Background: SBS 2003 Premium is running on one box. Performance is becoming poor due to increasing SQL demands, so we need to run it on a separate server. Can achieve this by purchasing A) SBS Workgroup 1 Processor Edition, or B) SBS 2008 Premium Edition & 25 CALs, (which entitles you to run SQL on a separate server) for about the same cost. But, I would prefer not to rebuild the SBS 2003 box at this stage.

After several hours of research I came across two opinions on whether we could buy SBS 2008 Premium, use the ‘second’ server part of it for a new server while leaving the existing server untouched.

• A) Legally possible, but maybe not technically possible (from Microsoft)
• B) Would breach the license agreement but may be technically possible (other IT people)

Knowing that in worse case I would have to migrate 2003 > 2008 immediately, I ordered SBS 2008 Premium OEM with the new server.

I can now confirm it is possible to install the ‘second’/Server 2008 Standard part of SBS 2008 Premium, with SQL, and join to a SBS 2003 domain without having to touch that machine.

New server (Dell T710) and SBS 2008 Premium with all required CALs turned up on Tuesday and within the day had the new SQL server up and running. Shut down later that day because the T710 is too loud to sit under the desk next to me, but thats a different story.

For anyone interested, SBS came with a licence key for SBS, one for SQL and one for Server 2008 Standard; and all separate CDs.

We settled on using 2talk as our VoIP provider, and so far, 98% of our outgoing calls have gone over that. A VIC2-4FXO card provides us with POTS trunks, just incase we run into internet connectivity problems. Users can dial 8 to force a call to go via the analog trunks, in case of a poor VoIP service. ISDN is too expensive as we are in a small town, and on a tight budget.

As well as the four internal FXS ports, we have a Linksys SPA8000 providing 8 extras. Still having some issues trying to send faxes over that, but we will get there. It is a shame the SPA8000 isn’t supported more by Cisco Configuration Assistant, but I’ve tried to put the less critical extensions onto the SPA8000.

We use a Snap ADSL2+ internet connection, and are using a Linksys AM300 in half bridge mode connected to the UC520 WAN port. All of our regular web browsing (and site to site VPN traffic) goes over a separate internet connection, independant of the UC520. I’ve got a spare AM300 in the rack should anything ever happen to it, all configured up and ready to swap over.

All of the voice equipment  & core network switches are connected to UPS battery backups, so in the event of a power cut (which happens fairly often) we can keep the phones up and running for about 40 minutes. The staff would have usually gone home if an outage lasted that long however, can’t do much with the computers down.

Surge protection on the analog trunks concerned me, we have been through quite a few trunk cards in the Samsung PBX, so we installed some APC phone surge protectors in the rack. They weren’t cheap, but we managed to squeeze 4 trunks through two of them (each of them protects 2 pairs, centre pair is line 1, next pair, line 2 etc). I made some breakout cables (cut a RJ11 modem cable in half and terminate the ends to a RJ45) to split the lines out to the FXO ports. Didn’t bother surge protecting the ADSL side of the lines for fear of reducing the ADSL performance. That’s what the spare modem is for!

I plan to purchase another VIC2-4FXO card to keep onsite as a spare should anything happen to the one in the device; they are much cheaper to buy from eBay than NZ new. That just leaves the risk of the UC520 itself failing; I hope the chances of this are very low because we can’t afford to have another one of those just sitting around. We will consider purchasing a SmartNET warranty contract, however it is a second hand device so have to work out what to do there.

The second hand system we got included a 7961 with a 7914 expansion module. Problem is we have two phone operators who need to see what is going on with the lines. Was about to fork out about $700 for another 7916/14 when I found the 7931.

Not quite as pretty as the 7916, but only cost us $290 and it provides all the functionality we require; will probably buy a few more.

The remainder of the phones are 7911s with a couple of 7941s. Our logo displays on the phone screens which is a nice touch.

If you would like to know more about any of this, don’t hesitate to contact me, I’d love to discuss it further.

First, check you have the 7914 phone load installed on your UC device.

1. Have a copy of the latest software for your UC520/UC540 etc, something like UC520-8.0.2.zip, about 100Mb.
2. Open up Cisco Configuration Assistant, open the Maintenance tab and choose Phone Load Management.
3. If 7914 isn’t showing in the ‘Delete Phone Loads‘ tab, this means we are onto a solution here, exciting! If it is already in this list, skip to the next section.
4. On the Upload Phone Loads page, select the UC520-8.0.2.zip (or similar) file as the Software Pack. Grab a cup of coffee while it searches the archive for phone loads.
5. Once that is done, find 7914 in the list and check the checkbox next to it. Good time to check if there are any other phones in the list you could add.
6. Hit Upload.

