What’s IT all about?

Work on the new, improved Four Lakes website has started in earnest now, and for the moment I’m looking at Joomla as a CMS solution. My current site, whilst reasonably professional looking, is extremely limited in functionality and, indeed, in the total number of pages I can publish. The current plan is to develop a LAMP/Joomla based site* using one of the hundreds (if not thousands) of Joomla templates out there. As a result I should end up with something professional, modern, and capable of boosting business rather than holding it back. And bringing my Joomla skills up to scratch is probably not a bad move either !

* Using VMWare to provide a LAMP/Joomla development environment on a Windows PC is a real boon here.

Just noticed that Atcom have a new firmware available for the AT-530 (v070813). Right now there does not seem to be any information on their website about what issues it is supposed to address, or what features it adds (nothing I can see). However, in the interests of my loyal readers, I decided to install it anyway and check it out for you.

As far as I can see, there are no new features, although a previously reported issue with the Daylight Savings setting does now appear to have been resolved. However, the update was smooth and the phone appears to have suffered no ill effects. So I cautiously recommend you give it a go, having ensured you have a backup of your current config first, of course.

If you spot any changes that I haven’t, then please let me know. I will keep an eye on the Atcom website and update this post if any information appears.

Update: A missed call that resulted in voicemail on my Asterisk server has also resulted in ‘New Messages’ being displayed on the phone display, and the status light is also flashing. That’s the good news, the bad news is that listening to, and even deleting, the voicemail has not removed the message or flashing light. Haven’t yet found any other way of clearing the new found MWI functionality either. Ho hum !

Some time ago the Skype network suffered a 48-hour outage, rather embarrassing for a company offering a service to individuals, an absolute catastrophe for a company hoping to break into the business VoIP market. The one over-riding need every business has from its phone system is that when you go to place a call, it just works. Not most of the time, or 99.9% of the time, every single time you pick up the phone you get a dial tone.

But 99.9% is amazing, I hear you say. Well, have you ever considered just how bad only achieving 99.9% uptime for your phone system is ? Lets look at the maths. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a non-leap year (60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days). So 0.1% downtime equates to 31,536 seconds, or 525.6 minutes or just over 8 hours and 45 minutes. That’s a whole working day without your phone ! And you have absolutely no idea when that outage will happen…it might be in the wee hours of a Sunday morning if you’re lucky, or it might be in the middle of the call that was going to close the most important deal you’ve ever made ! Now that 99.9% doesn’t look quite so good, eh?

One of the major plus points to Skype’s architecture was supposed to be the fact that, with a peer-to-peer network, you inoculate yourself against server issues. The bigger the network, the more ’servers’ (supernodes in Skype-speak) you have sitting on people’s desks, tables, laps, wherever. What could possibly happen that would cause a significant percentage of these disparate machines to fail ? Well, now we know at least one answer to that question…windows update ! The outage was caused by a significant number of Skype supernodes (read your PC) automatically re-booting as a result of windows update. (Click here for the word directly from Skype). Not a worm attack, not a flood in a data centre somewhere, nope, a standard update process. And the scary thing is, because this is a direct result of the peer-to-peer architecture (i.e. a design flaw), there’s not much Skype can do about it, despite their protestations to the contrary. Are you going to re-boot your PC a couple of days late, possibly exposing it to the security hole the patch has updated, just because Skype would rather you waited ? Nah, didn’t think so.

Personally, I prefer to have a bit more control over my critical business services.

An interesting news item on the Teleappliant site here.

Of course, Teleappliant aren’t the only company to offer an Asterisk-based PBX

One sometimes overlooked advantage of using VoIP technology over traditional telephony solutions is the enablement of remote access to the phone system. So rather than having to physically be at your desk (or at least in the office if you use a DECT phone), you can now have your work phone number follow you around wherever you have internet access. Many corporations, and a number of smaller businesses, who have jumped on the VoIP bandwagon have enabled this aspect of the technology already, and find it extremely useful. There is one important consideration, though, that you should make if you are considering this course of action yourself.

In the VoIP world, your voice traffic follows a very similar route to your data traffic. In smaller companies especially, the temptation therefore is to utilise the existing data network infrastructure to ease the implementation of the voice network. However, since the voice traffic needs to be routed via the internet, you end up compromising your edge-of-network security to implement VoIP (for instance, the recommendation for RTP traffic is to open UDP ports 10000 to 20000 !). Bigger companies will probably separate voice and data network equipment as much as they can to mitigate this risk, but smaller companies may not wish to, for financial or other reasons. Introduce the desire to allow remote soft or hard phones to login to your company PBX so that calls to their DID can follow them around the world, and you can start to see the extent of the risk.

The solution ? Well, as in many cases, that depends on the company and how much effort they are willing to put into identifying and addressing the risks. The only real solution is to run a proper risk assessment exercise so that you understand what could happen, the likelihood of it happening, and what you have to do to fix it.

The result, though, is peace of mind to go with your mobile VoIP telephony.