After testing Linphone, Wengo, and several others, Twinkle seemed to be the one which seemed to be pretty robust.

I like to have music going when I’m not on the phone, but that proves to be quiet the distraction during a voice call, as well, I ran into problems with having the headphones in, and the speakers turned on at the same time (microphone feedback, for example).

Twinkle has the ability to run scripts on call incoming, call answered, call hang up, call missed, etc.  I put that to good use and created some scripts.

callincoming.sh

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front” 100%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Side” 100%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Master” 75%

That script would turn the main speakers up, and the headphones (which I’ve got into the “side” speaker plug in the back), to 100% – so we can hear the ringing if I’m away from the keyboard.

The Master is also turned up to 75% which is where I find it’s ‘loud enough’ to be heard, but not deafening that the kids would get significantly disturbed if they were having a day time sleep.

The script can be expanded to kill the radio, or rhythmbox. I’d love to be able to stop the music streaming online, but I can’t get application control that the Sound Preferences offers just yet.

callanswered.sh

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Side” 100%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Mic” 48%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Mic Boost” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front Mic” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Master” 60%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Input Source”,0 “Mic”

What this script does is turn the “Front” speakers (my primary ones) off – so the caller / callee doesn’t hear themselves. Turns the headphones up to 100% (it’s actually got a control on the cord to the PC, that I turn it down and leave it). Turns the mic to 48% – this is a good level that doesn’t give the kids in the background into the call, but allows good level of voice, without echo.

Mic Boost – this was awful, picture a poorly mixed MP3, like 64k, turned right up, with emphasis on bass, it ‘crackles’ and ‘distorts’ heavily.  So, I kill that because I believe amixer resets after a reboot and setting it down is desired.

Front Mic is not used, but gets turned up to 100% for some reason, so I leave that off! Finally, I set the Input Source to “Mic” to ensure it doesn’t capture from the radio card for example.

callend.sh

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front” 100%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Mic” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Side” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Front Mic” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Mic Boost” 0%
/usr/bin/amixer set “Master” 75%

This script resets the music back to a usable level, kills the mic to stop that awful feedback through the speakers. As the others, can be expanded to start the radio, or rhythmbox for example.

This ability is also useful if we later want to expand the sound to other sound sources – like to the TV for MP3s in the lounge room!

After the scripts are created, chmod them a+x so that they are executable.

Adding the scripts to Twinkle was as easy as opening User Settings, going to “Scripts” and pointing “Outgoing Call, Outgoing Call Answered, Incoming Call Answered” to “callanswered.sh”. Set Incoming Call to “callincoming.sh”, and the call ended options and call failed options to callended.sh.

In the sense of a VoIP call,  you typically will terminate a call to the PSTN, so you send an invite to your VoIP service provider. The VoIP service provider verifies you have the right money, the right allowance to make such a call. The provider then picks up one of it’s many PRI channels, dials the requested number, and then the call is answered.

The audio in that scenario is proxied via a media proxy, the PRI channel is connected to software, such as asterisk, which then sends the audio to / from you and the PSTN gateway.

The SIP server, and media proxy can be on two different servers, in two completely different locations – the SIP server is there to initiate the session, the media proxy is there to handle the RTP audio data.

The SIP server still can disconnect the session as well – by sending a BYE packet to the calling device which gets the device to terminate the call, and cuts off the media stream.

When one places a call on hold, the device typically sends back RTP data with an ‘a=inactive’ state request, this causes the session to be placed on hold – in the case of asterisk, plays hold music to the channel placed on hold. Picking the channel back up will then route the audio back through.

When you transfer a call, however, you don’t simply change the RTP stream, the change involves sending another SIP invite to the affected peer, and depending on whether it’s attended or unattended, the other user will end up with you first, before yet another invite is sent to transfer the call “attended” mode, or unattended, they are simply sent an invite to the SIP stream, with the person transferring the call removed.

To avoid issues with NAT firewalls, you should port forward the applicable RTP ports to the device, and specify the public IP the device will communicate on, this allows for the RTP packet to be routed directly, and can avoid ‘no audio’ or ‘call drop out’ issues experienced.

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 exist, and the database connection was fine. I tested and couldn’t find any obvious cause.

So, I googled and found a french forum, and found the problem, in extconfig.conf, the sip peers and sip users entries (and any other relevant entries), need to have the database name changed to ‘general’ instead of ‘asteriskrealtime’ (or whatever you use).

The problem was due to ‘upgrading’ – a new install of addons, and make samples shows the config file has help text!

So, How does VoIP work?

Setting up an outbound call

Your ATA is registered to the VoIP provider, you have the right settings in the ATA, you’ve got a dial plan entered that is Australian compatible, and so, you pick up the handset.

As you’ve adjusted the regional settings to match that of Australia, you hear your usual Aussie dial tone, and begin to push the numbers of the destination you want to reach.

The ATA has timers setup in it, such that it will wait for a certain time, such as 5 seconds, before generating the call.

Once the timer has been reached, the digits that have been dialled, and the information it already has (such as user name, password, and outbound proxy), are formed into an INVITE packet, this INVITE packet is sent to the VoIP provider, inviting it to setup a call to the destination.

The VoIP server, reads this packet, and if you’ve given it the right details, should respond with a “TRYING” packet, advising your ATA that yep, I got your request, I’m trying to see if I can do it.

Then, the VoIP server upon successfully parsing the packet, and proceeding through to either an upstream carrier, or terminating on it’s own equipment, will respond with either an “OK”, “BUSY”, or “SESSION PROGRESS”, advising the ATA that either – the call is answered and ongoing, failed, or progress (as in ringing, or in cases such as Mobile, message service to send your number).

This packet can also contain data on “RTP”, which is the audio stream used, and the ATA will connect to that RTP audio stream, and send / receive audio via that stream.

Upon successfully setting up the call, the reply should be “OK”, meaning the Invite sent was accepted, the remote party answered, and the call is ongoing. Assuming your ATA is reachable, and the packets contain correct RTP information, and everything else is in order, the call is setup and works.

So, SIP is used for ‘signalling’, and RTP is used for audio.

Setting up an inbound call

Incoming calls are not unlike the above outbound calls.

The server receives (either via an upstream provider, or it’s own termination equipment), a invite request, inviting it to setup a call with a user it should be responsible for.

The server checks it’s lists, much like Santa, and if it finds you on that list, it will then find out if you are registered, and the ‘contact’ line from the last register packet your ATA sent to the server.

Depending on it’s configuration, it could send the call to your ATA, route it elsewhere (such as call forwarding), IVRs, Voicemail, reject and call back.. the list is endless. In typical consumer cases, the call is first sent to the Contact line in the Register packet.

The VoIP server should then send an Invite packet to the VoIP ATA, using the last Contact line as the point to send the call.

The ATA when not in use should respond with RINGING, meaning that it’s trying to alert the user to the presence of the call. This follows it’s path back to the VoIP provider, and there is then a ringing signal sent to the caller’s provider – so they know the call is trying to work.

When you answer, the INVITE the VoIP server sent to you is then replied with an “OK” packet, and the VoIP server specifies the RTP stream, and the call is setup.

But, what if I am already on a call? Well, that depends on the configuration. If your ATA has Call Waiting enabled, the call is attempted, you hear the call waiting tones, and the same process for ‘ringing’ is followed.

The process for call waiting with SIP involves putting one audio stream into ‘hold’, and the other into ‘active’, they do this by using SIP packets to the VoIP server specifying an RTP option of ‘active’ or ‘inactive’. When a call is RTP  set to ‘inactive’, the call should be put on hold, where hold music is typically played (from the VoIP server).

If you don’t have call waiting enabled, there is a reply back to the VoIP server “BUSY HERE”, meaning the call can’t be accepted. It might also be a “DECLINE” packet – it should have the same effect.

The VoIP server then decides the next step based on configuration. If you have Voicemail enabled, the call should be sent to Voicemail. If you don’t, then the next natural step is for the provider to echo your busy reply, with a busy tone back to the server.

So, I reset them all – everybody is back to 100%. Latency is reset, the highest is 68ms, to a provider in Perth, the lowest 6.4ms to a provider in Sydney.

I’ve reworked some of the outage back end, after an iiNet representative raised issues with the outage logging.

There was an alternative -remove all the outages in question, recalculate the uptime, but I want the latency to reflect what is current, and this is the best way to do that.

So, for now, I’ll monitor it and see which providers lose the 100% lead, and have a look at what happens there.

I predict Netspace will be the first, as they for some reason have no replies at 4am every morning.

I had a new website layout in preparation some time ago – it’s still back there in the ‘preparation’ stage as my job keeps me busy, and it takes a fair amount of effort and time to pick up from where I left off.

I’ll do it someday..

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 hour outages with no satisfactory explanation.

Add to that the 2006 and 2007 breaches of their own systems where attackers managed to exploit their own crap, to send emails to all users. And the continual DDoS attacks.

They advanced later in 2007, where they had the network running stable, in a near excellent state. Then, recently, they screwed it over again, and they still screw people over.

I think to myself now, why did I put up with them for so long? The answer is easy, because like all incompetent idiots, they couldn’t ever get the billing right, so that was to their disadvanatage, and gave me only a little to complain about.

