What’s IT all about?

I have recently upgraded my mobile phone to a Nokia E51, partly because I wanted to test out it’s potential as a SIP extension on our Asterisk network. This, of course, opens up the possibility of having one phone that you use whether you are in the office, on the road, or even at home. The detail of these scenarios needs to be determined by your particular circumstances, but it is certainly feasible.

There is plenty of information on how to actually set up this phone on an Asterisk system (Google is your friend here), so I will merely say that this aspect of the test was pretty painless.  Within minutes of taking the E51 out of it’s box I had it registered as an extension and happily making and receiving calls. Personally I would rather not have this as my only office phone, so any incoming calls are actually routed to both my desk phone and my E51, but you may wish to set it up differently.

Whilst the E51 has great battery life in what might be described as a traditional setup (i.e. not using the wi-fi capability) it is a known fact that wi-fi does drain the battery much more quickly than would otherwise be the case. This phone is very much business-oriented, so is designed to have pretty good battery life (amazing when you have it in your hand and feel how slim it is). I have heard estimates of 4 or 5 days between charges mentioned. All that goes out of the window when you turn wi-fi on. I have been doing a lot of testing over the last few days, so my use is atypical, but I have still had to charge the phone once a day ! I would expect that to improve slightly when my testing is complete, but I can’t imagine it lasting more than 2 days.

Anyway, back to the Asterisk interoperability. The E51 allows you to choose which type of call routing (i.e. mobile or internet) to use as default. If you choose internet, it will always fall back on standard mobile calling should the internet route fail. In practice this seems to work well, with one exception.

Having one device for all situations means having a single telephone address book. At first glance this might seem to be ‘a good thing’ and in truth it is…but it did throw up one interesting problem. As I travel abroad from time to time I like to store phone numbers in my mobile in ‘international’ forma, namely with a plus sign at the start, followed by the 2-digit country code, followed by the actual number. So, for instance, I would store our office number as +441233888240

This is all well and dandy, except the first time I fed such a number into an internet call, and therefore on to Asterisk, it didn’t work. It didn’t work to the extent that the call was not made rather than passing through from Asterisk to the mobile network. Thinking the problem was in Asterisk, I looked in the log and found….nothing ! A bit more testing suggested the phone was trying to place the call via Asterisk, but it wasn’t getting anywhere.

To cut a long story short, it transpires that passing a plus sign to Asterisk, without specific consideration for that within an outbound route, will result in the call being dropped pretty unceremoniously. So I proceeded to add the following to the outbound route dial pattern ‘+|.’ This matches the plus sign, strips it out and then passes the rest of the string on to the relevant trunk. This is important as stripping more out would remove the country code, and you’d get into a bit of a tizz trying to put it back on.

The IAX2 trunk I use for most outbound calls expects national numbers without country codes or international numbers starting with a ‘0′ followed by the country code. Since I wasn’t passing numbers in either of these formats, and didn’t want to reconstruct my dialing logic completely, I set up a second trunk in asterisk for the same provider. I haven’t tested this with a SIP provider, and I have my suspicions that it wouldn’t work, but for IAX2 it is fine. Within the second trunk I know what’s coming in (i.e. an international number starting with the 2-digit country code) so I merely tag ‘00′ on to the start  (using ‘00+Z.’) and send it off down the trunk. So far it works very smoothly and I can have all my mobile phonebook numbers in international format.

In a prior existence as an IT Manager, I implemented a Websense server on our network, primarily to monitor website usage and enforce our internet use policy. It was, and probably still is, a very good product offering a huge level of detail on who is accessing what on the network.

For a small business, however, Websense and it’s competing products just don’t make sense. Financially they are aimed at corporations, not a small office, and they require quite a bit of work to set up and maintain, let alone keep on top of the reports that are generated.

There are hosted services out there, through the likes of Messagelabs and Blackspider, that take the need for installing your own equipment away. However, there is still an ongoing cost involved, and you are likely to be faced with significant configuration and monitoring still.

