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!

Here the ISP numbers start with 0867, so I thought why not create an outgoing dialing rule which doesn’t require an access code.

I created a rule with the access code 0, number beginning with 867, 8 digits long, and set it to forward the access code to the trunks. This works great, except my incoming dial plans no longer work! Instead of SIP calls going to the auto attendant, they just get a busy signal. The moment I remove my outgoing dialup internet rule it starts working again. Haven’t had time to find out the actual cause for this, but I’m guessing it is a gimmick because I was using the GUI to configure it.

I had been pulling my hair out with why auto attendant wasn’t working (I didn’t want to specify the SIP number in the auto attendant setup because we have several numbers that should terminate to the same AA) and rebuilt the system today, which is when I discovered what was causing the problems.

Logged onto one of the student PCs today and found a big PowerShell folder in the start menu.

Mind you, I would be suprised if they actually managed to do anything interesting with it.

The prerequisite installer was failing immediately when trying to setup the IIS role, giving the message ‘Configuration Error’. Initially I thought this was obviously a bug because it was beta software.

After reading through the system requirements document again carefully, I found that Sharepoint requires the Application Server role, which Web Edition does not have.

Installed Server 2008 R2 Standard and it went on immediately.

Here is a list of IT projects I’ll be likely working on for the next couple of months. Hopefully I’ll be able to cross most of them off.

• Refurbish our server room (done)
• Recable admin block (done)
• Consolidate / migrate 4 Windows 2003 physical servers to Windows 2008 R2 running in Hyper-V Core (done)
• Deploy a Cisco UC520 phone system test phase (done)
• Create a new Windows 7 deployment for 25 new staff computers (done)
• Switch over to using UC520 in production (final testing stage)
• Integrate the UC520 with Exchange 2010 (not needed)
• Get Caller ID integration going with ACT! 6.0 (done)
• Build a website in Silverstripe (cancelled)
• Finish the Greymouth Baptist Church website
• Find a job for 2010, or pursue self employment (done)
• And if I get time, write my DFSR monitoring tool Windows 2008 (R2?) has a more powerful monitoring tool built in, including propagation testing which is what I was planning on doing.
• Catch up with friends, family, beach, sun, lake, bike, garden (done)

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!

You wil get the error message “This graphics card is not supported by Age of Mythology”, etc.

I did some research and found a forum post by awittenauer which pointed me in the right direction. By copying existing GFX files and modifying them so that AoM would recognise the Parallels Video Driver, I was able to get it working easily. I imagine this process should work for other games if you are receiving a similar message.

1. First, download my Parallels GFX Config Files
2. Unzip and copy the contents into the gfxconfig folders of your game. In my case this was C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Mythology\gfxconfig   &   gfxconfig2.
3. You should now be able to run the game.

If you are still having trouble getting it working, or want to add support for different resolutions, open up the parallels.gfx file in Notepad. Here you can customise resolution options etc.

Please let me know how you get on! Thanks again to awittenauer for the idea..