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
• Switch over to using UC520 in production (planning)
• Integrate the UC520 with Exchange 2010 (??)
• Get Caller ID integration going with ACT! 4.0 (could be interesting)
• Build a website in Silverstripe (might have to shift this one to autumn)
• Finish the Greymouth Baptist Church website
• Find a job for 2010, or pursue self employment
• 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

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..

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.