I just signed us up for residential VoIP phone service through SunRocket. They’re a newcomer to the VoIP market, which gives me some caution, but they have an incredible deal going on now that I couldn’t resist. $199/year for unlimited local and unlimited long distance calls. That works out to roughly $17/month. The SunRocket service includes every feature you can think of – including a free second phone number. We’re currently paying Qworst $23/month for basic service and no long distance, so you can see how the $17/month deal was tempting. Oh, and also, I found a promotional code online which got me a 2-handset expandable Uniden phone system for free along with the service.
SunRocket has a great no-nonsense policy. If, during the first 30 days, we decide that we don’t like the service, they’ll refund our whole payment. After the first month, if we decide to cancel, that’s cool – they’ll refund us at a rate of $17/month for the rest of the contract. No startup fees, no cancellation fees.
Initially, I just chose two random phone numbers to go with the service. If we decide to switch over completely, they’re able to port our current 763 area code number to their service, which is bigtime.
I should recieve the equipment next week sometime. I’ll keep you posted.
Edit…here are some reviews on the service. As you’d expect, there’s some good and some bad. I’ll withhold judgement until I can see for myself.
…unfortunately. I was hoping that I’d be able to implement an asterisk PBX system between our main office and our Vancouver project with the purpose of integrating them into our legacy PBX system. It would have been a really fun and educational project, allowing me to play with many really cool technologies including, but not limited to SIP, QoS, IAX, and a few others. Anyways – for now, that’s on hold, although there’s a good chance of me being able to implement it in the near future, in a scaled-down version for office-to-office calls.
However – I found another cool project that will be really cool when I’m finished getting it set up. I’ve been using MRTG for a long time to monitor the network traffic on all of our network devices at work – switches, routers, servers (both Linux and windows), access points, etc. It’s been working great, but it’s a pretty tedius process when I want to add a new host – everything is done through text files, which, while not the end of the world, it’s not overly convient.
Enter cacti. It’s a very robust front end to Tobi Oetiker’s RRDtool, which is the successor to MRTG. It allows the creation of new graphs/data sources/devices/etc from a web interface, and it keeps all of its data in a mySQL database. Cacti has support for templating both data sources and graphs, which allows for very easy maintenance and updates. And since RRDtool is able to graph pretty much any sort of data, I’m going to be able not only keep track of network usage (as I have been), but also to graph and keep a history of things like:
- CPU Usage
- Network latency
- Disk usage
- Memory/swap usage
- Chassis temperatures
- …and pretty much anything else
It’s going to take a bit of playing to get it right, but it’ll be great when it’s done…especially for a statistic junkie like me. :-)
/me goes off to figure out how to import 2+ years of MRTG data into cacti….
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