Flash forward to last week, I’m emailing them about a routing error to MaxoTel, they don’t have the Sydney and Newcastle networks routed correctly. It was like that for a good month, before the good people at Maxotel noticed it.

I create a ticket stating I can’t reach other IPs in the same IP block, and I can’t reach the other IP block (their Sydney IP block).

Anyway, the reply I get back from their incompetent Network Operations Centre 24 hours after reporting the issue, too bad if it was actually a network outage, because they’d be too busy watching YouTube (I have an email from them stating exactly that) – “The default gateway is set incorrectly”..

What? How is that possible. The sites and server are online, I can reach everything else (heck, I did the ping and traceroutes from the actual server), it’s been set to the right default gateway for a year or more.

So, I replied showing my clear frustration and disappointment that someone employed in Australia can be so incompetent, and yet be in a position responsible for the Network Administration. The idiot didn’t test, disregarded the testing I had provided, and replied on some useless assumption, ignoring the fact the second IP block was also unreachable. All because the IP I tested was 119.63.204.1 (and others, I just used that as an example.. )

Then, I get a reply from the ‘director’ (who is just an immature turd that started Servers Australia) who also doesn’t bother to read the previous content and tells me he’ll unplug it in 7 days.

I figure that’s fine, and reply advising him as such,  to which he replied with 24 hours. A little sudden, but the good folk at Inticon, who I am now hosting with aranged the smooth transition and it was error free.

I’m happy to be away from the rubbish that is Servers Australia. I have mountains of content in emails demonstrating the pure incompetence that is Servers Australia, but I’ve got more time on my hands available now, as I don’t have to monitor the server and make sure it’s up – I can actually trust Inticon to be ‘up’. I can’t say that about Servers Australia’s useless attempt at IP connectivity.

The downside? Inticon is competent, so they’ll probably be billing correctly, so now I’ll have to figure out methods of making the traffic from OzVoIPStatus cover the bills – I don’t have anything in the pipeline yet, I’ve still got an aging web layout sitting on the dev server waiting for tidying up – backend pages to create, edit, adjust.

The thought did cross my mind to stop OzVoIPStatus, and decommission, but I think it’s a useful tool, users like it to find out how reliable a voip provider is – they have opinions they can add.  The maintenance schedule is shot tho, I simply haven’t maintained it at levels I wanted to, and I can’t foresee time in the very near future to finish what I was doing -I’ve got other things still happening.

So, for now, the situation remains – it’s still working, it’s still somewhat useful, I want to put more of the useful features I do have live, but I need time or money for that (time would help to get my stuff live, money would help pay someone else to do exactly what I have in mind)..

OzVoIPStatus seems to be holding steady, the outage logs seem to be a little more accurate since the move. I also did some ICMP tests from Sydney, and I was reaching the old network in an average of 17ms (peaks of 56ms), the new network at Inticon was a constant 5ms. I should have taken screenshots at the time, too busy making sure the transition was smooth to think this far ahead.

My advice to anyone considering Servers Australia: Get a second ADSL2+ line, you could do better on your own connection, for much less!

OzVoIPStatus missed it.

One rather annoyed user resorted to comments claiming we falsify data (Freshtel haven’t sent us a cent unfortunately, so we have no reason to falsify anything, let alone cover up a 17 hour outage), and claimed the site was useless.

I didn’t really want to wake up to those comments. A lot of work has gone into that site to bring it up to the unreleased state, and the released states that exist. Insulting the site does little at sorting out the problem.

The user seemed to be a total tool, but of course, I definitely sought further information about this missed outage. I want to catch as many outages off as many providers as possible. The system is designed for it, and sure, we’ve found a few bugs here and there, but the majority of issues with providers have all been traced down to either a lack of monitoring of the server (being a server went down which isn’t monitored) or other scaled technical issues, such as when they run a cluster and the SIP process is running, but the far end connection to the termination provider isn’t, which causes us to see them as up, but of course, they aren’t able to carry any proper phone calls.

Now, we could rework the system so that it goes all the way, and doesn’t just stop at checking to see if a provider is running its processes, we could try and place calls over cross referenced trunks to see if a providers calling abilities are dropped, but, we would then have to open accounts with all providers and have minimum credit levels with them all, and even pay monthly fees with some of them.

Simply, the site doesn’t even cover its own costs now, let alone the time I put into it goes unpaid for. How on earth would it even be possible to get the extra dollars required to run calls across providers and pay for associated costs, when the site doesn’t even earn the required monthly fee to keep itself running? – The current method works fantastically, and there is a opinions page for each provider!

I do have plans of course to monitor the missing Freshtel services, the provider here has never actually come forth and told us they had more than one server, probably protecting their own better interests anyway.

But, I also have plans to finish the new website I have planned, which allows for more analysis on providers themselves to be done, and to link all servers to providers instead of the current method, so then, we can just simply add another server to a provider and all systems are set.

Ideally, we will also complete many other changes to make it more attractive for providers (and I said this a while ago, I know, see above comment about unpaid work, not covering own costs, etc, but I do plan to have some features to make it possible for providers to market themselves better using the site).

On that note though, there was no problem with OzVoIPStatus, the issue was with our lack of monitoring of another server we didn’t even know about, and that’s not really anyones direct blame, but certainly not worthy of accusations of falsifying data.

As for being useless, well, Koala Telecom improved their reliability extremely since the site was launched, many other users have found the site a great way to express their opinions on many providers, and some have gone from being a favourite provider to recently attracting negative feedback (PennyTel).

Other users have found it useful for checking if a provider is down, and I assume others would have found it useful to find out what provider is more reliable above others when it comes to maintaining a reliable user to VSP connection.

Anyway, those comments don’t bother me. I leave them up there for all to see, and judging just be a whirlpool thread (titled “OZ Voip Status Useless?”), others seem to take a light view of such attacks anyway.

I think I’m more annoyed at the fact I can’t find the time right this moment to finish it off due to the heat, and a few other things to fix up. I wish we had air conditioning, but then, I wish power were free then too.

On that note, keep on VoIPin’.

Enjoy!

… I’ve decided to instead look at VoIP and find out who, statistically, ranks highly for VoIP.

 Looking at the current data, we have a list of 10 front runners, who have been monitored for a lengthy period of time.

1. iiNetPhone
This is ran by ISP iiNet, and so far only have negligble to no downtime. A rock solid network, a rock solid service, and naturally latency measures up as much, with also low complaints from users. The minus? The rates are premium by comparison.

2. Engin
Engin are a more ‘premium’ charging VoIP provider. Despite this fact however, they have a good solid network, which for the most part is stable and error free, with exception that they do see a few complaints for service (or lack of).

3. Broadband Anywhere
Rock solid network so far, and very small in the way of downtime. They have a good rating percentage.

4. GoTalk
GoTalk seem to also just tail Broadband Anywhere, the rates they charge are OK, but from personal experience, I can’t recommend them, the staff on the phone have no idea and simply hang up when they are unsure on your sales question. That said, don’t let my experience interupt.

5. SIPTelecom
SIP Telecom have been monitored for a while now, and have had a little more downtime then GoTalk in the monitoring service, but, a little (and I mean negligible) downtime when it comes to VoIP, it’s probably less downtime then your own power company.

6. Chariot Internet
Chariot being a ISP, have a VoIP service also, and the service through monitoring has only suffered a little more downtime then SIP Telecom above.

7. Evolution Tel
They were discovered several months ago, and we added two monitoring servers for Evolution Tel. Unfortunately I don’t have a combined statistic available for them (but that’s coming), and so, the better performing server scored close marks to the others who managed to make the ultra reliable list of VoIP providers.

8. Internode
Rated as being expensive, but being premium quality, Internode finds itself automatically rated in 8th position despite being monitored for a little longer than some of the others above. They are in Adelaide and to my knowledge don’t have a national VoIP network in place for VoIP calls, the trunking to Adelaide must be reliable enough, but alas, they do seem to score some downtime, but again, your power is probably less reliable.

9. Nehos
Nehos are a business focused VSP. They want business users, they target them. Yet, amazingly a retail Engin connection scores better. We are really only talking 0.01% in these scores, but the statistics still show interestingly enough, that some providers find themselves marginally below others. What’s with the name any way?

10. Voxalot
Voxalot rate as number 10 on our monitoring scale. It should be kept in mind that whilst we are aware Voxalot have multiple servers, we only at this moment, monitor the one, understood to be hosted in Brisbane. It is very reliable, only marginally below other servers when it comes to uptime reliability.

All the above ratings should however be considered to not consider the latency times that each averages. I didn’t want to influence it for Sydney siders, as that’s where the server was better placed, but, the best provider for latency has been OzSite Internet Services (OzSite). Very low latency, and monitored for a fair while!

Those are the Top 10, based on monitoring time, reseller status (didn’t want to add resellers or rebillers), and percentage uptime.

Don’t take this as any prompt of who is best to go for, because clearly the rates of providers don’t match the reliability provided in some cases, and in others, they charge too little to give you a rock solid service. The ratings come in handy in that regard, as you can guage a rather recent pulse of what the ‘aura’ of a provider is.

Of course, consider a disclaimer that fits here, this is simply my opinion, any information provided may not be accurate, may be stupid, may not be free of error, etc, etc. You get the idea. It’s simply an observation of the data logged, nothing more, nothing less, my opinion only.

