Mark Recek’s Blog

So Time Machine seems like a great idea, and the market for good, reliable backup solutions is greatly under served. Even though Apple’s Time Machine product is good overall, it still has its own problems.

The biggest problem is that there’s no options for how often a backup should occur. It’s hard coded to backup every hour, anytime the backup drive is connected. This is great for people constantly updating documents, or when insanely frequent backups are more important than a usable computer. The problem is often when the machine is backing-up the computer’s performance is noticably affected, especially if you’re like me and run Parallels constantly. I think that perhaps the backup operations may even be hindering the stability of Parallels and the computer in general. Such frequent drive access has to reduce the life of the hard drive.

I have been able to change the frequency of the backups from 1 hour to 6 hours, but it involved editing a text file, not user friendly at all. A backup system should be useful for the person using it, there should be a slider for changing the frequency just like on a screen saver. The most important feature of having a backup is that I won’t loose all my data if I loose my laptop or if my hard drive crashes, I’m not so concerned about backing-up every hour.

Just recently (after some Time Machine updates) Time Machine has been acting strange: it gives me warnings saying that it can’t backup because the “backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 100.0 MB but only 3.7 GB are available.” Funny error isn’t (screen shot below), Time Machine is suppose to automatically delete old backups to make room for new ones, so even if I was low on space I should have never seen an error message like this.

Hopefully Apple will fix these problems soon. And hopefully we’ll see a business-grade version sometime soon.

So a few weeks ago I made a decision to get into better physical shape. I started by joining the local LA Fitness gym, I’ve been going there 4 days a week to do strength training and cardio. I’ve also started paying racquet ball and tennis; I’m really enjoying all of it.

When I get up early in the morning and get to the gym at about 6 am is when I notice the benefits. I am much more alert and ready to tackle anything that comes to me that day. I’m not normally a good morning person, but working out definitely helps.

About two weeks ago we finished our Allworx training session and became certified as an official Allworx reseller. After about 2 years of searching for the right VoIP phone system for small to medium sized business we have found the best in the market.

We are primarily a computer services company, so why are we getting into the phone system business? It’s a converging market, phone systems are utilizing computer networks for more robust features and flexibility. And even though are primary services involve computer and networks for small businesses, computers are just tools for business systems, so really we are also a business systems consultant. To best serve our clients we need to be able to provide or facilitate all aspects of a businesses’ communication system.

The Allworx system is a great all around system for small businesses, at a reasonable price. Of course VoIP is still not at cheap as many of the traditional digital systems, but the businesses don’t get the biggest advantage: remote phones. It’s very simple with Allworx and decent Internet connection.

The other big plus is they have created their own system for the feature keys. The SIP protocol has long been lacking in the abillity to have emulate simple functions like showing when an outside line is occupied, Allworks can function like a key system, even when using a T1 line or a SIP trunk, this is a huge advantage for small businesses who are accustomed to using a key system.

In summary the Allworx system is user friendly and works well, the company seems to work closely with the resellers and customers, all of these addup to make the Allworx family of products one of the best choices for small to medium businesses in need of a modern phone system.

www.allworx.com

Last week I had Verizon FiOS installed with data, voice, and TV services.  The Internet connection is great, but Verizon’s design of the system seems a inflexible to customer needs.

Ordering was fairly strait forward, called Verizon sales and spoke to a rep after waiting about only 10 minutes.  We went over the packages and pricing, ordered it and scheduled installation for a week later.

The day before the install I decided to do some wiring in the house so I could have Cat5e (for data & voice) and coax where I wanted it and how I wanted it; I don’t trust the free Verizon install service to do anything approaching a quality job.  It was a good thing I was home that morning because that’s when a Verizon contractor came to the house to run conduit and fiber to the house.  These guys were going to run it to the current demark outside the house, right be our A/C unit.  I asked if they could run it inside the garage at a location that was just a bit closer than the outside demark, through a current hole we had in the wall for a sprinkler wire.  At first they weren’t going to do that because it wasn’t what they were told to do, but I got the guys to call up the boss, he came over and said that was no problem.

