VoIP: Making the Switch…or not… [02 Aug 2006|09:39am] I’ve been talking with a good friend and co-worker lately about VoIP and how it all works and if it’s a good solution. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a great solution, but it seems to work better in a corporate environment better then a residential one, especially with the route I took. Let me tell about my little VoIP journey. About a week ago I setup my own personal VoIP server using the well known Asterisk software. Fortunately they had made a package for Mac OS which made life a lot easier. They also had created a packed/program that allowed you to easily setup users. I had the whole thing setup with a new user within 30 minutes, so easy!! My next thing was testing the thing out, and I assumed I would need to go out and buy a VoIP phone, so I started looking around and Linksys had a really nice one, but it only worked for Skype so I was a little disappointed, and then I found one Netgear made but again, Skype-only! Note: I needed a SIP-capable phone. So then I looked on eBay and found the Linksys WIP300 which looked perfect, and I doubled checked with my friend to make sure that worked and he said it would be fine. It was a little pricey though. So then my friend told me I could test the server out with a softphone. If you’re not sure what that is, it’s just a piece of software that runs on your computer and you can use that to dial into anyone else or other people on the server. So he pointed me to X-Lite which works on OS X, Windows and Linux. If anyone using X-Lite and is on an Intel Mac and has constant crashes, that’s a known issue and hopefully they will be fixing it. I read they wouldn’t and then I read they would on their message boards, so I think it’s safe to say they are working on a fix for Intel Macs. So I created multiple clients on the server (or extensions) and attempted to get that working. I assumed the Username was the persons name I had put in, but it’s NOT, it’s the extension. I also used stun.counterpath.net for my STUN server. Without setting the stun server I didn’t seem to be getting audio, and after putting that in I did get audio, but it was messed up. It worked when I talked from the iBook to the MacBook, but when talking from the MacBook to the iBook it sounded horrible, still not sure how that worked. This was all being tested when I was local to the Asterisk server. So it worked, for the most of it. then I went remote from the server and it failed to work…I haven’t fixed it and I actually have no plans to. I plan to go out and buy a normal cell phone. I don’t think that I am ready for VOIP yet, but at work we’re setting up VoIP so maybe I will get to use that Linksys phone, that would be really cool!! So I guess this article is for those who are thinking of setting up a small VoIP service for themselves, I would be more then willing to help out and try to answer any questions that come up! VoIP sounds great, but it’s just not ready for me yet! Another issue I had was, what if I am on the road, on the highway? As far as I know, we don’t have WAPs out on the roads yet haha Useful Links: http://www.asterisk.org/ http://www.astmasters.net/ http://www.sunrise-tel.com/ http://www.asteriskguru.com/ http://voip-info.org/wiki/ post comment

The SNMP & MRTG Adventure [02 Aug 2006|09:41am] For the last week or so I’ve been working on getting all of my important network devices mapped and graphed using a popular piece of software called MRTG. It uses information provided by an SNMP daemon, which is installed on each device to be monitored. The nice thing about it was that devices didn’t have to be local to the server with MRTG installed on it. That meant I could monitor devices in 2 or 3 or a million different locations. My list of devices consisted of 1 Xserve, 1 Gentoo Linux server, 1 Airport Extreme and a Linksys WRT54GS. Configuring SNMP on Gentoo was quite easy, but doing it on the rest of the devices was a little bit harder. Gentoo just required me to emerge net-snmp and it was good to go. I found some good links which helped me a lot, and that I have to share with you: Xserve SNMP: Todd Daily Apple KB Article Apple Discussion Board Thread Airport Extreme: I typed something like cfgmaker password@ip_address >Airport.cfg on the box running MRTG while in /etc/mrtg/ and that worked pretty good for me. The Linksys never ended up working because of it’s location and how ports are blocked, so that got scratched from being monitored. There was a funny post I came across while browsing and some guy thought SNMP was a mail protocol and seemed very sure about it. He was like, “Yeah, SNMP, the MP is Mail Protocol…”. Yeah ok buddy!! I think he was thinking about SMTP…wanker. Here’s a pretty good link for doing MRTG: Advanced MRTG For Linux So now, everything is almost complete, there is still a couple things that are being worked on, but it’s a great way to monitor network devices. It’s also pretty easy!! Oh yeah SNMP works on port 161 if you’re doing remote monitoring. SNMP works on port 514. Enjoy! post comment

Free Project Management Software [02 Aug 2006|09:42am] I was reading my RSS feeds this morning, so I think this one showed up on TUAW. Here’s an offer for some free software. It lets you do brainstorming and project management which is just what I was looking for last week. I ended up going with OmniProject Professional, which I absolutely love. It did take some learning but I have got the hang of it now and it’s great! You can hit up this website and put in some information and they will email you a license key for the full basic version of Curio. I haven’t tried it out myself but I probably will give it a spin later this week! post comment

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