To be fair, we aren’t a straightforward upgrade to VDSL. We can’t afford any downtime during business hours to swap modems etc as our phones are all VoIP running over our existing ADSL connection.

But from a user’s point of view, it is just getting VDSL put on a spare phone line from a different company.

May 2011: We got the go ahead to take part in an ISP VDSL trial, however we would have to supply our own modem. So we got online and purchased a ZyXEL P-870H-51a V2 VDSL modem from the US. It took a few weeks to arrive, and by the time I got a NZ power supply for it, Telecom Wholesale were no longer letting people on the trial

9 September: ISP tweets:

VDSL is available! $50 add-on on top of our normal packages. ($55 naked DSL + $50 for VDSL – 5GB data. for example) 0800 276 232 T&C apply ^AL

15 September: Called ISP and went to place the VDSL order. Apparently VDSL is only available as Naked DSL so we have two options, get a new line installed for ~$350 or bring one of our existing lines over. Decide to bring one of our existing lines over because we have one that we aren’t really using, but for some reason it is showing up in the database as already having ADSL on it. Will confirm that it doesn’t and call back tomorrow!

16 September: I get someone on site to trace that line back to our demarc and verify it really doesn’t have ADSL. Tell ISP to go ahead with provisioning on that number. Find out later in the day that it is going to be lots quicker if we get CallPlus to relinquish the line first, then we can just get DSL activated on that pair.

21 September: The line gets relinquished, so we give ISP the nod to put through the order. Fingers crossed it isn’t far away now!

23 September: Got a call from ISP saying that Chorus have come back asking for $400 in wiring fees, because the line hasn’t previously had DSL on it. How does that work? Signing up for DSL on a line that hasn’t had it before doesn’t cost anything. So, I request that we sign up for ADSL and then we will just get that upgraded to VDSL. ISP confirms this should be fine, although it will take longer. Fine with me.

30th September: Chrous came around to install ADSL, all syncs fine.

5th October: Notified in form of a chorus visit that VDSL has been activated on the line! Plug in our VDSL modem only to find

It uses ~66W of power doing absolutely nothing.

66W * 24 hours * 365.2 days =  578 kWh / year

That is about $100 NZD of power per year (at a lean 17c/unit) without even cooking one packet of 2 minute noodles!

Shame on you Panasonic.

Next time in Shame on you, does the Sony EX520 series really only draw 0.2W in standby mode?

My wife has a MacBook Pro and I use an iMac, of course the natural (and probably ideal) backup system would be to buy a Time Capsule and have them both backing up to that, plus a portable USB drive for archiving that offsite. But, I already have a nice Firewire 800 external hard drive for backup, and Time Capsules aren’t that cheap.

Also, I thought it would be quite nice to come up with a way to synchronize Rebekah’s user account between the MacBook and iMac so if she wanted to use the iMac she could access all her stuff as if on her laptop. This too would mean we would only need to worry about backing up the iMac.

iMac Backup

For this I am using the built in Time Machine with my external 1TB hard drive. Has been working great for me since I set it up and gives easy historical backups.

MacBook – iMac Sync
After reading reviews I quickly settled on buying ChronoSync and ChronoAgent for a total of $50 USD. The setup wasn’t particularly simple, but within a couple of hours I had it all setup nicely. ChronoSync on the iMac with Agent on the laptop. Every time ChronoSync connects to the network it synchronises her Documents, Photos and Desktop folders (I chose not to sync the whole profile so that she could have different preferences etc on the laptop to the desktop). Because Time Machine is running on my iMac, all her stuff has a historical backup on my external drive.

Offsite Backup
No backup solution is worth much without an offsite backup, and they are a bit annoying so need to be simple.
Using ChronoSync I have setup a job which automatically synchronizes my iMac to a Portable USB 500GB drive whenever I connect it (about once a month).

To keep things simple and make it easy to remember I keep this in my car, because I figure if the iMac got stolen it would probably be when we aren’t there and have the car with us. I actually have 2 of these drives and rotate them between work and the car just because I had the drives spare and it makes it really robust.

Summay
So there you have it, a relatively simple solution to keep the MacBook synchronized with the iMac, a historical onsite backup and a simple offsite backup. I haven’t had to touch it since setting it up except to plug in the offsite backup drives.

My solution would be very different for Windows, perhaps I’ll talk about that at a later date.

Equipment Used

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.