I use a Mitel desk phone which connects to my company’s PBX when working from home. I used to hook it up to my iMac and used internet sharing to make it connect. I tweaked the default network of the internal DHCP server used (to avoid a clash with the 2.0 network at my company) by adding a ‘SharingNetwork’ key to the NAT configuration in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.nat

As of Yosemite this ceased to work and I used an extra wire to my switch to connect the Mitel.

I was certain it should work so I spent some time on google and found the solution http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090510120814850:

Finally an update on my blog for you guys. So let me get you current on developments:

• I am now officially a Bachelor of ICT!

• I’m presenting the conclusion from the thesis at KPN soon

• the code I used for my final assignment is downloadable at https://gitlab.cloudseven.nl:8081/joost/horang

• visited XebiCon 2015 in May and heard lots of interesting stuff on Agile development

• visited the Microsoft Techdays and learned lots about Javascript, React and Cloud developments

• visited Paris to attend React Europe 2015 and learned tons of stuff on React and javascript

As of last week, all coursework is completed and I have received the following date to attend a session where I have to defend my thesis: 13 juli!

Really really almost done!

1. So there was some progress, not as much as I had hoped, but still! - finishing my thesis (or actually, refining it) The final definitive version is under review

• (done)finish last course Service Level Management by writing a Service Level Agreement and answer some questions for the last assignment
• (did 10% )finish the last practical assignment by creating a prototype .NET website in VB with a new technology like a web service that can be used by an app I have sent the code for the prototype along with the project document and install manual. They are all under review

The last couple of days I managed to get ahead!

• finishing my thesis (or actually, refining it)
• (done)finish last course Service Level Management by writing a Service Level Agreement and answer some questions for the last assignment
• (did 10% )finish the last practical assignment by creating a prototype .NET website in VB with a new technology like a web service that can be used by an app

I just received word that my research phase for my thesis has been aproved, so that is very good! Now it is really time for refinement.

Research model

After 5 years the end is really near. Don’t worry, nothing serious 😉 What was I doing? I tried to combine family life with small children, work and a part-time bachelor studies.

So the last hurdles for me to become a Bachelor of ICT:

• finishing my thesis (or actually, refining it)
• finish last course Service Level Management by writing a Service Level Agreement and answer some questions for the last assignment
• finish the last practical assignment by creating a prototype .NET website in VB with a new technology like a web service that can be used by an app

Almost forgot that I have made a contribution to the Question2Answer plugin for LDAP-authentication. I need it to connect to MS Active Directory through LDAP and it did not work out of the box for me. After some tweaking I decided to fork the plugin on Github. They accepted my changes when I created a pull request, so that is cool.

So I’d like to introduce Stackoverflow-like functionality to my company network. It can support us internally, because we run a front-and back office team. But we also talked about integrating solutions like this into our own BI/MDM product: My Cloud Controls.

We can buy us some of the functionality (from the cloud for instance, or outsource it otherwise), but at our place, we’d like to build or run our own servers. So let’s give it a try. I actually already did by investigating this list 2 months ago.

The first candidate we’re testing is Question2Answer. We like it, but it is a bit .. spartan (is that english?).

A couple of years ago I was introduced to stackoverflow.com. That was quite an improvement over my frantic Google searches for IT related questions at the time. I did not like the experts-exchange site which was very popular back then.

Long before that I even used old-school Usenet for asking and answering questions about IT topics. This was before it was primarily known as an alternative to file-sharing. The funny thing is it actually predates peer-to-peer file-sharing of course.

I actually forgot some of the stuff I posted those days. I looked for it on Google groups and it happens to be still around…

As as student, obtaining good hardware was… a priority (not necessarily for gaming though, I just liked to tweak):

• Re: pcchips motherboard identification

And from my early sysadmin days:

• Re: Lost emails via VPN connection!
• Re: Can two Ex servers use one OWA at the same time?

Well, enough of that. Back to Stackoverflow. It was conceived by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008. They wanted to create an open community driven source of knowledge based on the Creative Commons License. Here is how Jeff Atwood described it:

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

I have been using the site from time to time, both passively harvesting information as well as contributing by answering questions.

The site uses a concept called ‘Gamification‘. Users can earn reputation points and lose them as well through voting. It is a measurement of your position in the community.

It became clear to me that the system behind it just works. Years ago (another century) I was HP forums user and it also uses the point system. It gives a warm fuzzy feeling when you belong to something bigger and can help people out.