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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.