As of today, I’ve officially made an entry into the world of podcasting. Wheee!
I’ve been listening to the Geeks and God podcast for several months now. It’s a great podcast, hosted by two very talented guys – their mission is to help churches and ministries carry out their mission more effectively through the use of technology. Topics so far have ranged from CSS to open-source content management systems, to proper audio gear, to what presentation software to use in your worship services. A few weeks back, I approached the hosts to see if they’ve ever talked about VoIP on the podcast. They hadn’t. They invited me to be a guest commentator on the subject, and I soon found myself in a 1-hour recording session with them. All in all, I think it turned out okay. Of course I wish I could have been a bit more clear and that I could have talked in more detail on the subject, but that’s okay – it was just meant to be a very brief overview.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do so here. Otherwise you can go here to listen to just this one episode.
Cheers!
Via ZDnet.
They’ve apparently started either blocking or turning the QoS way down for Vonage VoIP traffic in some areas. Oh man – if they start blocking SunRocket, I’ll be *very* unhappy.
I got approval to go ahead and work on connecting our existing PBX at work with an asterisk server. So…I ordered up another T1/E1 card for the PBX and a T1/E1 PCI card for my asterisk server. The two systems will be cross-connected by an E1 [1] crossover cable, essentially giving me the ability to have 29 simultaneous conversations routing between the two systems. It should be quite a fun project, and in the end should save the company a healthy chunk of money. Our hope is to use the additional VoIP extentions for our employees out in the Vancouver office, as well as travelling users.
[1] E1 is a protocol similar to T1, only it has 30 channels versus T1′s 24. In my case, it’s going to be an E1 PRI, which allows 29 channels plus 1 channel for signalling, CID information, etc.
I finally got around to perfecting the traffic shaping rules on my m0n0wall firewall box. As many of you know, I use Sunrocket’s VoIP service, which works great except for when I’m doing any sort of large file upload. When this happens, the voice packets get delayed due to the large amount of upstream traffic, and hence, voice starts cutting out and sounding like a bad cellphone connection. Anyway, with the new traffic shaping rules, the m0n0wall box is able to take all of the upload (and download) traffic, and re-prioritize it. So…I’ve set up rules to give packets to and from my VoIP box the highest priority. The difference this change makes is quite remarkable.
To test the rules, I started a large download *and* a large upload, then called my work number and left myself a voicemail. I did it once with the shaping rules disabled and then again with the rules enabled. You can hear the results:
Without shaping and with shaping.
Here are the rules I currently have in place if you’re really interested.
Well our (previously) PSTN number was successfully ported over to our VoIP provider tonight, which meant I had to get the house phone system wired up to the VoIP box. Well, after 30 minutes of dust, improvised fish tape, staple guns, and wire ties, I got ‘er all hooked up. So now we have unlimited local and long distance calls for ~17 bones/month. Not bad.
/me goes off to sleep. ‘night all.
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