I think this is just the best day ever.
So. Join me today for a pint to mark System administrator day

An extract from the Sys admin Day site reads:

A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.

When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work -- to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin -- and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I love my job. I love when something breaks because I get the satisfaction of fixing it again.

Still though, could things only break between normal social hours like between 9AM and 11PM? That would be fantastic.
I got a text this morning at 4AM to tell me that one of the archival servers were down. Great. That's exactly what I want to hear at 4AM in the morning.

I haven't caught up with you in ages!
How are things?
How's life treating you?
Are you having a good summer?
Any holidays planned?

There are a few of you who read this and lerk in the background. Don't worry. I can see you all. Yes. Even you down the south of the country coming over every week or so to have a read through loads of old posts. The walls have ears don't you know.
Even though you sneek around in the shaddows I hope your doing well too.

I got a few new readers last week from around the north of the country. A few from England too. Great to see you!

I'm in a great mood. I got in early this morning and got everything done over half an hour before work was even due to oficially start. I'm also enjoying a little bit of a cafeen buz so my fingers are skimming over the keyboard. Hay, my iPhone has just played the same track twice. Why is that? That's irritating. Let me go fix that.

Right. Done...

What else is happening. Oh, in a few weeks, Emma and I are heading off on holiday for two weeks off to a hotter country. Well, it wouldn't be hard to find somewhere hotter than Ireland. What's the story with our attempt at a summer? I want good weather! for at least a month. Is that really too much to ask? People say we're lucky this year that July wasn't a complete wash out. Are we though? Where was the sun. Overcast skys do not make for a summers day.

I'll write more about the holiday closer to the time. I wouldn't want to tease you. hahaha. Who am I kidding. I'll love teasing you. :)

A lot has happened since my last major update. So, here's a brief breakdown.

• I'm still in the job I was promoted to a few months ago. Ok. There's been a bit of a change in that role lately but I'll not go into that much. At the start, I experienced a lot of accessibility related issues. There was a lot of push back from other members of the team as they didn't believe I could do the job. They were convinced that the job was too visual. This is nothing new though. For people who can see, they can never see an allternative to using their eyes even if that alternative may even be more efficient. I'll write about that little point at another stage. There are certain things that are still not very accessible however I'm making up for that by taking a lot of other work that is a little more suited. It means that in the long run, I'm taking more than I should but it all balances it's self out. It's a constant that any person who is blind will most likely relate to. No matter what your doing, or how good you are at it, there are always times when you'll need to proov your self more than others who you work with to those who cant see far enough past the end of their nose to see that your doing the job to the same level as anyone else. Now that I've jumped through that extra hoop, things have settled down and accessibility is no longer such an issue.
• I purchased a new server just over a month ago. It's a 2900. There's around 4TB of usable disk space in it, 16GB of ram, 2 quad core processors at 2.1GHZ. It's a huge beast. In fact, I'm going to have to look at storing it somewhere else as where it currently lives is not suitable. This server generates more noise than any other I've used in the past and it can be heard almost anywhere in the house. Plans are a foot that will solve this within the next month or two. The server is currently hosting virtual machines. These are hosting My domain controler, exchange mail server, linux web server, and a lot more. There are around 8 virtual machines in total on it and there is space for more to fit easily. Over the past few months I've been porting everything over to it. It's been a very slow and difficult process but I'm very near the end now. In the past six months I've updated our home network substantially. As some of you will know, when we baught the house, I wired every room with a number of network points with Cat5E cable. Origionally, this was all connected together with an access point going to a 100MB switch. Wireless functionality was provided by the ADSL router. Now, the patch panel connects to a 48 port 1GB managed switch with POE. the broadband connection is provided by Irish broadband and I couldn't praze them highly enough. Their really fantastic. the broadband is connected directly to the server removing the need for an external router. The server contains a customized Linux installation running on Debian that only contains the required services for routing and the firewal. The wireless is now provided by a dedicated 802.1N access point. Thanks to Blueface the house now has VOIP instead of an actual phone line. This is considerably cheaper and allows international calling without needing to even consider the implications in terms of the cost. Internally, the server hosts a trixbox virtual machine. This routs calls internally to either my self or Emma depending on who the caller wants to speak to. Messages left on the answering service are even Emailed to one of us so we can respond even when we're out of the house. Thanks to the softphone software we have installed on our PC's this integrates nicely with the contacts saved on exchange. We also have a cisco VOIP phone in the living room. I've also removed the old server running Windows 2003 and created a virtual domain controler running Windows 2008. That's only scratching the surface. I've also implemented a VLAN just for servers that has IEEE-802.1X authentication installed. I've a management VLAN that has access to remotely manage and monitor the servers internally and then I've an unsecured VLAN that allows Internet access. It's all a little bit over the top for a home set up but it's been a great learning experience.
• In terms of music, I've not done a hell of a lot. I've had a at least one gig a week and I've been learning some new stuff that's not necessarily traditional. My weekly radio show Mad For Trad is still going strong on a Tuesday from 7to 9PM in Ireland.