If, however, all you want is basic web filtering (i.e. don’t let anyone access gambling sites) then this can be achieved for free. How, well it’s quite easy really, and it’s all achieved through DNS. For those that don’t know, DNS (Domain Name Services) converts those ever-so friendly website and email address names (e.g. www.fourlakes.co.uk) into much less friendly but very necessary IP addresses (e.g. 72.52.225.30) which tell your PC exactly where to find the relevant web page. Your network is probably set up to use your ISP’s DNS servers, which makes sense as they are located quite close (in network terms anyway) to your computer. However, if you change your DNS server settings on your ADSL or Cable router to point at those run by OpenDNS.com (namely 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220) then you open up basic web filtering for your network. You need to register on the OpenDNS site first, but once you’ve done that it will recognise any traffic from your network and filter it against a whole raft of website categories. You can choose which ones you want blocked, resulting in a standard message which can be tailored to include your logo. This page also contains some fairly discrete advertising which is how the service pays for itself.

Additional feature include some pretty basic stats…you won’t get filtering or reporting to a user level, but you will find out if someone is trying to access unwanted websites on your network, allowing you to take action to track down the culprit if you so wish.

Worth a look.

Open source software is a bit of a buzzword (buzzphrase?) at the moment, and rightly so. Considering that the majority of the world’s websites run on open source software (servers running the suite of applications known collectively as LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and that the Firefox web browser continues to erode Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the browser of choice for many people, it’s not surprising that more and more companies are happy to consider non-commercial software for mission-critical tasks.

Proponents of open source software will have their favourites, in my case that consists of Firefox for browsing; Thunderbird for email with the Lightning plugin for calendars; OpenOffice for documents, spreadsheets, etc.; Joomla for my website content management; and SugarCRM for management of Customer activities. I am also looking at phpList as a possible mechanism for running an email newsletter. The total cost of implementing the above, nothing but my time and the rewarding process of gaining knowledge.

Many more people go further than I have at the moment and use a Linux-based operating system such as Ubuntu. The one real issue with open source, though, is knowing what to choose, even for evaluation purposes. Whilst you can happily download and install any open source software to try it out, it can take a while to get a good appreciation of what is actually available in any particular area.

Well, that aspect of the choosing process has just improved with the creation of a pretty good list of open source software on mashable (link). You still have to compare the software and evaluate against your needs, but that is a process that should be followed regardless of the licence under which the software is provided. At least now, though, you know what you should be looking at.

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 !

There are a few optiones if you wish to use a free database in your business. Nowadays many are aware of the open-source options such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, but may not be aware of some of the free options from Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. In this article, Leon Katsnelson of IBM evaluates his company’s offering - DB2 Express-C, in a prelude to looking at Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 and Oracle Express Edition (XE). It’s an interesting read, with the obvious proviso that this is an IBM guy talking about an IBM product.

My review of the AT-530 did not go unnoticed, particularly one of my critical comments regarding the display which was permanently set to ‘VOIP Phone’ - not particularly useful I’m sure you’ll agree. Well, a couple of days ago an email arrived with a rather large attachment - a new firmware update hot off the Atcom presses (now also available on the Atcom website download area).

The new firmware offers a few new features:

Version 07-04-24 Release Note:

　　1.Add eight different ring tone
　　2.synchronize from SNPT server
　　3.Add the sliding bar of menu setting page
　　4.Add LCD logo display customization function
　　5.Display the current server type ( SIP or IAX)

You’ll note No. 4, which I can confirm works. I have yet to check the other new features (keep an eye out for the full review soon), but this new firmware does appear to have broken one previously working function. Now, if you set the time zone to GMT then you just cannot enable daylight savings, so the clock will be an hour slow during the summer months. Back to the drawing board guys !

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 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.

The Atcom AT-530 arrived late last week, and my initial impression was that it would not look out of place on the typical office desk. It uses a decent quality plastic and the design is in no way offensive, if a bit safe. However, at a typical retail price of about £50 (excl VAT), I wasn’t expecting a rival to Band & Olufsen.

Once you take it out of the box and start putting it together, though, you start to notice a few, errmmm, ‘quirks’. For a start, the handset cable is quite short. Now this wouldn’t be an issue normally, but the phone itself is very light for a desk phone, so you quickly find that if you pull the handset more than about a foot or so from the phone, then rather than the cable unravelling, the phone itself follows you around ! I can see this alone being a major gripe for a lot of office workers, although investing in some sticky pads for the feet may resolve it quickly and cheaply. Otherwise, you may need to replace the handset cable for a longer one.

Another minor gripe is the lack of backlighting for the display which may cause issues in tricky lighting situations, although that is assuaged somewhat by the utilisation of a large clear font. My biggest gripe about the display, though, is that it does not seem possible to amend the standard text on the top line. I would much rather it could be configured to show the name or extension number of the person at that desk instead of just ‘VOIP PHONE’.