Enjoy!

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 new site is released.

That said, we have a new year. Which means one thing. OzVoIPStatus has data comprising 2006 to 2008 of VoIP provider monitoring.

That’s right, we have a full year of VoIP monitoring data to pick at!

I plan to put a 2007 page up hopefully soon, which goes through what the data there shows.

Simply though, I totalled up all the seconds of downtime for 2007 for all providers. Divided by 79 (the number of providers with downtime registered during 2007), and then got an amazing number.

That number is influenced by large AstraTel and SpanTalk outages however, which means that it’s not exactly friendly.

I don’t want to reset the global stats on all pages at each year, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll take snapshot data and have that ready, and allow for new year data.

If that works out well, we might dwell into a monthly type query setup where you can get snapshots of a month data, though that’s not going to happen quickly (like, it’s heaps away).

Anyway, back to where I was, the magic number. It’s 574,261.02. That’s the averaged number of seconds of downtime over the 2007 year across all providers.

Yeh, it doesn’t look realistic, I know. It’s like 1 solid week of downtime. I’ll do another query with AstraTel and Spantalk out after I figure out the IDs another day.

I’m also considering putting up a stats page for the year, showing longest outage, shortest outage, year averaged latency, and average uptime (and percentage).

That’ll be a bit useful. Then I’ll cap it with best and worst rated providers.

That said, all that needs to come after I get my new layout, design, admin system, features live, so that I can maintain it easily, and give users a better experience.

I’ve also recently relocated the website to a new point, and it is certainly performing well there.

Enjoy!

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 ULL prices improving to their benefit.

Regional users still have to wait til 2009 (or near to it) before affordable speeds reach them, and also, 2009 when its likely international capacity will improve.

Telstra has been an argumentative criminal over the last year, taking matters to court in a vexatious manner (Helen Coonan), and also attacking the ACCC in silly ways.

Not to mention the attacks on the government.

And the racism towards Optus.

None the less, broadband will improve over the next year, but not as significantly as it will in 2009, when PIPE hopefully get that cable in the water and give cheaper access to all.

Interesting times ahead in many areas, such as VoIP, with the last year alone seeing much discussion on VoIP.

Oh, and in case you haven’t done it yet, Whirlpool has their broadband survey up for all to start on, it’s located here, so stop reading and start your survey!

Hopefully the results should demonstrate what is already widely known, that broadband prices in metro areas are “ok”, but they could improve with downward pressure between the duopoly over international cable access!

And hopefully 2008 sees much more interest and more competitive violence between ISPs competing hard for our dollar (and not slicing each others throats to get it).

Interesting year ahead, we are just getting started!

Enjoy!

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, and hasn’t yet given a pulse towards getting back online at midnight.

I’ve tested this directly, and all I can gather is the IP is responding to PING, but SIP and IAX2 requests are simply getting rejected by the host.

The monitoring is revealing really high levels of monitoring accuracy, I don’t pay much attention to outages under a minute, considering they aren’t worth even counting.

The network, the providers and the VoIP services in general seem to be seeing better monitoring, and the end result seems to be a reliable service available to end users using VoIP.

In unrelated, but still somewhat linked news, ADSL2+ services are going to be available on my exchange “Soon”. An update to ADSL2Exchanges today saw my exchange get the Optus marker added, and a lot of providers are now available.

So, we can now piss Telstra’s HomeLine Budget plan off, and instead of paying $20 + 85 for internet and phone (Note: $20 when Telstra doesn’t stuff up and charge us for items clearly marked “FREE” on the bill and promotion – CHECK YOUR BILLS FOLKS!!!), we can simply get faster internet access with the same levels of data, better upstream bandwidth, for just $85 with phone ($60 net, $25 phone).

The end result is even better, the ULL costs for our area are in the ball park of $17. That means we screw Telstra out of even more money, party!.

Today, we decided to go get some quotes on fridges over at Erina. As well, get some toys from the toy shop.

After consulting them good folk over at The Good Guys, I’ve got a bargain fridge in mind to replace our power guzzling fridge.

I’m not convinced from my measurements however, that the fridge is using near that 1110 it claims it can use annually, so I’m going to base it off a week worth of monitoring. The idea is to get the result up to next week and then take that, multiply by 52 and that’ll be good enough to determine the payback time for the new fridge.

I’m estimating 8 years factoring in Electricity rises in the face of declining use (no, not global warming after all), So that would be worth it. If we are looking at past the average lifetime of the fridge, it might not be really worth it.

I give a fridge 10 – 15 years, though, I’m sure many can tell me stories from the 1980s of fridges of 50 years or more. Heck, my first flat I had a fridge that no kidding, weighed a ton. From the upper balancy we could have thrown it off (would require a few heavy lifters), and it’d litterally shatter the concrete. It was ONE heavy fridge. And it was certainly an old fridge. It’s one strong point: It kept food cold, and it kept it really cold.

Our main focus on power has been the peak load, reducing it, to a sustainable level where we aren’t detrimentally effected (for example, turning off the TV for 2 weeks would be considered detrimental), our motivation, not necessarily the dollars (though they do form a strong basis of measurement), but rather, a combination of environmental good (I can also be Mr. Nice) and focus on better usage of the usage of power resources.

On that note, today set me back even further on fixing them pages on OzVoIPStatus, I plan to at first upgrade the code on pages, and then get a new layout happening after wards, so hopefully a start on that can happen tomorrow.

The system at the back seems to be running nice. The website is where attention is now going to happen, where I’ve got many plans to focus on and deliver some results!

Enjoy!

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 check.

That’s pretty good, considering that if it were to wait much longer, then a timeout situation would almost certainly occur.

We also tweaked the system a little more for timing related data.

The VoIP Monitoring Statistics seem to have bumped a little higher for some providers due to the prevention of many of the 60 second outages that had appeared as a result of something I will only label ‘the 60 second bug’.

Needless to say however, we still see regular outages on the network, despite testing DNS, and VoIP packets twice to be sure. Heh, I’m better then Santa, I make sure I have the right details, and then I check those right details twice to make sure they are right.

Anyway, the outages we see listed on the VoIP Monitoring Outages page seem to suggest we have somewhat regular outage logs for SIPme for example.

That’s not too bad, but I still want to get the monitoring more spot on. So, what I plan to do is take advantage of a redundant monitoring situation and add some failover monitoring remotely and determine if the results are echoed in a different area of the state (north of Sydney).

Eventually (as I said yesterday), I do plan to setup mirrored monitoring, so that we can get a fair level of tests done from hopefully different areas of the nation, and compile those together instead of simply one point results.

I’d use my home connection too, but that’d likely get skewed results from our own usage of the internet, and being a consumer service one would (well, one would assume at least) expect the results to be subpar to a large scale.

Hopefully tomorrow, I’ll have time to finish up the webpages, but I do realise the current layout of the site is hardly appealing to users, and so I want to work on fixing that, and then, I’ll review the task list for it after there!

The initial results though, are a lot better, and the testing seems to have been nice on the server too, with load results screeching down low.

In other news, I’ve done some more power tests out there to determine power consumption.
After reading on whirlpool about some fantasy home using 11 – 13kWH a day, I was highly intrigued, they even had a pool!

So, I tested other areas of the house. My expectation was the lounge room. My little one loves watching some of the childrens varieties of DVDs regularly (and repetitively), so that gets a good work out, that’s the TV, DVD, VCR, Foxtel and Stereo going all at once. Amazingly, I saw a very low reading. With the TV on, the DVD playing, the stereo outputting, we saw a drain of just 60W. IMPRESSIVE! I was ready to attack the TV being a high power consumer, but it uses less than a 60W light globe.

So, the next items to attack were the deep freezer. It’s a new one we bought not long ago. Plugged it in. Got 0. Must not be freezing right now. The front label shows 210kW. Hardly a worry for that.

The fridge, was next.

And here is where we cue the suspenseful music.

It sucks, according to its energy ‘star’ sticker, 1110kWH! What a big waste of power. All we use it for is keeping our food cold. If it kept US cold, I wouldn’t be concerned. But using that much for simply cooling a small area of food.

So I put it to the woman today. It’s using twice the amount of power of a NEW, larger fridge. We would halve our electricity usage, by simply upgrading a fridge, and that would have translating effects on the power bill, as does my recent change to a standby / startup automation setup for my system (but it seems to freeze ), and for the server a shut down, restart sequence (wouldn’t come out of Standby by itself).

So, I plan to soon enough, anyway, have some true readings (appliances generally aren’t as ‘efficient’ with age, so I am metering it for a 24 hour period to get some solid results), and then, if we get readings at a level where a new fridge will simply ‘make sense’ – that’s what we will end up doing.

Having a look around today though, there’s a good variety in different sizes that can use energy more wisely than our current fridge (we could have two new fridges for what we are paying in power for the one).

I’m not concerned about Hot Water, it’s off peak and is generally 4KWH, the washing machine, not a major concern, we wash every now and then.

The bigger concern also, is the fact the fridge was sucking 1879 WATTs when I plugged the meter in. That was alarming. Later on I checked again, and it was using 0 however, so it is one that needs measuring over a 24 hour period to get a true measurement. Hopefully one that will enlighten us as to where the 5KWH difference between the 11KWH person, and us resides.

