TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

When you create a VoIP call, you invite the remote peer, who accepts or rejects, and there is a “SIP” session initiated. A SIP session is valid for pretty much anything, text, voice, audio, video, images, data – anything. SIP being the session, there’s no limit to what you can do with that ’session’. [...]

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Last night I moved an asterisk install from 1.6.0 to 1.6.1, and also upgraded addons.
One of the issues that wasn’t mentioned anywhere noticable, but was found (in french.. ) was the extconfig.conf change.
The log was flooding with error messages:
[Dec  7 00:57:27] WARNING[1759] res_config_mysql.c: MySQL RealTime: Invalid database specified: asteriskrealtime (check res_mysql.conf)
Of course, the database DID [...]

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I was looking at something related to this, this week, and it occurred to me when I was, that most just have no idea, they might think the dial tone generated by the ATA comes from the VoIP provider for example.
So, How does VoIP work?
Setting up an outbound call
Your ATA is registered to the VoIP [...]

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I’ve reset all the stats on Oz VoIP Status, the reason being – we changed colocation provider, the statistics and monitoring since the change has been sooo much better, that it’s unfair to the providers to leave the existing outages in place.
So, I reset them all – everybody is back to 100%. Latency is reset, [...]

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For some time, I was hosting ozvoipstatus.com with Servers Australia.
I moved recently, after they absolutely demonstrated their ignorance and incompetence of a routing issue within their network to the good people at MaxoTel, who also colocate with these idiots in Sydney.
Before the move, I would see intermittent increases in latency, random packet loss, and 8 [...]

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As the title suggests, OzVoIPStatus was unable to discover and log an outage with a VoIP provider monitored by us. The provider is Freshtel, and they were found to be down for 17 hours yesterday.
OzVoIPStatus missed it.
One rather annoyed user resorted to comments claiming we falsify data (Freshtel haven’t sent us a cent unfortunately, so [...]

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That’s right. Instead of writing about the continued increase of idiots on the road, or more on Telstra’s evil plans of industry monopolisation, or the disgusting crimes of murder, manslaughter, rape, and child abuse continually being committed, or the fact that bike sales are increasing, or, Holden’s large car recall (only a quick fix), or [...]

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There is finally a new news item on OzVoIPStatus.
Yes, it only took me 7 months, though, that’s nothing due to no maintenance on that site at all, it’s more of a, I don’t enjoy sitting there typing an entry into a database. I have plans to resolve that, bring on the new admin system after the [...]

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It is now January 2008.
Happy New Year to all.
On the broadband scene a lot has changed over the last year, yet the one static object is broadband prices have remained stupidly expensive and poor value for those in regional and rural areas.
Metro users have nothing but praises to sing in their situation, with LSS and [...]

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Seeing the site run more today, has revealed that the accuracy of the monitoring is increasing considerably, to the extent that outages are at new lows.
The outage log shows that in the last 24 hours, there have been just 3 outages in total, with the most notable being VitalTel, who went down at 9am today, [...]

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After getting my changes live last night, and making some changes to the VoIP Monitoring outages this morning, it seems the system is improving significantly.
What happens is if the first packet doesn’t appear, fine, we’ll check for another, so a maximum of around 3 seconds is spent on a provider to get a response per [...]

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At last. It’s taken many weeks to progress on this update to the website.
But. It’s live.
Running right now is a complete different system for testing for outages. It fixes many of the failures of the previous system, by testing DNS, by allowing for a simple missed beat, by testing in details finding any problem it [...]

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I’ve progressed on OzVoIPStatus’s new system, the changes however, are such a pain to implement that I’ve decided to take a different road and instead setup my own local version of the full website, and migrate changes there, once all is displaying and working well, I’ll move it over!
We do have it working, and there’s [...]

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Unfortunately (and its very unfortunate), the update I planned to release tonight isn’t going to go ahead as planned due to an issue with a particular provider.
The particular provider issue wasn’t determined until just recently, but has been fixed.
The reason for the delay? Well, I was investigating that issue and the time it took to [...]

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Recently, we had a item of hardware fail in my internal server (my in house server).
Essentially that was just my older 2 year old machine, which unfortunately, had an accident. It wasn’t the servers fault however.
Unfortunately, a Pop Top bottle filled with a bit of Sprite came into contact with the Zalman fan after being [...]

