Suggested Routers for VoIP

In addition to the new Trixbox training mentioned the other day, Fonality is now offering commercial versions of TrixBox...called Trixbox Pro. This is offered as a "hybrid hosted" model, in which you supply the server and other hardware, but the server is more or less permanently in contact and managed from their hosted server application.

As they are rolling this out, they seem to have upgraded the help support wiki, with some very specific information gleaned from their experience of deploying over 60,000 phones. For example, here are recommendations for routers suitable for use with VoIP.

They have also published a hardware compatibilty list, which lists certified, (fully supported) hardware and uncertified (supported by at a 25% cost premium) hardware. Of interest are several HP servers that are certified, and the Dell SC440 (tower), and 1950 (1-U rackmount). Aastra and Polycom phones are on the certified list, as are Sangoma interface cards.

On the suggested router list at the low end are the Linksys BEFSR81, D-Link DI724U and Fortinet Fortigate 50B.

They also have a "blacklist"...stuff that they don't recommend for various reasons. These include problems with firmware (notorious with some low-end routers), and design incompatibilities. Sure enough, my BEFSX41 is on the blacklist.

Internet Speed in U.S. is at the back of the pack

From this morning's Washington Post:

Tell me something I don't already know...we are repeating the same mistakes that we did with cell phone service; multiple technologies fighting it out in the cities, lack of access in the countryside, service that is way too expensive and speeds that are dismal.

TOKYO -- Americans invented the Internet, but the Japanese are running away with it.

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States -- and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world's fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country -- as well as in South Korea and much of Europe -- is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

And why is this the case? The Bush administration always favors companies over consumers and customers, even if consumer-friendly policies would ultimately create a market exponentially larger than what we end up with all the regulation in place which favors (and is written by) the old-line communication companies.

[In Japan...]For just $2 a month, upstart broadband companies were allowed to rent bandwidth on an NTT copper wire connected to a Japanese home. Low rent allowed them to charge low prices to consumers -- as little as $22 a month for a DSL connection faster than almost all U.S. broadband services.

In the United States, a similar kind of competitive access to phone company lines was strongly endorsed by Congress in a 1996 telecommunications law. But the federal push fizzled in 2003 and 2004, when the Federal Communications Commission and a federal court ruled that major companies do not have to share phone or fiber lines with competitors. The Bush administration did not appeal the court ruling.

"The Bush administration largely turned its back on the Internet, so we have just drifted downwards," said Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. diplomat who served in Japan and is writing a history of how that country trumped the United States in broadband.

Trixbox Training - More and Better!

Trixbox has added some more in-depth training options. I took the FtOCC (Fonality Trixbox Open Communications Certification training in June, and it started to get interesting on a technical level.

Now the TB folks have two new courses that go deeper into the technology:

• FtOCC Technician (trixbox CE, Pro and PBXtra)
  FtOCC Technician is a three-day technical certification course designed to train resellers and consultants to support their clients running trixbox CE, trixbox Pro, and PBXtra systems. Taught by Fonality technical support instructors, FtOCC Technician dives deep into platform and application installation, carrier setup and integration, network configuration, echo causes and remedies, and other common issues. A requirement for Authorized and Premium Resellers, this course should be taken by Linux technicians and engineers who regularly support client installations.
  
  
• FtOCC Engineer (trixbox CE, Pro, and PBXtra) FtOCC Engineer is a new course designed to teach engineers how to do custom application development for trixbox CE, Pro and PBXtra. Write deep CRM integration, database dips, text-to-speech, internet look-ups and more by combining the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) and Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) with a CGI, SQL database, IVR, or all three. Want to hear a perl-based IVR in action? Call 310-861-4393 and hit option 2. Taught by Fonality's lead engineers who created trixbox Pro and PBXtra, this course is for serious programmers with deep Linux knowledge.
  

The original FtoCC training course now appears to be renamed Trixbox Administrator course, and is the "entry-level" course of the series.

Even if you aren't selling and installing Trixboxes, the courses are useful on a general level as you learn a great deal about Asterisk, VoIP, Linux, echo-cancellation, etc.

Disk Partitions

I am reminding myself of how disk partitions work, and how they can be manipulated. The impetus for this is an attempt to load Windows XP Embedded (XPe) on my target machine, an ASUS Pundit. Using Acronis Disk Director Suite, ($49.00) I created a separate small partition for the XPe installation. The problem then was trying to figure out how to boot the extra partition.

Partitions can be marked several ways
a. Active Primary - this is the boot partition. There can only be one of these on a disk.
b. Primary - This can be either a bootable partition, or not.
c. Extended - A physical partition that can be further subdivided into other partitions.
d. Logical - A subdivision of an extended partition.

The upshot for the test machine is that I want to have two partitions; one for the original Windows and software installation, that includes all of the necessary application software and a second testing partition for the Windows XPe image which contains all the applications and drivers already burnt into the XPe image.

Also, I need to be able to designate one partion or the other as the boot partition. This is done by marking the partiion as “Active”, and insuring that the boot drive letter is designated drive C:. The first part, designating the partition as the boot partition, seems to work fine within the Acronis program. Changing the drive letter, on the other hand, does not seem to be so intuitive as it involves a registry edit.

The drive letter desgination is important, because many programs rely on the designated drive letter to find their own executables and data.

To boot the XPe partition, I changed it to the “active” partition, and then renamed the drive letter to C: A final change involved changing the Boot.ini file which is present in the root directory of the partition. This file looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows
 XP Embedded" /fastdetect /noexecute=AlwaysOff

and it gets modified to change partition(1) to partition(2) in both instances, so that the boot designated boot partition is indeed the 2nd partition on the drive. I recall from my distant MCP days, that although disk drives are numbered beginning with 0, the partitions are numbered beginning with 1. The diagnostic for this is that if you have already designated the second partition as active, but still boot into the “wrong” partition, it means that the OS files that are loaded are the ones that are pointed to be the boot.ini. To make this even more confusing, there is the notion of the “system” partition and the “boot” partition. This is a distinction which I think is only talked about when dealing with Microsoft operating systems. Perversly, the names seem to be reversed….it is the “system” partition which contains NTLDR and boot.ini. and the “boot” partition which contains \Windows, and \Windows\System32, and all the operating system binary files.

In 99% of the cases, of course these files are are all on the same partition and in most cases there is a single partition on a drive anyway.