My series called The Beginners Guide To Sucessful VOIP Over DSL was just republished over at Small Net Builder. Tim Higgins, the editor over there, has been very supportive of my recent efforts. Where they are interested I may be…
Rarely do I profess as much devotion to a piece of software as I have for m0n0wall. I’m told that it’s one of the single most successful open source projects and it’s easy to see why. It’s been my primary router for over four years. It’s never let me down, and the user community is very supportive.
I am happy to see that Phillip Cooper has recently created a series of “screencasts” documenting it’s basic setup and configuration. This should help new users a lot. I wish they’d been around when I got started. I further wish that I’d thought to do the screencasts myself. It’s a good idea.
I must admit that I'm more than a little surprised a what people read around here. The single most popular article is the one I wrote back in January 2006 about Building An Embedded Asterisk Server Using Astlinux On a…
Now that this little series of mine appears to have wound itself to an end I've collected all five posts in a PDF for your download convenience.
For the past ten years I have worked from a home office full time. This has been the major motivation for my education in networking, and onward into VOIP technologies. Since the middle of 2005 we have not used traditional…
My experience has been that the QoS mechanisms covered previously don’t provide a complete solution to the need for assured bandwidth when using VOIP over DSL. When the connection to the ISP becomes saturated for any reason VOIP traffic can be delayed which is always a problem. When managed QoS was combined with “traffic shaping” our VOIP phone service became much more reliable. This has proven to be true even on a very busy connection to my ISP.
Like the QoS mechanisms covered previously, traffic shaping is an edge process that occurs in your router. Traffic shaping is actually a process of reserving bandwidth specifically for selected applications. That bandwidth will not be used for other forms of internet access. As before, this tends to be most critical with outbound traffic where available bandwidth is most limited. It’s also true with inbound traffic, but this tends to be less of an issue.