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Logitech BCC950 Conference Cam – Bad Speakers, Blown Speakers, Defective Speakers

Since the internet has become overrun by a gaggle of free speech hating corporations, I thought I would take a brief moment to display my discontent for what I feel are some sort of manufacturing defects of the Logitech BCC950 conference cam.

Don’t get me wrong, for the price, this thing kicks major ass in comparison to many of the alternatives out there. The video is amazing quality for 1080@30fps with PTZ and honestly I do love the camera for all it’s strong points.

Butt, and I say that with an improperly formed sentence and a huge ASS in mind, I just wanted to make the general public aware to the fact that in the last two years, the company I work for has purchased thirty-one of these units and four out of those have had prematurely failing speakers that just start crackling out of nowhere. Continue reading “Logitech BCC950 Conference Cam – Bad Speakers, Blown Speakers, Defective Speakers”

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OpenMCU-ru – DSCP Based QoS Packet Tagging Rules for Linux IP Tables

In Ubuntu, the best way to ensure that the firewall is up and running and that your packet filtering or mangling rules are in place any time the network connection comes up, you should create a rule in the /etc/network/if-up.d folder. An alternative approach to that would be to put a “post-up” rule on whatever interface in you /etc/network/interfaces file. From my experience, so that your firewall rules can be easily maintained as well having the ability to make comments for each rule, it’s ideal to take advantage of the iptables-save and iptables-restore functionality.

In order to follow this procedure, the first time you set up the firewall, you will have to manually add all the firewall rules and then issue the iptables-save command. For sake of saving time, I will just provide you with the contents of my config file that can be restored with the iptables-restore < config_file command. Continue reading “OpenMCU-ru – DSCP Based QoS Packet Tagging Rules for Linux IP Tables”

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Bash Script – OpenMCU-ru Service Monitor -OR- Monitor and Automatically Restart a Service Upon Failure

I threw this service monitoring script together because occasionally the OpenMCU-ru process in the developmental versions can crash out on my Ubuntu Server from time to time, so I wanted it to auto-restart. The script could easily be modified and used for any other service you like, but it was written specifically for OpenMCU-ru and Debian based operating systems.

There are two pieces to this puzzle (which makes for an awfully pathetic and simplistic puzzle), the “/etc/init.d/mcu-monitor” startup script to run the monitoring script as a daemon and the “/usr/local/bin/mcu-monitor.sh” monitoring script itself, both are fairly simple and straight forward. Continue reading “Bash Script – OpenMCU-ru Service Monitor -OR- Monitor and Automatically Restart a Service Upon Failure”

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Polycom RealPresence Desktop – Windows QoS Registry Settings

Last week, I had to call Polycom support for two issues. One of which I mentioned in another post (Automatic Gain Control issue) and the other was because I wanted to find out why their user manual showed some QoS settings that my version did not have access to.

After waiting on hold for ten minutes, the first tech support person I reached was a little cocky, arrogant, smart ass of a prick who was less than helpful with either of my support requests. At one point, he literally told me “we can’t control Windows” (which brings up the question, “Well why in the fuck did Polycom even make software in the first place then?”) in regards to my AGC issue even after I told him that I had disabled all of the Windows settings that take control of the audio interface. He also said that you can set up QoS in Windows “somewhere in the network settings” (which turned out to be completely erroneous) without giving an ounce of help or direction.

Towards the end of our call, he was just trying to get me off the phone basically with an answer of “you’re fucked” to all my questions. At that point, I got pissed off and demanded to speak to somebody else. Finally, I got put on the phone with one of their product engineers and they actually addressed my issues. Long story short, the engineer ended up having to do a remote support session and did indeed acknowledge my AGC issue and gave me an explanation of why I couldn’t see the QoS settings mentioned in the manual. It turns out, those settings only show up if you use their provisioning server and they don’t even set the QoS settings in Windows like I needed.
Continue reading “Polycom RealPresence Desktop – Windows QoS Registry Settings”

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Polycom RealPresence Desktop – Do Not Minimize to Taskbar Tray

While poking through the registry trying to find a way disable Automatic Gain Control (AGC) for Polycom RealPresence Desktop (version 3.3.0.50871) video conferencing software, I stumbled upon a different registry key that addresses another annoying problem and that is to keep RPD from minimizing itself to the taskbar. Low and behold, it doesn’t appear that there is a setting associated with this registry key inside the program to disable this functionality either.

As a side note, I did have to open a support request with Polycom over the AGC issue as it automatically takes over the audio recording interface even after disabling all of Windows control over the settings and it negatively impacts conference quality. Because the software automatically dials down the input level of the recording interface, the user then has to yell just to be heard, which only further possibly causes the input level to go down even more, without ever adjusting the audio level back up. Currently, there is no way to turn this off, so it will probably end up as a feature request for the next software release.
Continue reading “Polycom RealPresence Desktop – Do Not Minimize to Taskbar Tray”

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Startup Script for OpenMeetings Open-Source Video Conferencing Server

/etc/init.d/openmeetings startup script for Ubuntu Server 12.04.2
OpenMeetings Version 2.0-INCUBATING

A few notes:
– Make sure to change path for RED5_HOME variable
– Make sure to chmod +x the init script
– This assumes openmeetings is running under a user/group with the same name
– This assumes you are using libreoffice (not openoffice) for the whiteboard file import service

#!/bin/bash
#
# Author: Nathan Thomas
#
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          red5
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named $time
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named $time
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# X-Interactive:     true
# Short-Description: Start/stop OpenMeetings java based conferencing webapp
### END INIT INFO
PROG=red5
DESC="Red5 flash streaming server"
RED5_HOME=/usr/local/openmeetings
DAEMON=$RED5_HOME/$PROG.sh
PIDFILE=/var/run/$PROG.pid
# Plugin Variables
#OO_HOME=/usr/lib/openoffice/program
OO_HOME=/usr/lib/libreoffice/program
 Continue reading "Startup Script for OpenMeetings Open-Source Video Conferencing Server"