That's all for the moment. There was a lot of technical rubbish in there too. Sorry about that. I wanted to write about that at some stage but I didn't really mean to include it in this post.

QNotifier seems to be a cool application that can report changes that may impact the performance of your Linux server right to your iPhone. If for example, the apache daemon goes down, QNotifier can be configured to notify you of this.

Installing QNotifier is a little tricky as the installation instructions are very brief.

the following commands will get QNotifier running on your Debian system. I assume this will most likely also run on Ubuntu.

Install Ruby.

apt-get update
apt-get install ruby ruby1.8-dev libzlib-ruby rdoc irb libopenssl-ruby rubygens

Install the update to Rubygens.

gem install rubygems-update
cd /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin
./update_rubygems

Update ruby dependencies for Qnotifier.

gem install hoe rexical racc rubyforge nokogiri archive-tar-minitar sup rails --include-dependencies

Install the QNotifier package.

gem install qnotifier

Run the package to set it up. Get the registration key from the iPhone.

/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/qnotifier

There are configuration files that can be tweeked to make the package report different information and these config packages are refereced in the short installation guide available from the QNotifier package after you install it to your iPhone.

This year Listen and learn Recordings brings you indepth coverage of Visit the Sight village 2010 page on Listen and Learn Recordings via this link.

Continuing to grow and evolve, Listen and Learn recordings now has a channel on Youtube. This allows the posting of video introductions and tutorials in a format that anyone can access. This link opens a new window in your browser.

The first video on Youtube is from sight village and introduces the Iveo hands on learning system that uses touch and sound to deliver material. It is found that using multable senses makes learning faster. This is a perfect example of this in use.

Use this link to watch the demonstration of the iVeo hands on learning system on YOutube.

The video is here for ease of access:

From what I gather, authenticating with an AD domain is actually not that difficult. You just need to use one reasonably straight forward command in the CLI.

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-auth --enablead --addomain mydomain.local --addc vserver.mydomain.local --krb5realm=mydomain.local --krb5kdc servername.mydomain.local --krb5adminserver vserver.mydomain.local --enablekrb5

Then just create the user and it will be authenticated against Active directory when you log in with that account.

Leave the root account intact in case you ever need to log in without your domain for some reason.

Oh. that reminds me. If you use system center but you have this machine virtualised, you will have problems if you have ESX clustered. However and your main ESX server goes down. However, if you have it set to run a number of VM's automatically when the server starts up, you can mitigate against this being a major problem in your DR plan.

I've done a few websites over the past few years. Some are coded from scratch but more recently, I've focused on drupal and even wordpress as they've catered for peoples needs.

Here are a few of the sites you can have a look at:

• Emm'as site. Actually, don't go here. she hasn't done anything with it. it's a work in progress and has been for three years now.
• Nicky Kealy. He really needs to blog more. but his website is a nice clean wordpress blog and information source.
• The Visually Impaired Computer Society of Ireland. That site took ages to create.
• Mushroom FM. The station that currently hosts Mad For Trad.
• The legend online radio station.

I've also done work such as adding the podcast feature to the website for Stuart Lawler and I've written a CMS to make it easier for the folks over at National Vibration Monitoring.

That's not an exaustive list, but it's a few to get started.

The words used were: and I quote, "Don't come unless your bringing your pipes.". So... I did.

You were expecting a big story about the weekend weren't you? Ha! tuff!

Greetings,

While installing Exchange 2010 on a Windows 2008 R2 X64 server over a remote desktop session, Jaws freezes after the first screen of the Wizzard.

No speech is heard.
The keyboard becomes unresponsive as it is like the alt key is continually pressed. this seems to relate to a previous bug that I reported in that regard.

I enlisted the assistance of someone wh can see to close Jaws however the alt key acted like it was still stuck until the jfw.exe process was stopped via the task manager.

