (which costs money).

One Year Blogiversary

Around a year ago I finally decided to start a blog. Since then I’ve changed the domain, name, written over 60 posts about various things, and released two WordPress plugins. I had no defined goals when I started…and I still don’t! So in the spirit of my random posting, here are some stats about traffic growth and download numbers for my plugins. Let the navel gazing commence.

Random Traffic Statistics

The site has grown from an average of under 100 visits a week to well over 1500 now. Much of that growth has been driven by the release of Fidgetr and CDN Tools, my WordPress plugins (more on them later). However, the single most popular post I’ve written so far was the fix for GrowlMail in 10.6.2. Google indexed it quickly and it became the #1 search result for people attempting to fix their Mail plugin incompatibilities. Other popular articles include items about VMware and OpenSSL UCC/SAN certificates.

Plugin Statistics

Fidgetr has seen almost 9000 downloads since its initial release at the end of January. In that time it has dramatically improved, but I still welcome feature suggestions and patches (and new themes!). Would Picasa support be a useful addition?

CDN Tools has had over 2000 downloads since the end of February. Due to how deeply it hooks into WP I had to make significant changes for WP 2.8 as well as utilize several new hooks for WP 2.9 support. There is still quite a ways to go before I’m happy with this plugin, but I’m pleased that so many people are using it on their blogs.

With these two plugins I am currently the 605th ranked WP plugin dev (by downloads) according to w-shadow. Top 500 here I come!

WordPress 2.9 Upgrade

WP 2.9 is out. The upgrade went quite smoothly here, but be sure you upgrade your plugins before running the core upgrade! Fidgetr and CDN Tools are both 2.9 compatible already, so if you have the latest versions you’re set.