Next, configure the phone in the Voice tab

I’m sure you have probably already done this section. If you haven’t:

1. In CCA, open Configure > Telephony > Voice > User Extensions.
2. Select the phone with the 7914 attached, and change the phone type. For example I have a 7961 phone. From the phone type dropdown box, choose ’7961/14′. If you have two 7914s, choose 7961/14×2 – you get the idea.
3. Configure the buttons as normal in the details section.

Save the configuration and restart the phone

These steps got it working for me. If you are interested to know more about the subject, continue on; if not – go and play.

In the process of getting this to work, I had found a half-fix, which I was relying on for the last week. This involved adding the following to the configuration
UC520(config)# telephony-service
UC520(config-telephony)# load 7914 S00105000300
However, whenever I opened up Cisco Configuration Assistant, I would get the message “Removing settings for phones firmware not in flash and saving configuration”. This is because I was specifying a load where the file didn’t exist on the UC520. For some reason, it did make the 7914 boot up, but I had to keep adding that line to the configuration after each time I opened CCA.
By adding the phone load through the method above, that has stopped happening finally!

Hope this guide has been helpful and saved some worry about having a faulty 7914…

For others of you who can’t afford a 7914, I’ve just recently discovered the Cisco 7931 – awesomely priced phone with lots of buttons!

Atcom IP04

Back in 2008 I posted an article about Affordable IP Phone Systems. This was all very well but I hadn’t actually ever touched the Atcom IP04 / IP08 phone system.

A couple of months ago I was able to get my hands on a demo unit thanks very much to Hadley at Nicegear. I regret being very busy with Uni at the time meant I wasn’t able to conduct an in-depth or scientific review.

Here are some of the things I can remember about the unit and the process of getting it up and running. Please note I would recommend trying it out first if you are considering going this route before leaping into it.

Hardware specifications

• CPU: 400MHz Blackfin 532 DSP Chip
• Zero/Four/Eight analog (FXO/FXS) module interfaces (IP01/IP04/IP08)
• 256MB NAND flash storage
• 64MB SDRAM

Software Features

• Built-in configurable Asterisk IP PBX
• Web based GUI
• High performance OSLEC (Open Source Line Echo Canceller)
• Voicemail
• Call forward, call waiting, call transfer
• Call conference
• Call queues
• SIP trunking, IAX trunking
• PSTN analog trunk (up to four PSTN trunks)
• Flexible dial plan
• Configurable IVR menu
• Replaceable MMC/SD memory

Setup

I constructed my review with a specific small business in mind (30 extensions, 7 trunks). Four trunks would be analogue and the rest VoIP. Extensions were going to be SIP but terminating to Linksys SPA8000′s as analogue adaptors as we have an existing analogue infrastructure in place (lots of cordless phones which were going to be challenging to find affordable VoIP alternatives).

First I launched straight in and tried to get it working. I couldn’t seem to get a dialtone on any of the analogue extensions. After a bit of playing around I decided to revert the settings to factory default. This got the analogue ports going properly in no time.

I set up a few extensions, that was OK, but I ran into some difficulty getting auto attendant / pre-recorded messages to work properly. Turned out that the extension group that was being used by the messages seemed to be conflicting with something, perhaps with the extension range I chose for the normal extensions. I opened up the extension list and there was some weird thing going on with the recorded message extensions being listed twice in the extension list – sorry I can’t remember exactly, but I did get it working without too much hassle.

Setup did take a bit of trial and error, however performing maintenance with the GUI should be a breeze after the initial setup.

Call Quality

The only oddity I noticed here was once when I was on a call and navigating the configuration GUI at the same time, I heard some digital artifacts on the line as each page was loading. I restarted the unit and didn’t have it happen again after that.

Based on a couple of unscientific test calls (Analog Phone > Atcom Unit > Analog Line > Telecom > Analog PBX) I came to the conclusion that the calls were a little noisier over the Atcom box than my normal line. I didn’t have any other ATA’s to compare what the quality was like. I imagine any FXO / FXS will degrade the quality slightly (any conversion from analog to digital), so wasn’t particularly worried about this. It could have also been to do with gain settings etc. If you were in a total VoIP environment, or using other adaptors to do the analogue conversion, this would not be relevant, as the quality of VoIP only calls was not at all degraded by the Atcom.

Conclusion

When looking at direct costs, this box would be hard to beat. We decided not to go with it at this stage, primarily because we were able to purchase our existing PBX for a good price.