It’d be good to see a nice reduction in power consumption, it just doesn’t ‘feel’ like we are using that much (or getting our money worth).

Plus, a new fridge gives us planning for the future anyway. Kids grow, right? And the stomach grows with them, right? So, when you have kids, you need more food? And more of that food is commonly cold storage food such as Yoghurt, Soft Drink, etc.

And for Dad, well he wants cold drink to. And I imagine Mum wants cold storage as well for .. whatever she wants cold storage for…

I’m not committed to a purchase yet, just incase it somehow improved on energy usage since the Energy Rating was placed on it. I doubt it though, I believe it to have gotten worse over time, simply due to ‘the aging process of appliances’.

On that note though, power consumption tuning is becoming great, and I think we’ll be near an end to what we can learn from measuring and tweaking consumption of electricity (our lights are those good energy efficient globes, they work well for what they use (14W)), the PC’s have got timed controls to standby / shut down on them, the washing machine couldn’t be doing tooo much, the stove might be the other point of call, but we don’t use it excessively, so I’m not convinced it’s a huge drain on power.

The results will come at billing time next, when we can hopefully proclaim that we screwed the power company out of around $100 or so a year.

Enjoy!

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 can with a provider we monitor (within reason).

What a pain it has been to get this live though. I didn’t put much planning into the website when I started coding it, back last year, and went with a simple approach of testing providers, and basically using a more ‘boolean’ approach.

The new testing incorporates several checks, and can log detail checks.

The website will catch up soon with the changes made. Many of the database changes required took a fair bit of time to change the website over, but at last, I’m very happy to have this live now. It’s just one bigger task of the monitoring system done. It will hopefully ensure we get no more of the short outages we have seen pop up and disappear, but they could still happen, which would just highlight networking issues with either the local provider or the far end provider being monitored. Not a lot we can do about that.

The new system is also more portable, and not a pain to setup extra copies. So I plan to look at doing a more redundant method of monitoring in the future, setting up somewhat of a national monitoring network, to get results from more than one location.

That’s very future looking however.

The website overall needs many of the pages recoded. All the one touch fixes have caused the code to be a bit more messy than I care to have, and I plan to clean that up by recoding each page, and even getting rid of the tables approach.

I do wish to have a new layout for the site, because most of the content at this moment is ‘crammed’ into place.

Further, I want to add a web backend to the site to make changes to providers / adding providers easier.

And then after that comes a heap more web focused features, at the very least to enhance the user experience, at the most, to get the user to enjoy the site and miss breakfast to check the status of their VoIP Provider (joking ).

Interesting data should be available by now with the outage data collected, such as the average number of outages per provider, and the average length of outages for each provider, as well for all providers.

I did clean up all the outages that were happening for the 60 seconds, since it is unfair to the providers to have outages logged that simply never happened and were resultant of a flaw in the monitoring that didn’t really start happening until a bug fix caused it.

I do plan to continue with the site more this week. I might actually recode many of those pages with this week, see what time I find at least. And naturally, the tests up ahead are related to checking monitoring, to determine if the new system is performing as I believe it will (I’ve tested it locally, but there’s big differences in spot testing and day to day long term testing).

Someone I’ve spoken closely with a lot thinks the website could even use forums. I don’t think they are needed at all, but he seems to think that forums on that site will give users the ability to discuss issues, and so forth.

I’m not convinced, I’m not adding forums at all at this stage.

The site will hopefully in this week, if not the coming WEEKS, get more changes, so much so that it might actually end up needing a different name to “describe” it.

The ISP monitoring section of the website has been down for sometime now, generally because the person who set that up has not appeared back online as far as I know for sometime, and I haven’t bothered fixing it.

I’m not convinced ISPs have large numbers of outages, though, I did indeed notice Netspace took the oppourtunity not so long ago to disconnect users. But in general, nearly all ISPs perform the same, the outages they have are so insignificant on a yearly scale, that the time they are down, you might as well as use to get fresh air anyway.

Anyway, I’m simply happy to have that new monitor live, and hopefully see some positive results from the time placed into it, and the bug testing done.

Enjoy!

We do have it working, and there’s just a few more bugs found to be ironed out, but we have it running at a much better level, and in a great setup which will essentially allow easily extended aspects to be added.

The website needs to be transformed to allow for a more dynamic approach to adding content. Not interested in a CMS, but the goal will be similar, with the intention of making the site a bit more active, and updating it regularly, and providing assistance and advice directly on that website, which might see it evolve into more than what it is at the moment.

I’ve got a lot of ideas, so the only way to do what I want with those will be to dedicate time to it. Not just a weekend every weekend either, something a little more constant. I’ve got a few items to tidy up on with a recent web release, but after I do those, I plan on getting these changes active throughout the week (placing more of my time into the site).

Today I made my decision on Whirlpool, I shall simply limit my activity on Whirlpool so that I can be a better participant in the forums, and also allow me more time to focus on the items that interest me “more” than whirlpool does (not that its not interesting, just I think I can have a little more interest in developing a website than I could whirlpool).

Further, now that I’ve settled into the car, and it drives great, I’ll obviously not be driving every day like I have been since I got my licence and instead will start to get that time and the time spent on Unreal Tournament (still will play it though ), place that time into OzVoIPStatus and the web hosting activity I’ve started on.

Essentially my goals will be readjusted to focus less on whirlpool (but still remaining a contributing member), and of course for the next week or so, placing that time into OzVoIPStatus and the other items that I want to put my time into!

What will essentially need to be done for OzVoIPStatus is to bring up a duplicate company, make changes in the testing environment and progress those to the live environment, to avoid breaking the website for extended periods of time, but also, more controls placed in the testing environment to stop heavy bandwidth consumption for monitoring servers on the home connection.

I’ll also be able to setup a few mirrors and somehow get the data integrated into one database using multiple monitoring points to prevent the issues of a single network outage affecting some providers (and just between me and this blog, the TSN network that hosts the server does at times get flaky and annoy me, and my phone calls), but over all it is solid and reliable.

Hopefully after Monday I’ll be able to get stuck right into the system and finish it and get it live. And that should hopefully see the site progress afterwards. I do have a mock design done, but I look at it, and immediately dislike the new design.

The problem with Australian web designers (not coders) is they charge an arm and a leg for their 20 minutes in Photoshop, which they then simply export to a html file and try and charge big dollars for it (I was quoted something along the lines of $300+ recently).

Sure, they get a good look and feel happening, but the expense for just the look of the website is a complete insult to the content and technology that goes into a website. A design is simply the look of a website. Sure, it’s great to have an attractive design, but for me, it’s technology that says yes or no to a website.

Dynamic websites, using ajax technology, and having useful content nearly always get the thumbs up, so long as the content is easily located (nothing like trawling a foreign website for information on a page titled something completely irrelevent).

I might decide to muster up the funds eventually to get a better design done for the website to use more of the screen real estate that is wasted with the current system.

The next template will almost certainly use CSS wisely to create many of the effects being forced upon it with tables at the moment (I’m not a real CSS junkie, but lately have been using div’s and css to get some great effects).

Tables still have their place in the web, because some browsers just be a royal pain in the ass to get CSS correct for, and others are easy, then you open it in IE6 and you wonder how on earth you ever viewed the web with such a heap of junk! Really. I did that recently with a recent launch, and it was amazing just what is different between the same page in two browsers.

On that note however, I’m definitely going to put a week or more into getting a lot of this done and done and live. It’s annoying having to put so much time into a big improvement on monitoring and reporting and simply not being able to deploy it due to database differences, web page issues and integration.

Enjoy!

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 isolate and correct it, was the time that should have gone into finishing off a last few lines of code, and then taking the site offline so I could integrate it all.

The changes are all backend, but they will affect the front end to some extent as a direct result.

I also took the time today to do a few other things, like watch a movie – nothing entertaining, was “Santa Clause 3″, pretty plain really, none the less, it was a break away.

Then, I got my night driving section ticked off in my log book in a nice long drive towards Budgewoi and back – it’s more of a highway stretch of road, so wasn’t town style night driving, and therefore made a little more complex, than that experienced in the suburban streets I’d rarely find myself on at a night.

So, therefore, it wasn’t completely error free, with a few instances exceeding the speed limit (it’s a 90K street, I kept dropping back to 80K- my limited limit, but continually found myself over the limit a few times), and a little distraction caused me to nearly touch the kerb, pulled away and corrected though.

But indeed, it is made more complex in darker highway conditions, when compared to that of regular streets, such as the well lit up Wyong Road.

Aside from that, I was pretty much error free, mainly due to the time, and the stretch of road being a straight ahead drive really, so no real blind spots to check, no turns to make, no giving way, no stop signs, no entering traffic, … none of the standard traffic conditions you’d be exposed to on a general mix of road conditions.

But, it got the night drive ticked off, so that works for me.

This week is an exciting week! I have a few things I am taking care of, such as the finalisation of a released website, the new system for my partner, getting my internal server back online, hopefully finding time to finish off what I was doing today, a few other projects and some more excitement.

All in the lead up to the most exciting weekend you’ll find in around 3 years, the federal election on Saturday, which really is looking for a Labor win, and my thoughts recently suggest voting Labor, because the way Howard is going against drugs, our crime rate is likely to increase.

