What’s IT all about?

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.

Yesterday I received in the post some information from a company (who shall remain unnamed) in the public sector who had put out an Invitation To Tender (ITT) for a new, VoIP-enabled telephone system. The ITT itself contained very little information indeed about their requirements, as is often the case. However, it did mention the fact that it was a public sector company, and since value for money is frequently highest on their selection criteria, Asterisk-based systems are usually a good fit. So I cheerfully applied for an information pack, which duly arrived, as I said, yesterday.

A quick read through the detailed tender document made it apparent that this was one contract not worth taking any further. When you see selection criteria such as

“The system will not be based on open source code”

then you suspect that they have had their fingers burnt. A more in depth perusal confirmed the suspicion:

“Since implementation London users and Homeworkers have experienced a variety of
issues with voice quality. The voice quality has varied from acceptable to unusable.
Outbound voice quality has been mostly acceptable but inbound voice quality has on
occasions contained dropouts or has been completely inaudible, preventing users
from hearing what callers are saying.”

They go on to say that WAN changes and the introduction of G.729 have improved matters, but obviously not enough. They also bemoan the lack of available expert Asterisk knowledge making it difficult to troubleshoot effectively.

There are a number of checks that any half-decent Asterisk consultant should have made at this site. Is the server up to the job? Is there adequate bandwidth for their requirements? Has QoS been implemented correctly across the board? Are there unnecessary codec translation going on? Is the VoIP provider up to the job? Instead company or consultant who carried out the initial implementation has left them in the lurch, and now a company that could have been very happy with an Asterisk solution are determined never to touch it again, and if anyone asks their opinion they will no doubt be very disparaging.

The solution? The best way to avoid the situation, in my opinion, is for any consultant or company selling an Asterisk-based solution/service to make sure that their customers have an alternative contact should things go belly-up. Do your homework and get in touch with someone who knows their way around Asterisk blindfolded. Your customer is more likely, not less, to stick with you if you can demonstrate that you have their best interests at heart and can provide them with a level of service that they require. That does not need you to be an Asterisk guru, but you do need to know where to turn if such a person is required.

From VentureVoIP comes news that Dell are going to supply SME’s with Fonality’s Asterisk-based VoIP system - PBXtra. Details of the arrangement are sketchy at the moment, but already there are murmerings of doubt amidst the obvious conclusion that this is a strong deal for Fonality and potentially for the SME market worldwide, 35 million of whom are expected to dip their toe in the VoIP waters over the next three years.

I must admit to wondering about the wisdom of the arrangement myself. Fonality have certainly got a pretty mature product with, in Asterisk terms at least, good market penetration. This deal will drive that through the roof, and one has to wonder just where the support for a huge increase in the installed base will come from ? If it’s Dell, then they have to train up a lot of people in a subject where they currently have little or no knowledge. Then there’s the mixed bag of customer experience with Dell support, which is bad enough if you’re dealing with an important server, but unacceptable if your phone system has just crashed and customers can’t call you.

That’s fixable, though, and I suspect that Fonality will provide 3rd-level support in a classic support scenario so that the easy stuff can be handled by Dell and the tough stuff goes where the knowledge lies.

My biggest concern is that I don’t think there’s a good fit between the way VoIP should be sold to SME’s (or any business) and the way in which Dell normally does business in this market.  Let me explain. If you have a look on my website you will see that I, in common with Fonality, offer a number of VoIP system ‘packages’. I suspect that Fonality view this in the same way I do…as a means of illustrating the ball-park cost of a VoIP system and of initiating a conversation about a particular customer’s specific and unique needs. I have no intention or experience of a customer phoning up to say “I want to buy package no. 2, can you send it tomorrow”. It just doesn’t happen that way, and so it shouldn’t as getting the phone system right is crucial to each and every business, big or small.

You can see where this is going, I’m sure. Dell’s business model, the one that has made them into the massive company they are now, is geared on the assumption that the customer knows exactly what they want, and Dell can provide it quicker and cheaper then anyone else. You start doing that with phone systems and businesses are going to suffer. The MD of a small company will not be an expert in VoIP-enabled telephony, and he probably won’t employ anyone who is an expert either. They will be focused on selling their widgets or whatever it is that makes them successfiul. And whilst they may be interested in buying a phone system that has the potential to save them money and provide more functionality, if it starts taking a lot of their time to install, maintain and support then that advantage is lost.

Putting a PBX into an SME is not just about selling them the server and a few phones. Crucial to the success of an install are factors such as how to minimise disruption, which codec to use, the efficient use of the existing network or installation of a separate VoIP network, the means of hooking up branch offices and homes to the VoIP system (another PBX, use a VPN, etc ?), and many other questions. These all need someone with knowledge and experience to assess before coming up with the best solution for that particular customer. Will Dell be doing all that…I have my doubts.

This could be a great thing, or it could set VoIP for SME’s back 5 years. I have my fingers crossed that it’s not the latter.

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.

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.

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.

Apologies for the long delay between posts. Truth be told, stuff outside work has been taking precedence over the last few months with the result that all non-essential business activities have taken a back seat. The ’stuff’ I refer to includes the house move that has been posted about previously, and as a result has required that I look after my youngest daughter pretty much full-time until she starts school in September (mainly due to the lack of available childcare in the area at short notice, but also because it’s an opportunity to spend some time with her before school starts).

However, I have had a little time to myself over the last couple of months, and have been considering changing my website from a highly limited, template-driven, ISP-hosted site to something based on a CMS. Early days, but I have managed to set up a virtual machine running Ubuntu server, LAMP and Joomla. So far it looks promising, although to do it properly I may end up moving this blog away from WordPress and on to whichever solution I end up with.

So normal service should be resumed in early September, and I would like to make the move to a new website by the end of the year. Watch this space !

Virtual Strategy magazine is a decent read for those interested in virtualisation in the workplace. A couple of recent articles caught my eye:

Solving Real-World IT Issues Through Client Virtualization
Dave Buchholz - Intel

Common Misconceptions of Server Consolidation
By Scott Feuless, Senior Consultant, Compass Americ

The Client virtualisation article is a little light on detail, but does set the scene for effective use of virtualisation technologies for testing new client applications, and also for enabling applications with different client requirements to co-exist.

The server consolidation article can read a little like a list of reasons not to consider virtualisation, however it is intendedto be read more as a checklist of considerations for when you are contemplating virtualisation in your environment. If you can answer all the hard questions then you know it’s right for you.

Rather than give you chapter and verse, have a read of this article on Digium, the company behind the Asterisk Open Source PBX and you might get an inkling as to the opportunities still available to you when you can’t charge for licences.

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.