Initial setup turned out to be trickier that it should have been, although I will admit that some of that was most definitely my fault. My first mistake was in assuming that the LAN port should be hooked up to the voice switch, and not the WAN port. Like many IP phones the Atcom will allow you to daisy-chain your PC off the back of it, and this is achieved by having a 2-port switch built in to the phone itself. A little bit of thought on my part would have made it apparent that the PC should hook up to the LAN port and the switch to the WAN port. However, this wouldn’t have been a problem if it hadn’t been for an unlikely co-incidence. My test network runs in the 192.168.10.x subnet, and this just so happens to be the subnet that the LAN side of the Atcom’s switch tries to utilise too. So once the phone was hooked up both it and my router were trying to use the 192.168.10.1 address. The WAN side is happy to use DHCP to allocate an initial address, as you would imagine.

Once I figured that issue out, I was able to access the web configuration page for the phone, and boy do you get a lot of options here !

• LAN config is pretty straightforward, with options for IP addredd config, bridging, NAT and also the ability to act as a DHCP server.
• WAN config allows you to set a static IP (useful if you run your own PBX), use DHCP, or use PPPoE. You can also spoof the MAC address if needs be.
• SIP config is pretty straightforward, and a nice touch is that if the address is the same for server, proxy and realm then you need only enter it once (in the server field) and it is automatically used in the other fields. Bit confusing if you’re not expecting it, though. In another screen you can configure a second SIP server for failover capabilities.
• IAX config, the main reason I wanted to try this phone as I will be using it with a Concordiax Asterisk server, is again quite straightforward. One thing to be aware of, though, is you need to tick the ‘IAX(Default Protocol)’ box or the phone will try to use SIP for outgoing calls. This may well confuse your PBX.
• Time Set config allows you to set up the phone to pull the date/time from an NTP server. I use one of the uk.pool.ntp.org servers which do the job perfectly well. However, it looks like you may have to manually set when you’re using daylight savings time on the phone, which has the potential to be quite painful in a larger organisation.

There are other switch-related settings, such as firewall, NAT, VPN and Q0S (utilising 802.1p). Indeed, just looking at the web config you could be forgiven for thinking the device is a router with some VoIP capability rather than the other way around. It certainly looks feasible for the phone to be used as a simple router/firewall for a small network such as a branch office.

Additional features include digit mapping (so the phone knows when to send the digits to the PBX), call forward, DND, auto-answer, hotline, blacklist, limit list and others. Although some of these features you would probably set on your PBX. The AT-530 also has a phonebook as well as 9 configurable speeddial keys for those frequentl-used numbers, and also have the usual configuration management options. You can provision the phone manually using the phone keys, Telnet or HTTP. There is also an option to provision using FTP/TFTP or a configuration server.

Once I’d got my head around that lot it was time to hook it up to my Asterisk server. I tried using SIP first, and after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing (all my fault again !) it was there. Everything worked as expected and incoming/outgoing calls were made. I didn’t spend too much time checking out SIP before I set up an IAX extension in Asterisk and configured the phone to use IAX instead. It connected quickly and easily, althought I did have an issues with outgoing calls for a while. This I eventually traced to the ‘Use IAX as the default protocol’ setting, meaning that the phone was trying to use SIP for outbound calls even though it was hooked up to the PBX via IAX. I ticked the relevant box and all was OK.

In the few calls I have made so far, call quality has been good, although there was a couple of hiccups on a call to a mobile in a noisy environment. The phone’s mic and speaker seem up to the job in handsfree mode without being startlingly good, but I will need to use the phone for a while yet to get a better feel for call quality, and will blog on my results then. There is no port for a headset.

Finally, one other gripe…the lack of a message waiting indicator. The phone will tell you on the display if you have missed an incoming call, but it would be nice if there was a flashing or solid light to tell you there was a message too. You preference may be different, but for me this is a big omission. (see the update at the end of the review for more on MWI)

In conclusion, the Atcom AT-530 is priced as an entry-level IP phone, and despite some nice features (not least of which is IAX support) it is difficult to consider it as anything beyond a cheap and cheerful option. However, if all you require is a basic desk phone, then it’s definitely worth a look.

UPDATE: I believe it is possible to configure MWI with this phone, but the documentation is, shall we say, challenging (seems like a direct translation from Chinese to English at times) so I am having problems getting it to work.

UPDATE 2: I have written a follow-up to this review here.