He plans to withhold Centrelink funds from those who are convicted of drug offences and only allow vital purchasing.

The problem with that is a drug addict or not, they’ll get the drugs. They’ll resort to lives of crimes, crimes that will harm innocent members of the public.

Better having them shooting themselves up, then causing more work for our police indirectly, by withholding Centrelink funds.

It’s a disaster if they take the drugs away from them, because, they’ll steal to get the drugs. Drug dealing and drug usage affect the selected individuals only (generally), and with the supply being taken away, they’ll simply find a new way of getting their supply. Crime will become the answer. And instead of select individuals being affected, members of the public will also suffer.

I agree with his stance on intervening on Child Abuse in NT, fantastic move to clean the area up of Child Abuse. Children were affected.

This move however? Seems to be more about winning votes, by being seen as doing something about drugs.

Indirectly, creating more problems.

A vote for Rudd will see some good dollars spent over the nation, that’s probably what’s going to win me over at this rate, though I can see Labor State governments have bad debts, so perhaps we can instead later, put Costello back in if they do push the nation into a defecit, and the Liberals will again save the nation.

Better having a debt than having a nation of crime, pushed by poorly thought out drug policies.

A whirlpool poll reveals a 77% Labor win, when asked “What sort of Government will Australia have” – with notes that state not necessarily who you will vote for.

77% believe we will have a Labor government. Just 18% believe it will be Coalition.

Of course, that’s only 174 users, and the polls in main stream generic media suggest that its more close, and might even see a Coalition win.. It has happened, it can happen.

Here’s hoping that not necessarily the Coalition or Labor, but “The Best Party” wins.

Enjoy!

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 knocked on to the case, laying on its side, resting on the two servers that superseded it.

Unfortunately for that motherboard, it didn’t seem to want to come back on after suffering numerous injuries as a result of the soft drink being quickly propelled around the case by the Zalman fan (which I just put into that case not so long ago, upgrading my own fan due to copper fin ‘bendage’).

Anyway, so the time has come to solve two problems, one, my partners thirst for more computational power to process tasks faster, and the newly invented problem, my server suffering from liquid near the brain (CPU).

The good news for me is my habit of buying parts nearly identical for my machine and my partners, and the end result of my older machine becoming the new server means I don’t have to do any formatting or reinstall.

It’s simply take her high spec P4 3.0Ghz 531 Processor, 4GB of RAM, and the same model motherboard, and place that in the server case, plug the HDDs back in the same order, and fire them up, and we should be good to go again.

Unfortunately however, for me and my server (and the projects I maintain on it), they have to sit back a bit whilst we hack data from the Linux Virtual Hard Drive (we use Linux Virtual Machines over Virtual Server, on a Windows Server 2003 base), from the hard drive on that machine, so that I can continue finishing some updates to OzVoIPStatus, or, wait until next weekend, when the hardware for my partners machine, is to arrive (they were supposed to be here Friday, but the distributors can’t tell the difference between Sydney and Melbourne – strange, I can, one has a highly problematic public transport network, and its not Melbourne).

Anyway, due to the delay from Melbourne, I have to wait until at least Monday to get the gear, which means probably taking Monday (which I would usually use to put towards focusing on websites of clients) to build the server and get it back online, just so I can get somewhere, otherwise the whole week will be nearly spent doing little at all in the way of development (lack of test area).

The new gear will see a performance improvement for my partner, who long has been stifled by the Hyper Threading artifical dual CPU technoloy, and will almost definitely love the ultimate responsiveness of a dual core machine!

I was planning the upgrade, but not so soon, after Christmas.

The next item on her upgrade list is two LCD monitors to help trim down the fat on the power bill her two CRTs generate.
Although trimming fat shouldn’t be something we have to do, instead, power solutions should be worked on that are friendly to the environment and reduce costs to consumers. Such examples exist in GeoThermal power. Truly amazing idea (figures quoted as 5c a KWH, compared to the ~12c KWH we pay now (and the 15c KWH after XX kWH).

My plan to release a key update to OzVoIPStatus is likely to go ahead, with thanks to Virtual PC 2007, which works just like Virtual Server, except its desktop oriented, which will do now for the time being.

My updates aren’t much on the web side, and more in the back, though some of the changes I imagine will be visible to viewers, as this essentially will fix a bug with outages being logged every 60 seconds due to the more passive nature of the tests currently being done.

It sort of sucks to lose a machine that isn’t so hardly worked yet! Many of my machines get around 5 years or so before I take them out, simply due to aged hardware, leaky capacitors, warping due to CPU heat, etc. But then, it was originally my workstation, and I do work them pretty hard.

So, tomorrow, hopefully, assuming I complete it, we’ll have a OzVoIPStatus fix up that solves outages being logged incorrectly, and can (but won’t for a little while) provide data back out as to what was found at the cause of each outage.

Enjoy!

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 test the providers every minute).

I isolated that issue, and corrected that, and we now don’t extend outages, and unfortunately, that leads to large amounts of 60 second outages (and frankly, a provider can go down for 60 seconds and not bother a customer).

So, my new plan is to take the focus of the monitoring, and remove a lot of the issues centered around how I put that together a year ago, and work on fetching the raw data and being able to put that out for analysis eventually.

What we do notice is that many of the outages for 60 seconds are a result of just a blip where a provider might appear momentarily unreachable.

This wasn’t good for providers who might not have been down and a packet simply didn’t get in with the time it had.

So my enhancements focus on speeding the testing up, when we get responses, we don’t really need to do much apart from getting past outage checks, and focus on finding those that are down, and finding out why they are down.

We obviously can’t do that without heavy detail being logged about logged outages. So, the plan focuses on moving away from a passive test, and into a more active test, and for the most part, it is working well.

C++ is a beautiful language, and I’ve come to have some fun with it today.

Hopefully I’ll be able to finalise the touches on the status system and that can be ready to slot in the server tomorrow, and then I’m going to probably work on the database overhaul to group providers, so that servers and providers are more different than they are at the moment, and swap the system over to the new method.

That leaves that going well, and then we can put the time into getting that website working nice and the way I want it to.

I got a big list of changes for the site planned, and they are in progress. I’ve had thoughts about dropping the RRD graphs, they seem a little wasteful to me, though I would need to look at their usage in the logs to see who is using them.

I’m also wanting to reconsider the site layout, but that’s not critical right now (but I do want to have something more appealing).

I’m always getting stuck at picking a nice logo or header for the site, something that depicts VoIP, and at the same time downtime (or uptime) and perhaps even something a little comical.

I don’t really have a vision of a logo for the site, but really am looking for something that sort of takes that look and adds a real VoIP touch to it.

The site has a long way to go before I will consider it finished and happy, like all good creations however, you keep on maintaining them, and keep them growing!

The issue for me is there’s never enough time to take what’s in my head as a vision of what I want for the site, and putting those into action in the site.

That’s changed a bit, there’s free time on the weekends (I spent all day on the status checker, with exception to my whirlpool exploration today).

So, hopefully, the progress continues and come Christmas, we’ll be locked and loaded with the site in a good state, ready for me to tackle my Diploma in IT next year.

Enjoy!

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 linux and avoided Windows for its outrageous pricing and numerous security flaws requiring constant patching due to being the mainstream OS (why not patch the hackers instead?).

Windows surprises me in that everything is nearly a click away after you work out what you are aiming for.

I’m very familiar with DNS, Mail systems and Web setups, anyway, I got into the windows machine expecting an extensive setup, requiring a lot of learning, a fair bit of frustration, and reaching the point where you wonder if its worth doing, then you reach that sudden break through where all is sorted.

That wasn’t the case here. I’m sort of disappointed, because I was ready for a challenge and all I got was a few clicks and I was pretty much done. Have already got domain running, website up and ready to load more in the coming days.

—

On another unrelated note, OzVoIPStatus has been getting a little bit of contact from VSPs wanting to add proxies or update details, etc, and I do have something in the pipeline for that. My biggest problem is getting and remaining focused on a task. I can generally stay on task once I have started, but if I get distracted (you have a 2 year old kid, you quickly understand “distracted”), I lose my thought path and end up just gaming or browsing Whirlpool (and both are actually not so entertaining .. they get boring fast).

So, I start to get my thought process back, I guess I get “over-bored” and keen to get back into it all and get it finished so I might be able to instead watch some TV, catch a movie, or work on the numerous of other projects that have been “PENDING” for, well don’t ask the time.

Essentially though, I try and put a bit of time into everything I can and the balance sort of makes it.

Back to it, I plan to get some features onto OzVoIPStatus in the coming weeks for providers to get more out of the site, so we can be more of a middle ground between them, instead of them remaining the star attraction to shame (wasn’t really the initial point of the site either). Coming weeks, I’d say days, but see above, time blows out. I think the planet is somehow speeding up, or its losing size, and therefore time might be adjusting. Who knows. A day just doesn’t feel like 24 hours though.

Enjoy!

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 after I logged out from my old machine and logged in on my new machine, it remained down (at the exact moment!!).

It has since bumped up and down occassionally, but it’s been so much down, that someone that regularly messages me on Skype has been overly silent (much, much more silent).

