ChillingSilence / Chilling_Silence and blog home

Just thought I should write a quick note clarifying:

Yes, I’m Chilling_Silence, wordpress just wouldn’t let me have an underscore in my name.

I also cross-post this at lazy.geek.nz while I figure out which I want to keep as “home”, though I suspect I’ll be shifting to lazy.geek.nz and eventually letting chillingsilence.wordpress.com die a slow death. I’ll figure that out over the next little while.

I also post on blogs.elastix.org/en and crosspost that here too, though those are Elastix or VoIP-specific postings.

You’ll also find some of my rantings on PressF1!

…Just to clear the air

Chill.

Initial thoughts on FreePBXv3 and FreeSWITCH vs Asterisk

As I’ve been testing out FreePBXv3 with FreeSWITCH, I figured I should blog my experiences, as they’ve been surprisingly pleasant!

After I got notification on the Elastix Beta mailing list about FreePBXv3, I was stoaked to learn it’s been released, even in an unfinished form! I went looking a while back for a FreeSWITCH GUI and was sadly disappointed. I found a few like tcapi and Phonebooth, but couldn’t get tcapi working and Phonebooth had just had all its code donated to FreePBX. So for the time I’d given up.

Anyway, so I grabbed the latest Install CD for FreePBXv3 which is based off CentOS. Ran through smoothly, no issues, got it installed, but I didn’t really do anything much with it.

For one reason or another I jumped into IRC in #freeswitch on freenode, I’ll have to look over my logs and figure out why. Anyway it turns out that some of the FreePBXv3 devs hang out there, and they’re actually friendly! It was a nice change from some of the other projects I’d had involvement in. I think Elastix is probably the only other project that’s been so friendly.

So I got chatting with one of the guys there, and it came up that I was happy to do some testing, so he asks me to do a clean install from a vanilla distro (And not the LiveCD. Again I’m not sure why, I’ll go re-read the chat logs later). No worries, so I install vanilla debian and get to work. Anyway a few bug reports later, 3 SVN updates later, and I’ve got a nicely working system running currently in VirtualBox.

I’m pleased to say that FreeSWITCH as a product from what I can see appears quite mature, but still growing at a steady rate. They even recommend you install from SVN, they’re that confident in the code. Most projects would have you install from a “stable” peg in the code and update as & when they release a new “final” version. The first and most obvious thing I’ve noticed about FreeSWITCH is the sounds. Even just the female voice that guides you through recording a Voicemail sounds *so* much nicer than the Asterisk one, it’s absolutely crazy! There’s also the nice feature that Voicemail automatically stops recording when you’re silent for 2 seconds. Quite cool I thought!

There was no “additional” configuration of any endpoints that I needed to do, tested with ZoIPer and an SPA942 successfully. It simply “just worked” making calls between the devices, as was to be expected. I’m still yet to setup an external trunk to test over.

FreePBXv3 is still a *little* rough around the edges, but overall I must say that the infrastructure that they’ve built, or framework, seems like a great improvement over the current FreePBX 2.X! Not only that, but the developers are very approachable, keen for feedback, they seem to be excellent coders who love doing what they do, and they’re rapidly pumping out an awesome project! It still crashes at times, or at least doesn’t display what it should, however the changes seem to get saved at least even though the correct followup output isn’t shown. Some features aren’t 100% implemented, but overall there’s most of the basic things in there that the majority of people would use. The developers also seemed pretty keen for suggestions and improvements, even just the trivial little things.

I’m just looking forward to trying this out on an Alix system soon to see how it handles the load from FreeSWITCH

My thoughts on the Toshiba NB200

As the need arose for me to replace my previous work laptop, I was very keen to go to the opposite end of the scale. From a 17″ semi-powerhouse laptop to a smaller 10″ Netbook.
It was a mission to carry it around everywhere, battery life sucked, and it was just not functional for anything but sitting on a desk.
So I wanted something portable, to take with me on-site as I visit client sites for VoIP / IT support etc. I wanted something with good battery life (3-4 hours would be good I thought, which is over double what my previous was good for), I wanted it to be lightweight, semi-durable as I chuck it in my bag with other computer gear like routers and cables, and I didn’t want to have to sit around waiting for an OS like when installing on the EeePC 900 Flash Drive. A decent GPU would be nice, like an ION-based system, so I could do 1080p movies in my spare time, but that’s a lower-priority. 2GB RAM is a must, if it’s going to run Win7.

