Firewall Upgrade to pfSense 2.0 RC3 from pfSense 2.0 RC1

This morning I downloaded the latest (2.0 RC3) full upgrade of pfSense for my home firewall.  I was previously running pfSense 2.0 RC1.  I’ve been using pfSense since it was in alpha, and have always found it to be extremely stable.

Step 1: Backup your current pfSense configuration, just to be safe.

Step 2: Download the full upgrade for your architecture(i386 for me – I run pfSense on an old laptop for power savings)

Step 3: Upload the firmware via the pfSense web interface ( System >> Firmware ) & click ‘Upgrade firmware’

Step 4: Wait for the upgrade to complete.  I navigated to the home page of the web interface for pfSense during the upgrade and found this nifty ‘upgrade is currently in progress’ screen.  The speakers on the old laptop still work, and a lovely series of beeps and tweets played once the firewall completed its upgrade and boot sequence.

Step 5: Logon to pfSense web interface, verify new version, and confirm firewall functionality.

All done!

From FLAC to MP3 and back again–EAC Rips with LAME

Maximum PC has a great post on Ripping archival quality MP3s from audio CDs, but one of the user comments following the article simplifies the LAME options.

User vintagegold suggests using the following:

-V0 %s %d

I just tried the above settings within LAME to rip a classical CD – Borodin – and it sounds great on my AKG K 271 Studio headphones.  The HydrogenAudio wiki does indicate one preset with even higher quality for archiving, but my ears(which are still sensitive enough to hear the frequency on certain monitors/LCDs) don’t find the higher constant 320 kbit bitrate necessary.

Some of my essential EAC Screenshots – refer to the Maximum PC article for setting up Accurate Rip and other portions of EAC:

Arturo "Buanzo" Busleiman has current Windows and Mac downloads of the LAME binaries [high quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder] on his Argentina-hosted site.  The Audacity for Windows download worked on windows 7 x64.

Goodbye FLAC – I’ll not miss your options.
-8 -A tukey(0.25) -A gauss(0.1875) -b 4096 -V -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s --sector-align

Wildcard Search for Exchange Recipients PowerShell Function

I wanted to do a partial string search against names and aliases, and used the output from the Exchange Management Shell Command Log to write a PowerShell function that returned the type of broad result set I wanted, finding a match with names OR aliases.

function Get-Recip
{
  param (
            [string]$Filter=$(throw 'Partial Recipient Name or Partial Recipient Alias required')
        )

# Wildcard search prepended and appended to filter string passed, limit result set to 1000 matches

$Filter= "*"+ $Filter + "*";

Get-Recipient -PropertySet ConsoleLargeSet -ResultSize '1000' -SortBy DisplayName `
-RecipientType 'DynamicDistributionGroup','UserMailbox','MailContact','MailUser', `
'MailUniversalDistributionGroup','MailUniversalSecurityGroup','MailNonUniversalGroup' `
-Filter {(Name -like $Filter ) -OR (Alias -like $Filter)}

}