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Today I spent a lot of time working on enhancing the status checker. Something I should have put time into a long time ago.
A fair while back, I made some changes to the status monitoring program, but unfortunately, introduced a bug resulting in many outages being extended to the tune of 7 minutes (no, we [...]

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I’ve finally been able to set up my new Windows server, and it runs fantastically.
I’ve actually not done much in the way of Windows in a hosting setup when it comes to establishing DNS, and POP3 and SMTP.
I’m amazed at how simple it is to setup DNS, Mail and Websites under windows.
I mostly focused on [...]

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Skype has continued to suffer from sign on issues, and is now approaching another day of downtime.
A report on Skype’s heartbeat page (their own status page), mentions they are no where near complete, but are in a better position than they were yesterday.
I disagree.
Skype’s downtime has continued throughout the entire time, funnily enough, right [...]

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Skype has since yesterday remained very problematic, and not able to maintain sign in!
The issue has gone on so far for nearly 24 hours, which isn’t good considering it’s one of the leading chat / phone programs on the internet, and one would think being eBay owned, they’d throw a lot more resources at this [...]

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Today I found a lot of connectivity issues on my colocated server.
It was rather surprising to discover the continuous streams of downtime.
I was even more amazed to discover that I could likely accomplish the same job for a price of $59.95 for a 512/512 connection. It’s a little slower, but in the end the result [...]

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I’ve recently moved server (again).
I’ve had to move between servers for a little while now because of a few issues that were causing software issues.
Those issues have been focused on and solved, however, each time I move server, and begin reconfiguring, I always consider each one could be done a little differently.
Each different software item [...]

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Over the last few days, we’ve had storms.
That is, rain, and thunder, and wind.
This has had effects on many people, some worse than others, as can be seen in the news stories plastered all over news.com.au.
Last night, we went to bed, and the rain and wind were loud enough to keep me awake for some [...]

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Today, we upgraded the crash server to a new BIOS version.
This new BIOS version quotes that it Improves Memory Compatibility. And so far, the results seem to be promising.
We moved (backwards) from Fedora Development to Trixbox 2.0.
The previous server we know would crash when any interaction with yum, or any compilation was done, on MOST [...]

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… Is what you get with the Tomato firmware for the Linksys WRT range of routers.
I have been messing around with DD-WRT trying to get it up and running in a workable state for VoIP, and my other $network->internet(); usage.
Unfortunately, everywhere I turned in DD-WRT for QoS lead me to issues after my initial setup [...]

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That’s right.
It’s moved data centre this time to Equnix.
Now, only the stupid would ever think a mass scale move of any type would go without error. And I mean, only the completely stupid.
Every time you move a complete farm of servers, SOMETHING will not go right. Ask anyone that has done it before, and endured [...]

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I’ve got them out, yes.
They’ve sat idle on my dev server for a while. But at last, we now have OzVoIPStatus VoIP Provider Status Logos.
Stick em on your blog, website, wherever you like, and show off just how reliable (or unreliable) your VoIP provider really is.
More details on the OzVoIPStatus News Page. If you [...]

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I’ve got several machines running.
And, we also have a few routers running.
For example:
1. D-Link DSL-504T – This is the ADSL Modem for the network (has a buggy SNMP daemon) – It’s a great device, powered by busy box.
2. Linksys BEFSR41 – This device doesn’t work anymore. It now sits as a switch to the ADSL [...]

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I heard recently heard that Vonage are being sued by Verizon for patent breach.
I was digging through the patents after I was linked to them, and was shocked to see the wording of some patents.
They are so poorly worded. I was browsing the titles, and just for VoIP i found a few weirdly worded [...]

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iiNet’s value for money continues to be diluted as the company gathers more customers.
The newer plans from iiNet offer very poor value, and aren’t really that competitive. But they are still better compared to Telstra, and that’s a bonus all over.
I guess they might be playing the “Brand name” card, considering they’ve got themselves well [...]

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Here’s a full guide on how to setup a Linksys SPA-3102 VoIP ATA to use a VoIP Provider for ADSL Connections, step by step.
Place the SPA-3102 in a place that’s convienient for you, generally next to your ADSL modem is ideal.
Here is how everything connects, looking at it from a view of Phone socket, down:
The [...]

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