One would again assume they have much more of a implemented process to swap out bugged software with other software rather quickly, considering they still acknowledge it as a bug, and not a hack attempt, or maintenance related.

The bug didn’t exist originally, so .. just go back, Skype’s owned by eBay, surely they could have afforded enough for a backup of their source code? Or do they spend billions and just hope for the best?

In other Telstra news, in 2005, one of Telstra’s better employees: Doug Campbell, arranged for ADSL extension technology, which could extend ADSL by 20kMs could be used to deliver ADSL to more homes in regional and rural areas.

They installed 50 of the devices, and have left 200 sit in warehouses for the rest of that time.

So, Telstra shareholders, again, more of your money going to waste, they bought 200, and left them sit in a warehouse, devaluing by the minute (technology loses value over time).

Much like all the ADSL2+ DSLAMs Telstra has deployed and are artificially shaped to ADSL1.

What’s the point in paying for new technology if you are just running it at the old speeds?

It’s like buying a P4, and ripping out the internals to install a 486 (80′s computer), it’s very stupid, and a severe waste of cash, when you consider the ADSL1 technology they are runnning artificially shaped at the moment has been superseded several times, and therefore lost any value.

Another GOOD reason not to own Telstra shares.

Enjoy!

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 issue to solve it!

You can only just imagine how much pressure the developers are under to fix the issue, considering that Skype’s marketshare is a huge share, and the income revenue they are missing from this outage is somewhat extreme.

It’s been exposed as an “algorithm issue”.. But one would assume they have older versions to go back to, to bring the system back online in the light of the heavy downtime?

I’d have done that after the 4th hour, and worked it out later in testing before pushing to production.

Claims of a hack attempt have been hosed down on Skype’s website.

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 would be so much more better.

Anyway, the outages started at midnight last night, and finished at 10pm tonight, the large section from 4pm to 10pm was the most concerning, as during that time I was missing on email, I was missing visitors to my website, and the only thing I could do is sit there and scream F*$K Y@U, dirty SOB’s that can’t keep a cable lit for a day right.

I was really, really, annoyed.

Then I started to see, what can I do about the situation to make it better. Well, there’s a lot I can do. I can tell the current mob, that it’s great they house me, but the people they get the inbound from are very disappointing and need a good kick in the N$ts, as I am simply not going to tolerate unstable connectivity on a site designed to be.. A MONITORING WEBSITE.

Or. I can do something else. I can instead monitor webhosts, as I have had a plan to do for some time now, and with that publish web hosting statistics, which, in the case of Koala VoIP forced them to be a more reliable provider (ignore the recent news that they are going down the drain financially), and perhaps force a reliable change by publishing the real statistics of downtime in a manner that is accurate!

Or. I can take the system elsewhere and see if things look better when you remove the current provider.

Or. I can install an ADSL2+ connection at the data centre my box is housed at, pay line rental and for an internet connection that is there for downtime purposes so that I can always acccess it. But that’d be stupid, because if that was the case, I’d just host it in my own home, it’d have the same quality, the same specific stats, just without the network connectivity issues.

Or, I can remain thankful for all they have done for me in getting this in the data centre and realise that the upstream provider still needs a kick in the nuts as they just changed the backhaul provider to WCG, an ex supplier of services that they are now back with.. Weird, but maybe someone has learnt something.

Anyway, the issue was resolved after many hours of downtime (not impressed), and I suspect I might just wait it out now, and see if things are on the rise. After the change back to the other provider that was causing issues.

A whirlpool user highlighted something that is very important though: Where’s the redundancy? Why on earth have ONE link to the internet, why not two ? I could do the same from home for about $50 a month for the second connection, and if it was down, take the routing back to the Netshape connection.

I suppose in a data center data is a bit more expensive, but on the other hand, the costs are a determination of your costing model. If it costs $1/Mbit for each connection, fine, it’s $3.20/GB for the sake of redundancy, I doubt anyone would say no to that, it’s a little more, but for the sake of reliability, I’m sure everyone would be paying.

I have no real idea of what 100Mbit of connectivity costs, but if its something like what they are paying now, then you can surely double up and operate two links, multihomed (published routes on both links). Or better, load balance. That is, two links provisioned at half the maximum capacity required. If all is up and fine, the traffic goes in and out of two links suitable for carrying the load, if a link goes down, the other one is a little saturated, but sure enough, online.

When you kick the other mob in the n$ts, you end up with full capacity again.

Anyway, that’s how I’d be doing it, to benefit from both routing paths, redundancy, and better stability. It’s so bloody obvious I’m amazed they don’t do that already.

It’s good to be back, not so good that we spent many hours down! Let’s hope things are on the up from here, with a constant stream of reliability!

Enjoy!

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 we run could be configured a little differently for a better result.

It’s seriously an artform, the art of configuring a linux server from scratch.

Of course, I didn’t sit there and manually reconfigure the box each time, that’d be a big waste. Instead, we use the power of scp to copy data over, have all the processes on the server tested and running, implement the configuration files and add the data and let it run, after some testing of course.

Now, each time I do this, not everything works 100%, for example, email might act a little funny, or we’ll lose the ability to receive or make calls.

Actually, just while on that note, I’m “VERY” tired of the inconsistent programming by a particular coder, I won’t name them here, but it’s just “silly”.

For example, the first update, they used a variable like “get-this”, they then changed it in the next version, assumably to make it shorter, to “get”, and this time we fetch the next update, and it’s changed back to “get-this”.

Very much annoying, as if you use a direct call to that, you end up having more issues, like fixing the issue.

I wrote about this a while back, basically, the person should be using an alias to the function, and not simply “renaming”, other coders use the same, and it’s just inconsiderate to be changing it so much.

Anyway, with the move near complete again (and a nice 9days uptime in the data centre! ), we are on top of it all and screaming along to finding my weekend time free again for OzVoIPStatus maintenance.

I originally planned this weekend for it, however, moving from a underpowered loan server to my beast was much, much more of a priority, and moving a dynamic site like OzVoIPStatus does take a fair bit of thought. It’s not a simple one line command, though, I am sure I could make it so, it takes a fair bit of thought into what part of it slots into what area of move, and basically everything is live before data is even migrated to ensure that we always have the providers monitored, one server is on top of it, the other is getting data and staying up to date, and keeping on top of it.

Eventually the two are split, and we see if the configuration was successful.

Assuming all goes well for OzVoIPStatus, we move on to setting up mail for it, and test that its successful, and eventually we land with the setup configured.

It’s certainly not a walk in the park, and takes a fair bit of time, and in nearly every case, I am sure I could have configured it all differently and got a different result!

As I mentioned earlier, there’s gotta be some sort of artform to it. You really have to find the time each time to manually configure and compile software and optimise it to your requirements, and adjust configuration settings to tweak them to the peak.

That’s not a quick task, and I guess the only thing that can be said is.. Thanks a heap for yum and the open source gurus that will happily compile these packages and a configuration file that makes it simple to configure and tweak each option to your needs.

Trixbox and systems like that just basically have a script that runs (and breaks in several scenarios) after install and writes out configuration the way you want. It’s just another compilation of packages really.

Trixbox could have been better done in my opinion too.

It would have been far easier to not rely on a “trixboxload” folder, and instead, use a repo, then it’s a simple yum install trixbox to get it and all its dependancies. For a CD install, the same thing, just a repo that points at the cd .

The script they use is generally buggy from my testing, breaking for various reasons, like yum not installed (the first case ), all could be easily checked for and error handled (but its not).

And the other let down for Trixbox: It installs a dang IRCd for no apparent (or related) reason, therefore opening the system to a security exploit, and besides, it takes up resources, needlessly.

Back to the topic: Building a linux server, building a distro, it’s all a very unique artform to get a server from command prompt to your chosen ideal configuration, very fun, if you can find the time.

Enjoy!

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 time. Just as I thought things would settle down a bit, the house shook, and I noticed light shining into the lounge room.

What had happened was the network had restarted, causing monitors to turn on, and the ADSL modem to get a blink. This was due to a power blip. We’ve had a few of these over the last few days. What happens is that the power drops for something like 15 ms, which causes a VERY quick flick in the lights, and some (if not all) the network equipment and computers to all start rebooting.

My machine, unfortunately, hasn’t missed a reboot, copping all the power blips, and therefore, all the reboots.

The router on the other hand, running Tomato firmware, which I must say, works great for VoIP QoS, had 18+ days uptime on it, when I forced a reboot today to get the redial program running (meant to do that the other day when the connection didn’t come back by itself).

But, when I woke up this morning, a problem happened with one of my servers .

I turned it back on as it was off after the outage. I opened up command prompt on my machine (after logging in of course, due to the power flicker), and started pinging its IP.

I waited, and waited, and we had no response to the PINGS.

I tried remote desktop, just incase it had confused its interfaces to the network again, and was blocking ping internally. Nope, it was definitely down.

No worries I thought, probably something simple, like a prompt wanting to be dismissed in the BIOS or something basic.

I connected a monitor to it, and what I saw was well, a blank screen.

I turned it off and on again, it looked like it was going to boot, BIOS was successful, and it looked like it was getting to the animated Microsoft screen.

Nope, it sat there on a blank screen. This was very much confusing. I start following through a troubleshooting process, to determine the problem.

I took several hours, and did everything imaginable to get this machine to boot back into its OS.