The Atcom isn’t for the faint of heart – you do have to be prepared to do some tinkering to get this working right. However it should be easy to maintain after the initial setup. Admittedly I didn’t have to use the command line at all. I love the idea of no moving parts – and you shouldn’t settle for anything less (I could accept a fan or two). Consuming less than 5 watts of power is excellent.

I would recommend this unit to users who are going to use VoIP throughout their system (or at least for the trunks) rather than using analogue adaptors – although you should have a couple of analogue lines for failover and emergency calling. Do some experimenting of your own if you are planning to use analogue phones with it.

It would be great to hear about your experiences with these or other VoIP units, as would any other readers. Please leave a comment below or send me an email. Thanks!

If you haven’t read part 1 – do it now. In summary, I converted a Dell Small Form Factor PC into a Video Conferencing trolly. I mounted the PC to the sack barrow using some tiedowns.

After trialling many different options – trying hard to find a free one – we were left with a shortlist of Mirial Softphone, or Polycom PVX. While there were other free products out there, we specifically wanted a product which would allow us to do direct IP calls, so we could call into parties using real hardware conferencing units too.

We trialled both products, not scientifically. The general consensus was that Mirial perhaps had slightly better performance/quality, but the user interface of Polycom PVX was much more intuitive.

Both are great products, in the end it came down to affordability – Polycom gave us a great educational price through an NZ dealer which sealed the deal.

Our video conferencing setup hasn’t been without its problems – first it was a faulty network cable, then we didn’t have a static IP address set for the unit in Hokitika, obviously small problems which could happen with any units.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that this seems to be an area that could do with some quality open source development!

This is a strange feeling after growing up with 1 routable IP address to somehow share across a whole network and having hundreds of NAT port forwards. It really should make life much easier.

But… there are a few implications. Previously in many situations we have been able to rely on NAT as a reasonably effective firewall. NAT is excellent at that. Customer ADSL/Cable routers will need to now have firewalls which many don’t… and if they do have firewalls it is almost certain they wont be managed properly.

So IPv6 end to end connectivity is all very well; but now instead of managing port forwarding there is going to need to be managing of firewalls instead. By default I am sure they will be managed by UPNP; so basically may as well not be running a firewall unless UPNP gets some security added.

Lastly, I realised IPv6 means you can no longer use the excuse of decreasing the size of broadcast domains when subnetting or using VLANs… It now will be reducing the multicast domains seeing IPv6 now uses multicast to replace the broadcast functions. I’m pretty sure most usually VLANs are more about security anyway than broadcast domains.

We began with a couple of requirements:

• The unit must be portable, able to be wheeled around the campus.
• Upon arrival at the location, it should be able to be up and running within a couple of minutes.
• As our demand for video conferencing isn’t that high, the unit should be able to be used for video editing, to help justify the cost of having a powerful computer on the unit.

I first spent a few hours looking through catalogues of AV Trolleys and general computer trolleys, but wasn’t able to find any I was satisfied. The trolley would need to hold a computer, monitor, webcam, keyboard/mouse, speakerphone.

Last Wednesday I was down in our tech workshop when I noticed a sack barrow and realised we could convert one into a pretty useful trolley ourselves.

Building the trolley:

Trolley Ingredients:

• 1 x sack barrow with pneumatic wheels, purchased from The Warehouse ($39.95)
• 6 x pipe clips (I forget what size exactly, but they fit perfectly over the pipes on the sides of the sack barrow ($3)
• A strip of a wood of your choice. I used custom board, slightly wider & taller than the sack barrow ($0 – had it lying around).
• Bunch of screws suitable for the thickness of the wood
• 2 x cans of matte black spray paint from ($14)
• 2 x |_ brackets (sorry, cant remember their name) to secure the computer from sideways movement. ($3)
• A black ratchet tie-down type strop to go around the computer and trolley and hold it in place ($5)
• A simple VESA mount, this will mount the LCD to the trolley. I used this ($15)
• Total cost: around $80 NZD (the Polycom trolley was $600 alone….)

Computer Components:

(usually using the cheapest sources from PriceSpy)

• Your choice of VESA capable LCD – we used a 22″ BenQ G2110W ($310)
• Your choice of small form computer – we got a Dell Optiplex SFF Core 2 Duo, a very nice machine. ($400 brand new from GraysOnline auctions)
• Your choice of webcam – we got a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 ($125)
• Your choice of speaker/mic – we got a Logitech QuickCall USB Speakerphone ($100)
• Your choice of keyboard/mouse – we got a Microsoft Wireless Desktop 1000 ($55)
• Total cost: around $990 NZD

The Build:

1. Lightly sand the sack barrow to make the spray paint stick, then spray. I didn’t want a bright red conferencing trolley, so matte black it was.
2. Prepare the wood suitably, for me this involved sanding, sealing, then a couple of coats of matte black on all surfaces.
3. Sit the wood on the bottom of the sack barrow, and secure to the sack barrow with the pipe clips.
4. Now mount the VESA bracket for the LCD close to the top of the board. Obviously the exact placement will depend on your LCD.
5. Bore a hole for the monitor cables to go through, then attach the LCD.This is where I’m up to currently – the computer hasn’t arrived yet, so bear with me.
   Anticipated steps when the computer arrives:
6. Place the computer you are using, sideways on the bottom of the sack barrow. Use the |_ brackets on either side to secure the computer from sideways movement, and throw the ratchet tie-down around the machine to stop it escaping.
7. Find a place to mount or stow the keyboard, mouse and speakerphone. I am wondering about making a padded pouch of some sorts that will keep the keyboard and mouse on the back of the unit.
8. By using piggyback power cables I will eliminate the need for a multibox, as I’m finding it hard to come across a black multibox.

Backboard painted and mounted to the sack barrow with the pipe clips

Positioning the VESA mount

VESA Mounted & Cable hole drilled

VESA Mounted on the LCD

LCD Mounted onto Sack Barrow

LCD Mounted to Trolley

Testing the LCD with the new iTunes visualisations

Conclusion:

So far I am pretty pleased with how it has all turned out. I only attached the monitor thismorning, and the computer hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m looking forward to getting that all setup after the Christmas break.

Stay tuned for Affordable Video Conferencing – Part 2 – Software!

There is a strange sense of security that goes with having a dedicated appliance for something as critical as telephony. Businesses that are used to having a phone system on the wall somewhere may not be totally comfortable having a phone system running on any old PC sitting in the server room (although this could be a safer option, as you always can drop the hard drive into another machine if something goes wrong with one).

While there have been Asterisk appliances from major names like Digium, their cost is not much cheaper than a POTS system, making migrating from a traditional phone system hard to justify. The Atcom IPxx series on the other hand which you can get the base unit for under $500, depending on how many analogue trunks and extensions you want.

I should note that it is not a trivial cost associated with moving to VoIP – if you have existing analogue phones the cheapest way will be to use ATA devices such as the Linksys SPA8000. VoIP phones start at around the $200 which soon adds up.

The ATCOM looks fairly easy to set up. There will be a learning curve, but it is definitely within the scope of in house IT staff to create new extensions, reconfigure IVR menus, if not set up the whole system from scratch.

For the price, I would buy two, and keep one as a spare that I could drop the flash card into should anything happen to the other.

The Atcom IP01 / IP04 / IP08 can handle around 30 concurrent calls, which is plenty for any small to medium business in New Zealand.

My immediate reaction when I saw this was to buy it just because it was so unbelievably cheap. Unfortunately, being a student means that isn’t quite a good enough reason to buy one.

Update: July 2009
I still haven’t tried out any of the ATCOM gear. I have to say I am nervous about the quality, I’d love to think it would be excellent, but until I have tested it I won’t know. In New Zealand of course you are probably still going to want analogue trunks instead of relying on 2talk/SIP trunks unless you have a really nice internet connection.

DNS Performance Test by the1silverwolf. Enjoy!

My initial plan was to use a VoIP provider, purchase various numbers around the country, and use geographical routing on our 0800 number to route calls to the local numbers we had purchased (as 0800 calls to local regions cost less).  Enter 2talk.

2talk provide a Business Go plan, you can check it out on the site, but with it, you can buy 0800 numbers and you don’t need to have them terminating to a number – meaning we don’t need to bother with setting up local numbers around the country. What is even better, is that the 0800 numbers first use up the minutes that you get as part of the plan – and their Go plan you get unlimited minutes! So that means, unlimited minutes of 0800 calls, and unlimited outbound calls, (Reasonable small business use applies).

The 0800 numbers cost exactly the same as getting a number anywhere else in the country, currently $7 a month, but that plan actually includes 2 NZ numbers as it is.

With the Go plan, you can have 5 simultaneous calls, something which is quite hard to get my head around after being used to landlines, where you get one call per line. Each additional phone number you purchase, you get an extra simultaneous call.

The potential for savings for small businesses here is incredible. Just take a look at these numbers:

Telecom NZ – for City customers: $37.05/line/month.
5 lines x $37.05 = $185.25 / month

2Talk – Anywhere in the country: $7/line/month
5 lines x $7 =  $35 / month
5 calls, unlimited minutes = $80 / month.

Whatever way you look at it, there are huge savings to be made. They do number porting for the same price, they even have numbers in little places like Greymouth – as far as I am aware they are the only place providing local numbers in Greymouth!