All other applications behave correctly via mouse control when Jaws causes this issue.

Note, the wizzard for the installation of Exchange 2010 is not unlike the wizzard used for 2007. this issue can not be reproduced during the earlier version of Exchange.

The client is running Windows 7 X64.

All windows patches are applied.

The version of Jaws in use on both machines is the most recent available from the Freedomscientific web site.

I look forward to your response in relation to this.

Darragh Ó Héiligh

This is not edited but the commands have been checked for validity and correctness. Obviously, I cant say for definit it will work on your system. It is meant more as a guide line than an instructional step by step process.

Prepare the package manager and update it's list of available packages and updates:

apt-get update

If like me, you used the cd with the web installer type facility where only a small CD image is used and the installation pulls the remaining files from the

Debian servers, you probably don't need this step. But, if your using a full CD image that's over 600 megs or a DVD then this is definitly a crucial step.

apt-get upgrade

This isn't a complete list of applications you will need. In fact, some, in the case of nano for example won't be required by you at all. Nano is strangely

my editor of choice when working in the CLI in Linux.

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev phpmyadmin lynx nano icecast2 squirrelmail ssh binutils cpp fetchmail flex gcc libarchive-

zip-perl libc6-dev libcompress-zlib-perl libpcre3 libpopt-dev m4 make ncftp nmap openssl postfix libsasl2-2 sasl2-bin libsasl2-modules libdb4.2-dev procmail

db4.6-util libsasl2-modules postfix sasl2-bin courier-authdaemon courier-base courier-imap courier-imap-ssl courier-pop courier-pop-ssl courier-ssl gamin

libgamin0 libglib2.0-0 php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-ming php5-mysql php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc

php5-xsl libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap proftpd ucf webalizer ntp ntpdate

libhtml-parser-perl libdb-file-lock-perl libnet-dns-perl fail2ban build-essential libtool flex

If you are planning on accessing your server remotely through SSH. you will need to start the service:

/etc/init.d/ssh start

Now, if your like me, and you are using this machine as a server, you will want to set a static IP. Interestingly, the information provided to

/etc/resolv.conf remains even when not using DHCP but obviously, if you didn't have DHCP to begin with, this is something you would need to edit also. Note

too that you supplied the hostname and the domain search suffix during installation so you don't really need to edit /etc/hosts

nano /etc/network/interfaces

remove the last line for the eth0 interface. This usually refers to dynamic addressing. Paste the following lines replacing the addresses with the scheme you

use.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.101
gateway 192.168.1.100
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.21.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255

Above, we installed postfix. Now lets configure it. Follow the wizzard that appears:

dpkg-reconfigure postfix

postconf -e 'smtpd_sasl_local_domain ='
postconf -e 'smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes'
postconf -e 'smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous'
postconf -e 'broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes'
postconf -e 'smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated,permit_mynetworks,reject_unauth_destination'
postconf -e 'inet_interfaces = all'

Now, create the certificates for TLS.

mkdir /etc/postfix/ssl
cd /etc/postfix/ssl/
openssl genrsa -des3 -rand /etc/hosts -out smtpd.key 1024
chmod 600 smtpd.key
openssl req -new -key smtpd.key -out smtpd.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in smtpd.csr -signkey smtpd.key -out smtpd.crt
openssl rsa -in smtpd.key -out smtpd.key.unencrypted
mv -f smtpd.key.unencrypted smtpd.key
openssl req -new -x509 -extensions v3_ca -keyout cakey.pem -out cacert.pem -days 3650

postconf -e 'smtp_use_tls = yes'
postconf -e 'smtpd_use_tls = yes'
postconf -e 'smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes'
postconf -e 'smtpd_tls_key_file = /etc/postfix/ssl/smtpd.key'
postconf -e 'smtpd_tls_cert_file = /etc/postfix/ssl/smtpd.crt'
postconf -e 'smtpd_tls_CAfile = /etc/postfix/ssl/cacert.pem'
postconf -e 'smtpd_tls_loglevel = 1'
postconf -e 'smtpd_tls_received_header = yes'
postconf -e 'smtpd_tls_session_cache_timeout = 3600s'
postconf -e 'tls_random_source = dev:/dev/urandom'
postconf -e 'myhostname = server1.example.com'
,/blockquote>
Restart postfix

/etc/init.d/postfix restart

mkdir -p /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd

Activate or enable SASL Auth by doing the following:

nano /etc/default/saslauthd

In this file, change start to yes and replace the line beginning with options with the following. For me, the options line was at the end of the file.