I also had issues getting it to boot from a Setup CD, however, it would boot from a system tools CD, a Windows 98 CD, a Ubuntu Live CD just fine.

It didn’t like an XP CD, and it didn’t like its own Windows Server 2003 eval CD.

Ripped out network cards, swapped CPU, swapped memory, no joy.

Got down to the point where I was going to swap motherboards, though I had still thought.. the motherboard couldn’t have a fault, the Live CD works fine, Partition Commander loaded the file structure off the drives fine, it simply can’t be an IDE issue, or a motherboard issue.

I got tired of it, testing everything I could find to test and isolate the issue. This all was from 11am to 5.30pm.

I did one last thing, I thought, if its an IDE issue, not affecting the CD drive, but is affecting the HDD, a Seatools test will likely show it, surely.

So, I stuck the Seatools CD in, and attempted to boot from it, but it wouldn’t start from it due to a few scratches on the surface of the disc, I think.

After rebooting it again ready with another CD, I was too late to get the disc in before the BIOS prompt, anyway… I was amazed. Windows was actually starting all by itself.

Just moments earlier (that is, after each test I attempted to get into Windows), it didn’t work, it would just freeze up. When trying Windows XP or Server 2003 setup discs, it just locked up at “Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration”.. I googled as well, but got nothing useful, as the entries at that point were all SATA / PATA related, and I don’t have those drives in this server.

So, the problem doesn’t seem to be a problem after all that testing, and it wasn’t an old issue, because the machine rebooted in one of the previous power blips earlier.

Weird issue. It works now. It wasted a good 7 hours of my time, very disappointed, no, more annoyed, as I set today aside to do some more on OzVoIPStatus, and I really wanted to make some changes to the site today . It still doesn’t make sense either, how can it just DO that, after I tried all the reboots earlier to get it going, and it refused. The disk would light up for 1 second, and sit there, waiting for it to continue loading more of the loading application into memory for it to process.

It’s up now.

And in good news, the dedicated server is also running stable waiting for me to finish migrating over to it so we can get operational on it. I’ve got some sip providers on it now, and I should look at moving the tester over to it soon too, so that we can prove its stability, and in fact, just duplicate the entire setup to the box, if its going to crash again, it should crash in the office and not back in the data centre. It really does feel so much more stable!

top – 00:10:59 up 1 day, 13:07,

Closer and closer reaching the two day slot, where it would normally crash (it was crashing ~ 2 days).

Tomorrow, hopefully, I can get some more time in on OzVoIPStatus, basically, I want to try and focus on making the site more presentable to new users. I suck at presentation (really, I do), so I think I might just take a different road, and make the site more capable of templates, so perhaps we can try a few different layouts and get something default, that works for new users, and something more advanced, or more “detailed” that works for advanced users.

I really also have to put some more time into the features for the site, and get those finished, essentially, we want to source more data directly from providers themselves, so they can maintain their own records where possible, and I’ll obviously make some methods for the larger or smaller providers that are yet to open their eyes to the monitoring of their servers, but managing 180+ VoIP providers is no easy job for me to do myself, and we have had just 39 plans in the database for some time now, which indicates to me that a user provided data model isn’t going to work (as well, it has to still be validated, and corrected from those who think dollars are cents).

On that note though, this post was to focus on the bad weather we have had, and amazingly, we haven’t been affected as bad as others, who have yet to get power on, going into 24 hours without power. To describe that for someone who uses power regularly, ARE YOU INSANE?! – That’s just far too long to be without the connections to the internets and the power to the computers. I really dunno what I’d be doing that bored. I suppose I still have the 2 UPS in storage that I could connect up that should have around 4 hours of power on it !

I do hope for their sake they all get the power back, and this bad weather eases off soon enough (well, fill the dams up, and move along). I wouldn’t want to be a business owner in Wallsend right now, Jared of Servers Australia taking some pictures of his local town showing shops with smashed windows, likely a key target for looters to snatch and run anything salvageable from the floods they had. Take a look here:Servers Australia: Wallsend Wash.

My favourite thus far is the Jigsaw carpark, but also, there’s a bank that might have attracted the view of some salvagers.

It was indicated in the news we’d be getting some more, but I think that the rain is easing off some more. They predicated we’d get some more at 10pm, it’s now.. 12.22am and its just cold and quite. On that note, so much for Global Warming, everything feels cold. (joke)..

This is getting a bit long, so here’s hoping for a sunny day soon for the mothers to do the washing, the SES to get some sleep, the lawns to get some progress, and the power to be restored to those in the dark.

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 occasions, likely because this gave various areas of the CPU, memory, motherboard and IDE a workout.

Just tonight Trixbox 2.0 is installed and I’m moving it from CentOS 4.4 to CentOS 5 to take advantage of the newer kernel and bug fixed software, and then we’ll work on destorying everything that makes trixbox, trixbox by removing IRCD, the web admin system, the flash operator panel, some of the databases, and a few other items it installs.

What this does is give us a platform to start with to modify the key items I modify and create a stable operating platform, the change being this time, CentOS 5.

We have a dual core, 64bit CPU. The 64bit shouldn’t be a problem running on 32bit hardware, with a i386 kernel. What could be a problem however, is a dual core CPU running on a kernel that has been superseded a total of something like 11 times or more?

So, the running theory is we’ll use a newer kernel that should have some tastes of dual core implemented and work well with the system, and moving to CentOS 5 now, saves issues down the track if it doesn’t work out.

Of course we could have just took the perhaps different way about it, and installed CentOS 5, and ran the ugly Trixbox script, and removed all the rubbish it includes that we simply have no use for (like its IRCd).

Let’s hope this BIOS update solves the issue completely, so we can get running on some REAL hardware for a change.

In related hardware issues, I got a P3 passed to me today, complains of Windows 98 already installed, but running slow, and wants a format.

Took it to someone else, who said it worked the day before, and just today, they plugged it in, turned it on and it wouldn’t work. They investigated the hardware and concluded the issue was a faulty switch. I wasn’t happy with that conclusion, mainly for two reasons:

1. They hadn’t tested the power supply.
2. They hadn’t tested the motherboard.
3. They hadn’t isolated anything else in the machine.

So, I opened it up, tested the machine, no boot, removed PCI cards, and isolated machine to bare bones, no boot.
So, I dug a deeper, and changed the reset button with the power button, no boot – there goes that faulty switch right out the window, the switch is fine.
So, digging a little more deeper, we swap the motherboard over, with another board, no boot.

Used the power supply from another machine, motherboard from another machine, and the power switch from the same machine, viola, it boots.

So, the issue was that not only had the power supply gone, but the motherboard too.

The switch on the case is fine. Problem now is that the case won’t take the other power supply I have, and basically the rule of time average applies, average time to get an angle grinder, grind out a hole in the back of the case to take new power supply, probably longer than it would take placing all the components in the case we just took everything out of.

And so, it was done, and it boots. All successful. My old P3 motherboard that hasn’t been used in a fair while was working fine in a new case.

The message is clear, if you haven’t tested completely, you can’t diagnose an issue. If you have no experience diagnosing issues using proven methods, you are not going to be able to come to a solid conclusion on what could be the issue, without the resources and knowledge to test each component involved in a problem to completely identify the issue, you will not identify the issue.

To accurately determine an issue, you must first identify the problem, and not make problems up as you go to see if that fixes the issue. If you get lucky, sure it’ll solve it, but if you are wrong, you’ll end up wasting all of time, resources, and money chasing down an issue that you haven’t even identified yet.

The total time taken to identify that issue was around 1 hour, with an extra hour to move the components over, testing and cleaning up, with tomorrow used to install Winblows 98 again.

Back on the topic of my server, I am so happy to have it running, stable again (I hope), testing will tell, I think the next outage will be placing the extra 1GB ram back into it, or the reboot into CentOS 5, assuming it goes successful.

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 didn’t work as expected at providing a shaping mechanism to slow the data rate of network services down, as well, as provide bandwidth for VoIP calls.

I began to think about how best to approach the issue a few weekends back, and came to a conclusion that the DD-WRT firmware needs to be pulled apart, and rebuilt with shaping that suits my network usage, mainly putting a set limit on all network traffic to 192kb, and placing services I want to be interactive with, like SSH, and VoIP, to be able to use all bandwidth, thus creating a “always available” buffer for them and ensuring that we don’t shape the network to hard to a state that uploading becomes unbearable.

Anyway, I read about the tomato firmware being good for QoS a while back, but didn’t want to take the time to tear down the DD-WRT config, and reload the Tomato configuration.

.. Until tonight, when I was talking with a MSN contact, and it came back up in conversation. I thought, stuff waiting, lets get it loaded up and test it all out.

And, I did, and it is very impressive in its reporting facilities.

I don’t want to place DD-WRT in the bin just yet, because I was looking at things differently. The general idea should be, you place all traffic in a pool, and pull out traffic you want to have running fast.

This router does that, but with the added bonus, you can configure the speeds that tc shapes at, and the iptables setup is a lot better.

The router as a whole seems great. But. And a big but. SNMP is gone!

I’ve found a workaround by holding on to SNMP in the CIFS dir, and loading it from there, it seems to work, but MRTG is broken. Good thing they included rstats .