What you never knew that you needed to know about Broadband and Fibre to the Home

With the government investing NZD$1,500,000,000 into this “Ultra fast broadband” Fibre-Optic network, you’d expect them to have good reason for it right? You’d also expect people would generally back the idea of it, and know why we, as a country, need this infrastructure investment. If only that were so! Communications and Information Technology Minister Steven Joyce is pushing for a major infrastructure rollout across the better part of NZ, and everywhere you look there’s talk of the $1.5 billion the Govt is investing.

That’s a lot of money, and as you can imagine a lot of people are keen to get their hands on a slice of that pie. What you also need to understand is that 3rd parties are also expected to front up that amount (and more) themselves, some estimates suggest that independent parties will need to invest over 6x the amount the Govt will be putting into this project.

My thoughts on the WDTV Live

Yes, I’ve had my WDTV Live for a while now, and have had several requests for my thoughts on them.

They’re priced very nicely, mine cost $229 + GST on my account with PBTech. Just make sure you search for “WD TV Live”, and not “WDTV” or you’ll get the regular one without a LAN port.

I wanted to get myself a media player that could stream from my PC, as well as do HD MKV files in 1080p. It needed to also support h.263, as well as h.264 in both AVI and MP4 files, not to mention some of my stuff I’ve encoded with MP3 audio CBR / VBR, some I’ve encoded with AAC. It’s quite a mashup collection. I’d looked at a few others, Seagate had one, but they generally required you to plug your HDD in to them to use them.

PC / Router failing? It might be overheating

Yes, with the advent of summer, and more sunny days, hardware *does* fail.
I just recently fried two sticks of RAM, as I pulled them out of my PC they were so hot I burned my fingers. Serves me right for having so many Hard Drives in there without thinking about fans.

You may be in a similar boat, if you PC blue-screens and restarts, maybe it just won’t turn on, all are common symptoms of PC’s that are now overheating.
What can you do about it? Well to find out if your PC is overheating, grab either Speccy or EVEREST Ultimate (Trial). EVEREST is nice as it can be left in the system tray while you carry on working.

The importance of a good router – Why your internet keeps failing

“But I have a good router already! My ISP gave me it, it must be the best!”

Man if I had a couple of bucks every time I’ve heard that, I’d be so rich by now. Fact of the matter is, it’s unfortunately far from the truth, and many ISP-provided routers truly suck.

I work with VoIP, and running a Voice call over the internet may be easy with Skype, and you may be OK with choppy calls, but when you’re running an enterprise-grade telephony system, you don’t have the same tolerance for bad quality. Same for Home users, you should not have to put up with daily restarts!

What does that have to do with you? Most probably everything! If you’re here it’s likely because you’re having issues with your internet, and either you think it’s related to your router, or I’ve referred you here from PressF1.

So let’s clear the air about a few routers:

Speed up your internet with OpenDNS

If the button says “Sweeeeet” then good on you for doing the right thing and using OpenDNS. If it says “Get Started” then read on!

 

What’s that you say? I can speed up my internet without doing anything? Surely not?

Well you’re kind of right, technically we’re not going to “speed it up”, however pages and websites will appear to load much faster, making better use of your connection.

Telecom Geek Exchange Tour 2009

Let me just start by saying what an amazing and impressive tour it was, so much knowledge, so much cool tech stuff, so a big thankyou to Telecom Wholesale, Chorus and Jay Best for organizing the whole thing!
Anyway for now there’s just photo’s, I’ll go back later and add some tags or comments about them when I’m not so lazy but for now I just wanted to get them online so a few close friends / family could see. Talk about a TON of cables huh?!
Pix below the break

iLBC vs g729 — The quick guide to using compressed codecs in Elastix

We all know that g711 (alaw / ulaw) is meant to sound the best. It’s uncompressed and equivalent quality to ISDN, which most businesses are used to with their traditional PABX System.

However, it comes at a price, 64kbps + overheads means around 111kbps when you factor in everything else over an ADSL PPPoA / PPPoE connection.

Now that’s a LOT when you think about it, considering on a standard ADSL2+ line you’re going to max out at around 5-7 SIP lines, especially if it’s a shared connection. This is where a compressed codec such as (My personal favorite) iLBC, or g729, can be incredibly cost effective, as you can load up around 15-20 on the same sort of bandwidth. When you’re a small business, that means with the right kind of QoS, you can share your ADSL Broadband connection and still have 5-10 concurrent phone calls, all happily living together.

So do away with expensive BRI interfaces and monthly charges, and go SIP!

We’re going to look at a few things very briefly:

1) MOS – What is it and why do I care?

2) Which codec is right for me?

3) g729 – Installation

4) iLBC – Installation

5) Trunk and Extension setup

6) Testing the codecs