OPTIONS="-c -m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd -r"

Now start the service.

/etc/init.d/saslauthd start

Now edit /etc/apache2/mods-available/dir.conf

nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/dir.conf

Replace the directory index line with the following:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.shtml index.cgi index.php index.php3 index.pl index.xhtml

Edit /etc/apache2/ports.conf and add Listen 443:

nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf

add Listen 443 right below the line for Listen 80.
Now, enabled the required Apache2 modules:

a2enmod ssl
a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod suexec
a2enmod include

Reload the Apache2 configuration:

/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
Disable PHP globally:

nano /etc/mime.types

Comment out the following lines by placing the # sign at the start.

#application/x-httpd-php phtml pht php
#application/x-httpd-php-source phps
#application/x-httpd-php3 php3
#application/x-httpd-php3-preprocessed php3p
#application/x-httpd-php4 php4

there's more editing to do.

/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf

nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf

Comment out the two lines as shown below:

# AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .php3
# AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Now restart Apache.

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Turn off IPV6 in proftp or you'll get errors:

nano /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf

UseIPv6 off

ISP expects the config to be somewhere else for proftp so run the following command to create a link to it:

ln -s /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf /etc/proftpd.conf

Now start the FTP server:

/etc/init.d/proftpd restart

Run the following commands if you will have the need to run services in a chroot environment.

cd /tmp
wget http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/jailkit-2.5.tar.gz
tar xvfz jailkit-2.5.tar.gz
cd jailkit-2.5
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
rm -rf jailkit-2.5*

Not sure if I've covered these already. These packages handle antivirus and antispam.

apt-get install amavisd-new spamassassin clamav clamav-daemon zoo unzip bzip2 arj nomarch lzop cabextract apt-listchanges libnet-ldap-perl libauthen-sasl-

perl clamav-docs daemon libio-string-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl libnet-ident-perl zip libnet-dns-perl

Now for the final part of the installation, download and install ISPConfig:

cd /tmp
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/ispconfig/files/ISPConfig%203/ISPConfig-...
cd ispconfig3_install/install/
php -q install.php

Answer the questions provided.

Note, if you have problems with port 443 and 8080, remove the listen line that I wrote about earlier in the ports file for apache2.

When using Routing and Remote Access Services in Windows 2003 or 2008, it is not possible to specify a range of ports to open in the GUI. Therefore, you will need to use NetSH through the console instead.

This however is actually easier than you might think. Obviously, specify your own network interface and internal IP while doing this.

FOR /L %I IN (10001,1,20000) DO netsh routing ip nat add portmapping "Local Area Connection 2" udp 0.0.0.0 %I 192.168.2.248 %I

I hope that makes sense.

Shout if you have any questions.

Of course, there's always something that you overlook isn't there? in Active directory users and computers, right click the domain and hit raise domain functional level. Now go into Active directory forests and trusts. Right click the branch above the domain and click raise forest functional level. That's all there is to it. Of course, you'll need to confirm the version but it's simple enough.

I know I know I know I know. I would have determined this if I had bothered to do some reading before diving head long into it. but look, I just couldn't have been bothered at the time. I was consintrating on other things. And, yes. I know. that's not the way I should do things but give me a break! So. to get Exchange sP2, you need to download it separately from the Microsoft website. I'm not going to give the link. Google it. When you download it, the extract process will run and dump a folder in the same path as the executable file that you've just downloaded by default. From here, go to setup then update.exe.

When migrating from Windows SBS 2003 to Windows SBS 2008, you may find the same problem I encountered this morning if your using (Routing and Remotte access Services (RRAS) on your old Windows SBS 2003 server.

It will complain that your destination server IP cannot be the same as your Gateway server address during the installation of Windows SBS 20008.

to fix this:

1. Go to start then run and type
   control netconnections
   and press enter or click ok.
2. Right-click on the local area network connection you use for the internal LAN.
3. Click properties.
4. Click Internet Protocol TCPIP then click properties.
5. Click advanced.
6. Under IP addresses, click add.
7. Type your new IP and subnet

This isn't enough.
You could in theory specify to the installation of SBS 2008 that it should now use the updated server IP that you've just added so that you don't have to go changing your RRAS config but unfortunately the wizzard will complain that your domain cannot be contacted.

