What’s IT all about?

I blogged a few days ago about my initial impressions of Google Apps, saying that it looked promising as a free mail/calendar/web service aimed at small businesses and other groups (families, clubs, etc.). Certainly for our particular circumstances at home it promised to ease a bit of a headache, namely running a full-featured groupware platform in a VMWare virtual machine merely to provide mail and calendar services to family members, all on a home PC.

Well, a few days in and there have been no real hiccups so far. Changing the MX and CNAME records to point at Google’s servers was pretty simple, and all changes took effect within an hour. Installing and configuring Thunderbird was pretty painless too, and the simple user interface provided no issues to my Outlook-familiar wife or my 7-year-old daughter ! A nce feature of the Google service is the ability to set up friendly URL’s for the services (e.g. http://mail.domain.com or http://calendar.domain.com)

The only real potential gotcha I have so far encountered happened just now. Google mail has quite a good spam collector built in (on another Gmail account I have reached the point where I rarely bother to check it so confident I am that there will be any false positives), and in logging into the web interface I saw that it had already captured one spam item, which turned out to be quite an important email. Turning spam filtering off is an option, but I think it would be best to monitor the web account for a while until it ‘learns’ what is and isn’t spam to us.

Another success was setting up IMAP access to our old mail accounts (on the Domino server). Took a little bit of fiddling in Domino to make sure each mail database was set up for IMAP access properly, but once done I was able to drag and drop emails and folders to ensure all the mail I wanted to keep was now in Thunderbird. This was so successful that I can see Domino being decommissioned sooner rather than later. Or at the very least being left off by default and only being fired up if an old email needs to be searched for.

One previous facility that I have not yet reproduced, though, is synchronisation of my contacts and calendar between PDA and PC. I was using Laplink PDASync to synchronise Domino and my Palm Lifedrive, which worked very well. I have not yet been able to find a product that will sync the Palm with Thunderbird 2.0 although there does appear to be a product for Thunderbird 1.5 which will hopefully be updated soon. Exporting contacts to CSV seems to lose a lot of the nice information…and using vCards would require them being exported one by one ! The search continues on that one.

I came across a link to Google Apps the other day and it certainly intrigued me. Why ? Well, I have been running Lotus Domino as my personal mail server for some time now, primarily on the basis that I have many years experience with Domino, and it offers both a decent mail client (OK, Notes has it’s idiosyncrasies, but I am very familiar with it and can make it work the way I want) and the ability for me to check my mail online using Domino Web Access (DWA). This all happens in a VMWare-based virtual linux server (specifically Fedora Core 4) running Domino 7 and using fetchmail to pull four family members’ personal mail into separate mail databases. It works, and works well, but it has a downside. Basically, no matter where I am, if I want to access my personal or work emails then this virtual server has to be up and running. And since this does not sit in a server farm somewhere, I can’t guarantee it will be available.

So when I saw Google Apps I thought that there may be an opportunity to replicate the important aspects of my current setup within a more stable environment with higher availability. Here’s how I see it working:

• Register the ‘family’ domain name with Google Apps, giving mail, calendar, chat and website for free.
• Change my MX and various CNAME records for the domain to point to Google.
• Install Thunderbird as the new mail client, pulling emails from Google using POP3.

And that’s about it. The big issue right now is how to migrate everything from Notes to Thunderbird, but I will probably use IMAP to give access to old emails for a month or two and not bother copying everything across. Sometimes these exercises are a good means of having a tidy up !

I’m not totally convinced that POP3 is the way to go, but Google mail does have a setting that archives emails once they have been downloaded, and I think that will be the best solution. I will blog more about this, but initially I think it’s a good solution. I am certainly looking forward to the point in time when the Fedora VM is only fired up occasionally rather than running all the time. It’s a bit of a resource hog on what is, after all, a family PC.

OK, it’s a blog by a rabid Notes/Domino fan….but interesting nonetheless :

link

I guess it really reinforces the absolute commitment to MS software you need to have if you are going to run Exchange, or presumably most of their other server-side software. So much for open standards

I have been having problems getting emailing of voicemail to work on my home Asterisk system….seems it’s due to the lack of an internal DNS server ! This article explains how to fix the problem.

Nice article in Virtual Strategy magazine about how Small and Medium businesses can use virtualisation to improve their usage of hardware.

link

Just read an article that describes the new Skype Prime service and I must say that my gut feel is this is a mistake on Skype’s part. To summarise, you need to pay Skype for the privilege of charging other Skype users who call you. So the big advantage of using Skype in the first place (i.e. free calls between Skype users) has now been undermined. I wonder if Skype saw all the free calls that were being made and thought “We’ll have some revenue from that, thank you very much !”.

It remains to be seen how many people will go for this, and it all likelihood it will be attractive to companies providing support and advice services, but I can’t help wondering if less scrupulous people will find justification for charging for other calls.

Four Lakes will be moving soon to a more rural location near Ashford in Kent. In preparation for this move we have a new phone number - 01233 888240. This is a change of style from our previous non-geographic number - 0871 408 2117 (which carry on working, it just won’t be advertised) for a couple of reasons.

