Posted in Unified Communications on February 12th, 2009 by Rolf – 1 Comment
The Asterisk open source phone system has always been a favorite of mine. I used it to help me out of a SIP jam a few years back, and for many years I have wanted to be able to put together a good system for customers using Asterisk, but have not been able to create something sufficiently compelling.
Although I primarily work with Cisco Unified Communications, and think it is the best overall UC system in the market, I had become frustrated when trying to come up with designs for less than 100 phones that were competitive from a standpoint of features and price.
For example, there was one company just down the street read more »
Posted in Data Networks, Network Security on February 9th, 2009 by Rolf – Be the first to comment
I have talked with a number of public safety organizations over the last few years about how they extend network connectivity to patrol officers that make stops. The benefits are tremendous. By having the ability to run a car tag and a driver’s license through the Georgia Crime Information Center, the officer is able to immediately identify individuals with warrants out for their arrest, stolen cars, and any number of other issues.
The ability to run this information through the GCIC database is always available, by calling in the information over the radio, and having it looked up, but at that point it sometimes becomes more trouble than its worth. read more »
Posted in Business, Unified Communications on February 7th, 2009 by Rolf – 2 Comments
Two and a half years ago Cisco came out with Call Manager version 5. There were a few notable changes in this release. Besides running on linux, it was the first version that supported both SIP phones and SIP trunks. As fortune would have it, one of our customers at the time had more prescience than I, and had researched the cost savings capabilities of using a SIP trunk for PRI replacement. Since I have never shied away from deploying the latest Cisco voice technology, we agreed to put the system in place.
The cost savings of the SIP trunk is what funded a majority of the deployment. read more »
Posted in Network Security on February 7th, 2009 by Rolf – Be the first to comment
OK, I have all the basics in place. We use a great mail filter at work, and I hardly ever get spam or phishing email, and have never gotten a virus by email. Still, I was getting about 20-30 emails that I would delete without reading, every day. Finally last week I started to do something about it.
I could have taken the shortcut of putting blacklists on the mail filter, but I felt that was not yet necessary. Instead, I decided to see what could be accomplished by a concerted effort of unsubscribing from the drip marketing campaigns that were aimed at me. read more »
Posted in Business, Unified Communications on February 6th, 2009 by Rolf – Be the first to comment
I was on the phone with a customer the other day discussing issues with the current installation we were doing for them. Even though all the web filtering system was set up properly for them, the customer had an expectataion that we would set it up in a different manner. The scope of work was unclear, and the lead deployment engineer said that we had had the discussion on how to set it up, with customer agreement, but apparently there was a communication gap at some point.
Because we value our customer relationships, we decided to do the additional work at no cost. read more »
Posted in Data Networks on February 5th, 2009 by Rolf – Be the first to comment
It is so amazingly fast to get things done when you have a few linux boxes in the network. We are doing a few things to optimize our admittedly staid website, and those changes will roll out over the next few months.
I added wordpress to the server and linked it in quickly since it is packaged so nicely. Just ssh in, quickly type in the things to do, and we are up and running. Nice!