So, you'll need to update RRAS to use the new IP and then specify this IP as the gateway in the setup wizzard.

It's fun isn't it?

When they say that you need to make sure that all updates are applied on Windows SBS 2003 in the SBS migration guide available from Microsoft before running the migration preparation wizzard, their really not kidding! I had only required security updates coming down by design through WSUS but that really wasn't enough. The domain user created also required domain administration, schema and enterprise administration privlidges. Once that was done though it ran smoothly. One thing I will say is a credit to Microsoft, their documentation is very comprehensive on this subject and the errors logged by the migration tool are actually very clear. Over all, this part of my upgrade has been ok. In saying that, I'll have to document my problems changing from Windows SBS 2003 to Windows 2008 standard. That didn't go well at all. So much so that I had to throw that idea out the window. I might try that in a year or so when the requirement is there for it.

I@m working on a massive project at the moment at home. I'm upgrading my physical inferstructure to a virtual one. I know! people are reading this saying, he's got enough computers at home to call it an inferstructure? He's either crazy for having that many computers or he's delusional.

Lets go with delusional shall we?

Anyway. I'm not going to document everything. But, what I will do is give you a few of the highlights as I find them.

The first is that on a number of sites, it says to run adprep /forestPrep on the domain controler to get the old C ready for the migratin. Now, there are two things to watch out for here. /forestPrep is case sensitive. the P in Pre has to be upper case. If not, it will not work.

Also, the ADPREP command must be run from the adprep on the Windows 2008 CD.

Finally, the Windows 2008 wizzard for setting up the domain controler says that it is on the installation media under a folder called support. This is not correct. it's in \sources\adprep\.

There are a few other commands to run also. Here's a list.

adprep.exe /forestprep
adprep.exe /domainprep
adprep.exe /domainprep /gpprep

Continuing to log issues that I have experienced with Jaws 11, here is the next response I have recieved from Freedom Scientific technical support. Note, these suggestions could have been provided by any user of Lotus notes as they have been required to Lotus Notes since version 6 of the client.

Origional message:

Greetings,

In Lotus notes 8 I have the following problems:

1. I cannot open attachments. Jaws reads the file name as it did in previous versions of Lotus notes (Example: 7.03) however when I press enter on it, the message closes and focus is left back in the inbox.

2. the auto complete functionality for the To, CC and BCC fields no longer reads correctly in this latest version of Lotus notes:

3. Control tab no longer works to move between pages. This is not a jaws issue but could be resolved with scripting.

The menus for new, reply, reply all, forward etc do not speak any more. for
example: when you press alt 2 for reply, Jaws should speak menu items such as reply, reply all etc.

The list view in the lotus notes client preferences dialogue no longer reads with Jaws. Again, this is a problem that was introduced with Lotus notes 8.

It would be appreciated by many users including my self if these issues were resolved before Jaws 12.

Thanks for your assistance.

Darragh

Their response:

Dear Darragh

Thank you for contacting Freedom Scientific technical Support. See the below information from our senior specialist.

There are some preferences in Notes 8.x that should be set for accessibility. You should verify/set the following:

Notes Preferences for Accessibility
• Enable preference "Use Accessibility Keyboard Navigation" - this is what allows you to use the Tab navigation from field to field. Some parts of the UI don't use this preference, but if you have issues using the Tab key, make sure this is enabled.
File> Preferences> Basic Notes Client Configuration panel> Additional
options list
• Enable preference "Use Tab to navigate read-only documents” - may need this preference to tab around forms, definitely need this enabled to test the Home Page (navigating around frames). Description from online help: Tab moves to next unread document until the last unread document is selected.
Then it moves to the next navigable object in the next frame. When a document is open in read mode, Tab navigates to any embedded object such as URLs, application links, and attachments.
File> Preferences> Basic Notes Client Configuration panel> Additional
options list
• Related preference "Show Extended Accelerators" - disabling this preference turns off the use of Accelerators, but you can invoke the Launcher list by pressing Alt+B. Description from online help: Extended accelerators offer keyboard methods for operating the bookmarks bar and window tabs. If you have extended accelerators enabled, press and hold Alt to display additional accelerators for each bookmark and window tab. Once you see the extended accelerators displayed on your screen, press the letter or number that corresponds to the area of Notes you want to go to.
File> Preferences> Basic Notes Client Configuration panel> Additional
options list

Be sure to include all previous correspondence pertaining to this matter when replying to this message so that we might better assist you.