1. In the UK, my perception is that there is a lot of uncertainty over the cost of calls to non-geographic numbers. Virtually everyone knows that 0800 numbers are free (although not necessarily from mobiles), and most will recognise that an 0845 number should cost the same as a local call, but do you know what an 0871 costs you ? In fact, looking at my residential phone providers tariffs (link), charges can vary quite widely even within the 0871 band. Therefore, having a geographic number will, I believe, minimise any uncertainty anyone will have about calling us.
2. Using a VoIP service means that you don’t have to have the ‘local’ geographic number. I could have chosen to have an inner-London number (0207), or a Birmingham number, or even a Lerwick number. Indeed, in certain circumstances having such numbers can be a good way to offer ‘local’ support to customers around the country. However, I think it’s important for a company to have a local identity and not try to pretend to be something it isn’t. That’s why we have a postal address and a local number. There are too many ‘virtual’ companies out there that are here today and gone tomorrow.

Normal service will be maintained during the move as much as possible, but it is likely that we will be off-line for at least one working day.

Here’s a fan of Skype who has started hitting a few limitations. Interesting stuff:

http://robozen.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/why-skype-cant-replace-a-phone-top-10-skype-wtfs/

I’ve been thinking about a hypothetical discussion. This chat is with the owner of a smallish company who is running an old PBX which, despite a number of frustrations, has served them pretty reliably over the years. The conversation may be face-to-face or on the phone; it may be in their office, our office or at an exhibition. Wherever it is, there is one simple assumption about how this conversation would come about that I should share; namely that there is some, as yet unknown, reason why this person is considering replacing their phone system. So the first challenge in any such conversation is working out why that person is talking to you.

Notice that I’m considering the question from the customer’s viewpoint. A common mistake I’ve seen over the years (and made myself, if I’m honest) is to take the wrong viewpoint. It’s like a carpet salesman saying to a potential customer “I think you should have this carpet because it’s easy for us to lay.” It’s not going to impress the customer. In fact you may end up without a customer.

So the business owner is standing/sitting in front of me and we have a chat about why they’re there, what’s happening to the business over the coming weeks and months, how they are getting on with their current PBX, etc. I would expect this conversation to serve up the information I’m looking for. So I may find out they are attracted by the cheaper calls offered by VoIP, they may be relocating to bigger offices, they may find that the running costs of their current system are rising as they need an engineer in to make even the most trivial change, they may even be reaching the end of the maintenance/service agreement on their current system and it’s a natural time to consider other options.

There may even be other reasons that I haven’t considered (answers on a postcard….or at least in the comments). Once I know the driver, I can start explaining how our product is so much better But that’s for another blog.

I do quite a bit of work from home, particularly testing hardware and software. For many years I have been a reasonably happy customer of NTL (now Virgin Media), using their cable modem service to run a number of test servers and services. One of the big advantages of Virgin Media is that, as NTL, they did not much care what you were running behind their modem, as long as it wasn’t grossly illegal. So in my time I have run enough services to keep a small to mid-size office happy, including web servers, email servers, ftp servers, in the dim distant past even games servers. And now I am also running a VoIP PBX.

One of the issues of running all this stuff has been finding a broadband router/firewall that can cope with the variety of access rules and restrictions that I need to constantly amend to make sure I don’t leave any gaping holes for the nearest hacker to have fun with. A few years ago, without going through a particularly exhaustive exercise, I purchased a Linksys WRT54G wireless router/firewall. And whilst the wi-fi performance has not been as good as I hoped (my house isn’t that big, but it has a few blind spots as far as wi-fi coverage goes), I must say that the firewall side of the router has done the job very well. A recent firmware upgrade even extended the QoS (Quality of Service) capabilities, somewhat essential when you are running a VoIP  telephony server.

If I had one gripe about the standard Linksys firmware it was that you were quite restricted in how many rules you could define. If you needed more than 10 single ports or port ranges in total then you had to get very creative over how you managed it. My fear in doing this was that I may open up unnecessary ports just so I could run everything I wanted to behind the firewall.

Then recently I happened across a web page that spoke about open source Linksys firmware, and in particular the aforementioned Tomato. This promised to address the only significant concern I had with the Linksys firmware, so having backed up and printed off the current configuration I uploaded the Tomato firmware. My first pleasant surprise was that the majority of my existing configuration had been retained. In fact, the only re-configuration required was to put the access rules back in and define the QoS settings, presumably because with the new firmware you have much finer-grained control over the settings. I was happy to do this, and being honest it was a good opportunity to get to grips with the different implementation of defining the rules.

It’s early days yet, the firmware has been in place about 8 hours, but already I have been able to define exactly the ports I need open rather than trying to shoehorn the rules into place. The QoS setup is much more fine-grained too, even allowing me to divide HTTP depending on the amount of data being downloaded. So small web pages can have a high priority, but large file downloads have a low priority. Another nice feature is the ability to see real-time or historic traffic data in graph form.

If you have a Linksys or Buffalo router (both of which use Broadcom internals), and you keep running up against configurations limitations, then it’s worth considering changing the firmware; and the Tomato flavour seems to be very well regarded.