I did not want sensitive electronic equipment mounted on the outside of the house, exposed to the elements and in a location to which it is quite difficult to run wire.  The inside location is right below a spacious garage attic and on a wall with plenty of room to mount telcom equipment.  I just wish Verizon would have notified me of when these contractors were going to come by, I would think that most home owners should be given notice so they too can make decisions about where to install such wiring.

On the scheduled install data the Verizon tech was early to the appointment.  He was quite courteous and helpful, and appreciated the pre-wiring work.  He also was quite thankful for having the equipment inside; when fiber is run to the outside they still have to run power and the battery pack on the inside.

He was knowlegible about the install process, but not about the core technologies involved.  During the ordering process I  requested a direct bridged connection to my router as I did NOT want a Verizon router in-between my router and the Internet.  Verizon’s ONT 612 (Optical Network Terminator) has Ethernet (RJ45 jack) and coax connections.  The coax uses MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance, basically a LAN for coax.  Verizon pushes their techs to ONLY use the MoCA connection to feed the Internet connection to the Verizon router, espeically for TV installs.  Considering the same coax service as a WAN (for the router) and LAN (for the TV set top boxes), it minimizes work, complications, and wiring, but at a loss of flexiblity.

Only one of the two ports on the ONT can be enabled for data at one time.  The coax connector still outputs a TV signal either way, but the set top boxes rely on a MoCA LAN to receive TV Guide updates and to stream video on demand.  What I figured out though is that the router and the set top boxes don’t care how that Internet connection is connected, meaning that so long as the Verizon router has an Internet connection, the MoCA LAN for the set top boxes will still work properly.  This means that I can have my router connected to the RJ45 Ethernet port (so it could have a direct connection to the Internet with a public IP address) and still have my set top boxes get their Internet connection.  The Verizon router’s Internet Ethernet port just needs to be connected to the LAN network behind my router.

At first the inflexibility of the FiOS system (for power users such as myself) was really pissing me off, but now that I figured out a way to have my router connected directly to the Internet, and have the FiOS TV service I think everything will work.  Howerver I still have a ticket open to change the Internet connection from the MoCA to Ethernet.  I’m sure Verizon doesn’t get requests like this all the time from residential users.

A few months back I posted information on how to SIP trunk an Asterisk server to bandwidth.com. The configuration included was for Asterisk 1.2.x.

Recently we upgraded our office server to Asterisk 1.4.x and encountered a problem with the “from-bandwidth” context used to strip the +1 from the inbound DID and Caller ID. So after doing some research on Google I found that the function AND variable used to strip the +1 were BOTH depreciated. The “context” is the configuration in the extensions.conf file that all incoming calls are routed into; the +1 is stripped from the DID an Caller ID so Asterisk gets a normal ten digit number like 8005551212 instead of +18005551212.

The configuration files below come with no warranty of any kind. You may need to alter them to work with your particular configuration. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Below is the OLD “from-bandwidth” context:

[from-bandwidth]
exten => _+1.,1,Set(DID=${EXTEN:2})
exten => _+1.,2,SetCIDNum(${CALLERIDNUM:2})
exten => _+1.,n,Goto(from-trunk,${DID},1)
My research found that the “SetCIDNum” function and “CALLERIDNUM” variable were both depreciated.

The NEW “from-bandwidth” context:

[from-bandwidth]
exten => _+1.,1,Set(DID=${EXTEN:2})
exten => _+1.,2,Set(CALLERID(num)=${CALLERID(num):2})
exten => _+1.,n,Goto(from-trunk,${DID},1)
Notice the second exten line is the one that changed. Thanks to this web site I found the new function and variable I should be using. I hope this saves someone else the hassle I went through trying to figure out this issue.