Graves on SOHO Technology

Originally published in December 2008 at Small Net Builder.

It has been nearly three years since I first published an article detailing my experience setting up an Asterisk server on an embedded PC platform. That turned out to be just the start of a wave of interest in the embedded system or “appliance” approach to Asterisk. Since then, a number of companies have offered ready-to-roll Asterisk appliances.

Many of these Asterisk “appliances” are really just pre-configured servers running a bundle of software built around Asterisk. To meet my definition of “appliance” the system should have no moving parts. That means diskless, fanless, silent and reliable.

Preconfigured servers are very capable but they often have much of the administrative overhead of an old-school Asterisk installation. They usually require someone with Asterisk or telecom experience to plan and implement a working system.

I have deferred upgrading my own Astlinux server a very long time. I knew it had to be done, but also knew that it would be essentially rebuilding the system from scratch. When Jazinga offered to let me evaluate their new Asterisk appliance, I saw the possibility of deploying something simpler, with less administrative overhead.

In their flagship MGA120 PBX appliance, Jazinga set out to build a device that could be installed in a typical small business, home or home office by someone with minimal IT skills. It combines common networking and IP telephony functions with software designed to make installation and administration truly easy.

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The .e4 blog has a good new post on power-over-ethernet, which I see as an often overlooked area of SOHO VoIP. It goes into some detail P.O.E. network switches, power management and mid-span P.O.E injectors.

Just last week we suffered a power outage that took down my entire office for about two hours. That is, it took down everything that wasn’t on the UPS. At the time I was on a tech support call with a customer. Happily, my IP650 and all the core network components get UPS power, some via P.O.E.. The UPS power only lasted about 45 minutes, but that was enough to let me resolve my tech support situation.

While some of our larger offices have P.O.E. capable network switches I use a couple of simple single-port mid-span power injectors from Aastra. Why? They’re simply a better, and more cost effective solution for my small office. I only need to power a couple of devices over the ethernet, just my Polycom desk phones. However, I need gigabit ethernet bandwidth in a number of places. POE capable gigabit switches were on the expensive side when last I reworked the office network. In contrast, single port power injectors can be had for around $40 each.

From my Facebook page comes this comment from Gary Mark about our new NAS.

Okay, so why do you need this Mike? Can’t you RAID a couple big disks into your desktop and run it like a server? You’d save another 500 bucks doing this.

In fact for the past couple of years I’ve had a mini-tower PC living in a closet acting as a file server. It wasn’t really a server as it was a pretty limited little box. It had an AMD 1800+ CPU, 512 MB memory and four 300 GB IDE drives on a Promise RAID controller. In RAID 5 it gave me around 860 GB of storage. It actually started out with four 120 GB drives long ago and had been upgraded once already.

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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve split my blogging in two. Respecting the fact that many readers have a singular focus SOHO VoIP and networking topics remain here as usual. However, more varied topics and curiosities are on a new personal blog at http://www.mgraves.org/personal/. Both blogs are cross-linked with buttons on the main menu bar.

This post is the second in a series addressing some thoughts about ATAs. The first dealt with cordless phones and can be found here.

I’m not a big fan of analog terminal adapters (a.k.a. ATAs.) If you’re not familiar with them, these are the devices, like the Linksys example pictured below,  provided by companies like Vonage et al that convert your plain old telephone into a broadband phone. They bridge the old analog world into the digital realm. I accept that these devices have been the lifeblood of the residential VoIP provider world. That’s only logical since they’re cheap and easy to deploy. Read the rest of this entry »

After my last post about Cisco’s TechWise TV I was a little surprised to be contacted by someone from Cisco offering me a pre-release look at the new episode that is due out later today. It’s episode #37 and all about “Redefining the Remote Office.” As a long time home-office dweller this sounded potentially interesting so I had a look.

The show covers a lot of ground including voice, data, VPNs, security, energy efficiency, SLAs, etc. There were some cool ideas in there. I especially like the idea of scheduled power-off/on of devices based on time of day, controlled by logic in the switch providing POE. That’s pretty cool for SOHO sites, and something I should do around my office.

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SOHO users like myself are unlikely to have high-end networking gear supporting their home office setups. My initial experience with VOIP over broadband involved using Vonage and a Linksys BEFSR-41 broadband router. At the time Vonage was the leading phone-over-broadband service and the BEFSR-41 was the leading SOHO router.

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You hear an awful lot about “QoS, which stands for “Quality Of Service.” In point of fact it means different things to different people depending upon their perspective, telco or IP networking.

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Here are a few fundamental considerations when planning a VOIP implementation using DSL.

1. What is your actual available bandwidth inbound & outbound?
2. How many simultaneous calls do you need to sustain?
3. What voice codecs are you using? And so, how much total bandwidth do you require?
4. Do you have managed QoS on your network?
5. Can you also implement traffic shaping to reserve bandwidth for VOIP purposes? Especially outbound bandwidth as this is typically the most scarce.

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