I’m not the biggest Apple fan in the world.  I mean, I own a iPod (1st gen shuffle!), I recommend macs to my friends and family, and I think the Macbook Air is SO PRETTY.  But at the end of the day, I’m a PC guy.  I like iTunes well enough, but the last time I upgraded my laptop I didn’t bother installing it, choosing instead to go with Winamp. No big deal, and nothing personal against Apple, I just prefer Winamp.

So I’m starting to get more and more annoyed with this stupid pop-up that comes along every day or so that wants to “update” my Apple software.  All because I installed the Quicktime viewer, which is practically required to do anything video related on the internet.  If it were just trying to update Quicktime, I’d be ok with it, but it isn’t.

The updater has checked BY DEFAULT to install itunes and Safari, as well as updating Quicktime!

Bad Apple! BAD!

I don’t want Safari. I have no interest in Safari.  I don’t want iTunes either. Installing one product of yours DOES NOT mean I want the whole rest of your catalog installed with a single click. Get rid of it.

Having laid out my needs and wants in a IP-PBX here, let’s take a look at the platforms themselves, shall we? For the sake of convenience, I’ll divide them into No-Cost and Cost sections.

In the No-Cost section we have basic Asterisk, trixbox CE, trixbox Pro Standard, and PBX-In-A-Flash. By “No-Cost” I mean that the IP-PBX software won’t cost you anything. You still have to provide server hardware to run the system and buy all the phones and such, but you won’t incur any software costs. Digium (who owns the Asterisk brand now) distributes an official Asterisk package for free.

While you can certainly install Asterisk on your favorite Linux distro, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I was looking for more of an all-in-one install. I wanted to download an ISO, burn it to CD, drop it in the drive and go. AsteriskNOW is the basically that, using rPath linux and vanilla Asterisk. It’s as close to a basic Linux+Asterisk as anything and that’s probably why I felt the least comfortable with it. I think it’s a great platform, and hugely extensible. Someone with more familiarity with both Linux and Asterisk could probably make better use of it than me. Sadly, my Nix-Fu is weak.

(more…)

I’ve been working for the past couple of months on putting together an Asterisk IP-PBX for the purpose of replacing my company’s aging traditional PBX system. Briefly, for those unfamiliar with the concept, an IP-PBX does everything a normal PBX system does, but it talks to the phones over your data network using TCP/IP. There are IP-PBX systems made by Cisco and Shoretel and a few others that are quite impressive but they tend to be either expensive or extremely expensive.

So I’ve turned to Asterisk. Asterisk is an Open Source IP-PBX built on top of Linux. Like most platforms built on Linux, you have a wealth of options to choose from when putting together your own system, to the point that I am lost most of the time. So far, I’ve looked at trixbox (CE and Pro), PBX-in-a-Flash, AsteriskNOW, Druid ECS, and Thirdlane Advantage.

My ultimate plan for this is to replace all our PBX’s for all 5 sites with a comprehensive system with some key features. Least Cost Routing is a must. I have to be able to route calls from any extension at any site out of the most efficient (cheapest) trunk. I have one site in remote Northern California and the call rates out of there are killing me. Line Failover is another must-have. The copper going into one of my sites is TERRIBLE. We have regular outages on either the voice PRI or the data T-1, though neither at the same time. Auto-provisioning Phones is nearly a must, I don’t want to be hand-configuring phones. Reliable Support is the last. Whether it’s paid support from the vendor or an active community of Open Source people, I need to know I can go to someone to ask questions when I get lost.

I have a couple of desired-but-not-needed features in mind too. 4-digit dial between sites, Outlook integration for dial-by-name, telecommuter extensions, fax support. Those are just icing though.

This has gotten too long, so I’ll break it up into a few pieces. Stay tuned…..

I turned 31 today. This is not particularly remarkable in and of itself. The birthday card I got from my Mom, Sister and Niece, however, is full of awesome.

Sometimes you go to war with the network you have, not the one you wish you had. Case in point is the current state of the network box in my office. In my defense, we just moved in and I haven’t had time to finich it up and make it look pretty. Of course, that was a month ago…

What is perhaps not obvious are the zip-ties suspending the switch from the bottom of the box. *sigh* I’ll get it mounted, eventually.

I promise.

I’ve been a Systems and Network Admin for quite a few years now, and I’ve recently come to a startling conclusion.  That is, there is a number relating to administrator of a system. When the quantity of admins reaches or exceeds that number, it then becomes a requirement to thoroughly document all parts of the network and all changes made from that point on. Once you have this many people mucking about within a system or network, there needs to be an accounting if what changes were made, when, and why. How that documentation is done is not really important (wikis, spreadsheets, whiteboards, clipboards, etc.), merely that it is done in the same place for changes.

That Number is One.

This blog is inspired by a post from a fellow of mine.  Tony Dye is the IT guru for Perimeter Church, and his post below pretty much sums up my entire philosophy for network troubleshooting.

I can’t believe I never posted this before, but I went to reference it and couldn’t find it.  So, if you’ve heard this before, I’m sorry for being repetitious.

Sometime a number of years back, about the time we were getting ITDiscuss kicked off, a few of us were sitting around a table talking about network monitoring (bandwidth issues) and what tools we used.  There was a lot of silence.  Then somebody (may have been me) sheepishly admitted “I watch the blinkey lights.”  Kind of similar to the Roundtable discussion on network monitoring regarding “a lot of calls tells you things are really bad,” we sort of all came to the same conclusion — we look at our switches and use a highly scientific method of determining network traffic:

1. If the lights are all off, that’s bad
2. If the lights are on solid, that’s also bad
3. If the lights are blinking, not too fast, not too slow, then that’s good

Do you use the “blinkey light” method of monitoring your network utilization?

http://tonydye.typepad.com/main/2006/10/blinking_lights.html

 To sum up:

1. If the lights are all off, that’s bad

2. If the lights are on solid, that’s also bad
3. If the lights are blinking, not too fast, not too slow, then that’s good