Graves on SOHO Technology

So Netgear has released an open source router. Thus it has something to compete with the open source version of the venerable Linksys WRT-54GL. Garrett Smith has an interesting viewpoint on this. One that I’m inclined to agree with.

I’m not a typical user. I’m an early adopter. I don’t mind putting in some effort to making something work up to its promised potential. I also like open source, but I just don’t see the value in running 3rd party software on a hobbled router platform. It’s just not good use of my time.

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The trend in new offerings of Asterisk appliances continues unabated.

On a VUC call a couple of weeks ago Dean Collins & Co. detailed the VDEX-40 from Technoco, with The Amanda Company providing US distribution.

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I spent much of this past week in Los Angeles. I was all set to fly home Friday morning but my last meeting canceled so I got myself on  the last flight out Thursday evening, a 6pm departure.

Except it wasn’t. Thunderstorms in Houston, and bad weather elsewhere in the east, had caused a myriad of delays and cancellations. My 6pm departure was pushed back until almost 9pm. No big deal. No point in making a fuss. It was still better than killing the next day getting home.

Besides, I could use the time to attend a conference call that I’d heard about. Iotum has launched a series of conference calls with interesting people to mark the introduction of their new Calliflower conference service. This past Thursday evening they interviewed William Shatner on the occasion of the release of his autobiography, “Up Till Now.”

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I finally managed to accumulate enough experience using this device to get the review written. It’s in the hands of the folks at Small Net Builder for a final polish before publication. It’ll probably be online in a couple of days.

This was a very interesting review process as it required that I upgrade my network, which is never as easy or quick as it might seem. I now have a nice new Wifi AP which was probably overdue. My old Linksys WAP54G was a first generation model.

I like to take my time and really use a new device in anger before starting to develop a review.  Often that’s a period of weeks, sometimes even months. It depends upon the nature of the device, the amount of work required to get it working, and home much I’m traveling at the time.

Now and again I read the forums over at Broadband Reports. This morning I see that a member I recognize has posted a thread about Netflix streaming video service, including a casual review of the new Roku/Netflix set-top box.

I’ve recently been toying with Twitter where I’m known as mjgraves. During those lovely periods when I’m in my office I’m most able to use it, but also some while travelling.

Have a laugh. Learn to speak like Yoda.

It appears that the Polycom IP670 with the color backlit LCD is finally available for order. It also has gigabit ethernet like the IP560 released last fall.

The IP650 (pictured right) that I’ve been using lately certainly benefits from the backlit LCD. This is one of the reasons why I started to use Aastra phones a couple of years ago.

I really want to be using HD Voice as I go forward. The real question before me is does the color LCD and faster network merit the extra cost over the IP650? My old IP600 is likely to be retired to a lesser role one day soon.

Update: I see that VOIP Supply has these listed at $429. That’s actually less than I might have expected!

It’s been about 5 months since I installed the Portech GSM gateway. It’s working well. I stand by the decision to buy a GSM-to-SIP gateway over one that presents an analog FXS interface. We’ve never had the kind of call quality issues that can result from small FXOs in Asterisk.

However, this morning I noticed that there are now some extremely low cost GSM gateways being offered on E-Bay. Some quad-band models as low as $99. This could be interesting if you just want to experiment with the technology.

Sometimes the apparently simple, little things take longer than you’d expect. In my recent travels I’ve had some trouble when trying to VPN connect back to my home office. This generally happens for one of two reasons;

1. The ISP at the remote location is blocking related ports
2. The network at the remote location is on the same subnet range as my home office network

The first cause is something that I simply cannot control, but the second is something that I decided to address today. I moved my entire network onto a new subnet.

The process is simple enough. Make the required changes in the m0n0wall router and reboot just about everything. As much as possible I leave network devices with DHCP enabled and the reserve IP addresses in the routers DHCP server. Even so some things need hand tweaking.

For example, my wife tried to make a call only to find no dial tone on the house phone. It turns out that the Sipura SPA-2002 that we use with that phone had a hard coded DNS server entry. Oops. Gotta change that manually then dial tone returns.

Just to be safe I rebooted a lot of things and confirmed that they were back on the network and working correctly. I expect that we have more on-LAN devices than most homes. The process took a couple of hours.

This week has been crazed. I started out on Houston and had meetings in Waco TX, Dallas TX, Lawton OK, Austin TX. Not all of it was planned at the outset, and the planning was being done (so I thought) by an associate. Based on the information at hand it was decided that I could drive it in order to facilitate moving equipment around. Here’s the route we covered in three days:

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That’s a total of 850 miles on the road, plus meetings, hardware demonstrations, etc. Had I known this was how it was going to work out I would never have agreed to the trip!! I’ll be soooooo glad to be home tomorrow evening.