Regards,
Mr. Tracey Jackson,
Technical Support Specialist
Freedom Scientific

Phone support: 727 803 8600, option #2
E-mail Support: support@freedomscientific.com
Visit our website at:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/

This is my response to Freedom scientific.

I can confirm that all of these options have been set. Note, I have been using Notes since version 6 of the client. IT has been necessary to enable all of these accessibility impacting options since that version. I did not however experience the problems in Lotus notes 6 and 7 that I am now experiencing with 8 with Jaws 11.

Thanks for your continued assistance.

Darragh

Not one single response I have recieved from freedom scientific has improved my situation yet. Every response I have recieved has been nothing but a token jesture.

So.

Here goes.

The response to the poll was much small than I expected or than I had hoped for.

This coupled with the lack of donations to the site to keep it running has begun to cast doubt over if I should renew hosting for it in July.

Unless I can determine a way of boosting it's user base, I don't really see the point in continuing it.

Here are the results:

Poll: We want to be your number one learning resource site. What do you think we should do to be better?

• 77% of you want more audio content more frequently.
• 8% of you want more live shows.
• 8% of you want more assistive technology news.
• 8% of you think there are other services out there providing the service so don't

see the point of LALRecordings.

Poll: What kind of content would you like to see more of?

• 9% of you want more content relating to accessible mobile phones.
• 18% of you want more Windows tips.
• 45% want Linux tutorials.
• 9% of you want mobility aid related recordings
• 18% of you want more on Windows screen readers.

I am sorry if I am annoying people on twitter in relation to the messages I am sending and recieving from Freedom scientific regarding the bug reports and issues I am emailing to freedom scientific.

I am attempting to keep users as up to date as possible as I fear that without significant pressure from the Jaws user base, we will see no improvement in the quality of this product.

To that end, I have set things up so that you can see all of the posts relating to this topic on one page.

If you use RSS to keep up to date with new content on the Internet, I have made things really easy for you. Simply point your RSS reader at the following address to recieve updates as soon as they are posted to the blog for this topic only.

http://www.digitaldarragh.com/?q=taxonomy/term/20/0/feed

Again, I call. no. I pleed with you. If you have problems with Jaws, please email Freedom scientific. It is absolutely imparitive that Freedom Scientific are pressured into fixing these problems. The action taken to resolve bugs has been minimal at best since Jaws 7 from what I can see. This needs to change.

If you have emailed Freedom scientific, forward a copy of the Email to me at d@digitaldarragh.com and I will add it to the blog so that others can see what is happening.

Thanks.

What follows are messages between me and Freedom scientific regarding a number of problems that I have experienced with Lotus notes. Note: the problems I submitted are not an exaustive. they are just some of the most major issues that have hampered accessibility.

Greetings,

In Lotus notes 8 I have the following problems:

1. I cannot open attachments. Jaws reads the file name as it did in previous versions of Lotus notes (Example: 7.03) however when I press enter on it, the message closes and focus is left back in the inbox.

2. the auto complete functionality for the To, CC and BCC fields no longer reads correctly in this latest version of Lotus notes:

3. Control tab no longer works to move between pages. This is not a jaws issue but could be resolved with scripting.

The menus for new, reply, reply all, forward etc do not speak any more. for
example: when you press alt 2 for reply, Jaws should speak menu items such as reply, reply all etc.

The list view in the lotus notes client preferences dialogue no longer reads with Jaws. Again, this is a problem that was introduced with Lotus notes 8.

It would be appreciated by many users including my self if these issues were resolved before Jaws 12.

Thanks for your assistance.

Darragh

Response from Freedom scientific:

Dear Darragh

Thank you for contacting Freedom Scientific technical Support. I'm researching this inquiry with our senior specialist. As soon as I have some feed-back from this team, I will be emailing you back.

Be sure to include all previous correspondence pertaining to this matter when replying to this message so that we might better assist you.

Regards,
Mr. Tracey Jackson,
Technical Support Specialist
Freedom Scientific

Phone support: 727 803 8600, option #2
E-mail Support: support@freedomscientific.com
Visit our website at:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/

It will be interesting to see what they come back with. As before, this is functionality that they should have released in Jaws 11. Lotus notes 8 is not a new version in terms of it's exposure to the public compared to Jaws versioning. Terefore in my belief, Jaws should support this latest version. I will therefore insist that these issues are resolved before the Jaws 12 release.