I’m thinking there’s other reasons for MRTG being broken, considering I followed the external program method to get the data for MRTG and provide it, and it still doesn’t seem to be taking it on board and updating my RRD and graphs.

That aside, the QoS benefits will outweigh the graphing benefits, and if it still doesn’t want to play ball, I can work around it by just going straight to rrdtool instead.

In other news, the routes for OzVoIPStatus seem to be fixed, it looks as though it was simply routed around, rather than corrected by WCG, so the original problem still exists, but just not for me, and TSN Internet customers.

In completely unrelated news, The G9 claim they don’t need Telstra’s business on their network, as they have enough business between them all to make it all viable, which is great news for them.

Even greater news is that the proposal is expected to finally be in the public eye this week, and I’m very keen to tear it apart!

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 the late nights, or the customer complaints from the early risers when a problem occurs.

And even worse so, when the problems continue later into the day.

And much more so, when the problems creep into the night. Not likely.

Anyway, the move for OzVoIPStatus was started at 3.31AM. The move was completed at, I understand to be 6AM, the server was showing activity.

I was awake til something like 1.30AM, with my little one who thought being awake after 12AM was pretty good. So good he stayed up for an hour after while I quite happily built PHP 5.2.2 on my dev server and well, configured and maked a few times while I gave up waiting on the move to start (not an attack at anyone, its no easy task moving several servers, without drastically affecting their online abilities).

So, it got late, gave up waiting on swapping the DNS over, woke up this morning at something like 10AM with my server offline.
Nothing says “Good Morning” like a server that is down. You know your gonna have to do something to fix it, and get all its services running, and you are probably going to put that ahead of “EVERYTHING” else, so that its up and not affecting anyone.

So, when I found it was still down, waiting to be moved, and the WHM DNS had been automagically changed, I had a few things on my plate to take care of.

First, was making sure the server was online at its intended IP address. It wasn’t, but that was fixed quickly.
The next step, figuring out why OzVoIPStatus’s IP magically changed where it pointed to, to another IP.

A quick visit to the first DNS server confirmed the IP was correct. A quick visit to the second DNS server saw that the WHM tools had managed to unchange my changes.

A quick change, a router reboot later, and we were up and running.

The next step, check all services are running.
Naturally, the server had been sitting there from 6AM to 10AM without internet access, so the predictable had occurred, some applications running that require internet access would not be running, or would require manual work to get running, or adjusted.

So, the first step, start all services not running, pretty easy.

Check OzVoIPStatus to see if we are cooking with 200 OKs and pages load ok. Yep.

Check if outages are being logged correctly, and no provider is suffering DNS issues or other network issues.
Nope, no joy.

Unfortunately, a problem with a link out of the data centre (about 2 levels above SAU) is having issues.

The traceroute revealed that it wasn’t passing on traffic from the WCG Optus link.

So, I contacted SAU, alerted them of that, and you can only imagine that they are busy getting servers in racks, systems running, services online themselves, that it was no way going to be a #1 issue, but for me, and OzVoIPStatus, it was a rather critical issue that needed some attention.

So, I dug a bit deeper later on. Contacted Optus’s NOC, alerted them to it. The response was that it didn’t seem to be a problem their side, and that they couldn’t find a route advertised.

I was already aware such a problem existed, when I posted in this whirlpool thread (the hop just came to mind):

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=740473&r=11610503#r11610503

As you can see, the issue is related exactly to that 59.154.15.66 link, which points to 59.154.15.65 to carry traffic to further hops.

Optus tells me that the traffic should be routed not to .66, but to .65.

I have no idea, not my network, not my problem, but the issue does exist none the less. I’m amazed, the poster in that thread claims it was fixed just Friday. However, today, it does not seem to be fixed at all, with myself experience, believe it or not, the exact same issue.

It’s a bit of a long running issue, and I have had one user complain they aren’t accessing the website, and beside that, the other issue I’m having is the fact the link is down, I’m logging incorrect outages for 25 providers which share the same 10 servers, so the stats are incorrect as a result, but there’s little that can be done, aside from deleting the outages once they are finished, and every time I check out how things are, to reduce the impact.

I was hoping for a “TODAY” fix. That was more than 12 hours ago, so it’s probably a next few hours issue, as it’s already 1.30AM.

Anyway, the move was pretty much a great success, and all worked out nicely, with the exception of this routing issue, which is pretty much in the hands of a third party to fix. I wonder what the SLA is like on the links.

In other “crashing” news, the crashed server remains crashed, as anyone can imagine, the time wasn’t there to get the required photo of the console, and the reboot of the console.

I still am not sure on the reasons behind the crashes either, but one thought I had was a 10 / 100 Mbit issue. That has apparently been ruled out, as it always was on 100Mbps at the testing point, and the data centres (news to me).

So, that being the case, there’s no real idea behind the crashes at this point in time, some months after January when they originally started.

Changed from x86 to x86_64.
Changed from CentOS 4.4 to Fedora 6 (different kernel versions).
Crashed with no additional software running.
Didn’t crash with stress testing.
Memory testing passed successfully.
HDD is fine (unless all 3 are faulty)
Motherboard and CPU would have caused crashes under the tests ran if they were faulty, as the operations performed were all generally, system intensive.

I guess the console dump holds key information here, but that’s still not useful if its only short lines like the netconsole output that I got, as it pointed us to CPU being the issue, but that’s not the case, as the tests all passed fine under another OS.

I got excited about the issue being a 10Mbit / 100Mbit issue too, but if thats not the case, what could it be? What on earth could be wrong?! Why does it crash, when it shouldn’t? Why is there no replication of the crashes?

Why blame hardware when its working?
Why blame software when it works on several servers elsewhere?

It’s not an easy identified issue, but hopefully, we find out soon enough, so I can start enjoying the dedicated server, and not have it there wasting rackspace.

I’ve pondered a lot of possibilities, but still remain without much of an idea on what the issue is, nothing is obvious, nothing points anywhere. Well, actually, according to someone I spoke to, the obvious link is that when they have it installed in the data center and pass it over to me, it crashes. Well, this time it was a clean install, with nothing installed, SSH and yum was installed by the technician, I installed nano, and went to use yum and it ran away.

That tells me its not liking SSH, or yum, or the data centre.

Consider the facts, here, yum is used by many servers, in fact, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 servers that I have used yum on, and have worked fine. They were all CentOS 4.3/4.4, x86, on differing hardware.

All seemed fine with those though, so I think we can rule yum out as having the bugs, considering it crashed when yum was not running as well.

Further, I think we can rule out the OS, and kernel, as different versions still see it crash in the data centre.

The only thing that is in common between crashes are, well, data centre, because I’m not logged in when other crashes have occured, different kernel version, same results.

All testing outside the DC was successful, and without error.

Leads me to, the ethernet cable, the rack, or the manner it is placed in the rack, or some other issue surrounding the server in the rack.

I remain solid on my point that its not software, because the OS has changed, and the software it normally runs was not even loaded, with the exception of SSH and yum, and we don’t see other servers crashing running yum, and we don’t see SSH causing crashes on my other servers.

It doesn’t seem to be hardware, as the hardware testing they did was all successful, and it even maintained, I think it was 14 days uptime, in their office, or more. It never crashed, so it can’t be software.

Either something is flowing down the network cable it doesn’t like in the data centre, the network interface is not likely the cofiguration at the switch, the environment is too cold for it (not likely, its an Intel), power is dirty (unlikely, its all APC gear).

All fingers can be seen to point at the environment, or perhaps the driver for the network adapter and a conflict.

It’s all very much confusing stuff, and nothing is clear, and everything we’ve done has only made the initial points that conflicted clearer: It’s not hardware, it’s not software, the crashes are random, but the crashes only happen in the data center, and it doesn’t matter which rack its in.

I thought Telstra was weird, expecting Australia to believe their crap on how they have Australia’s interests at hand when they propose FTTN, yeh right, but this, by far, is a very weird issue, but will definitely have a solution, if myself and the staff at Servers Australia have anything to do with it.

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 do use a logo, please link back to OzVoIPStatus. People can check the outage data, and see what’s occurred, and so forth. Plus, I’ll consider it a return favour for all the work I put into that site over now, and into the future! If you don’t, that’s fine too, but I’d rather the link .

Also, I’ve added 2 servers today, Engin NSW and Engin Vic. My source on those said they were on Engin’s network, and he didn’t seem to suggest they were BYO servers.

Now, if that’s the case, and they are on Engin’s locked network, we can get some great idea of reliability of engin’s locked network, and just see how well it matches up to regular VSPs like PennyTel and the like, who only seem to have one server, and seem to cope VERY WELL. No, exceptionally well for a single server operation.

Also, I do plan to get my own local (development) setup running internally so I can monitor some providers locally and see how the performance is, and what the new Asterisk is like.

I’m surprised to see a comment here from Philip Argy, ACS. Who claimed we needed 30Gbps bandwidth. I sort of do agree that being a leader is good for development, don’t get me wrong, development is good, but if we get too far in front, the core might just dump or a memory leak occur, and that’s my angle on it. Let the memory leaks get found and the core dumps found on someone elses watch, give us something solid, reliable. The downside is, as Philip suggested, that we get set back a fair bit behind others who are right on the bleeding edge, so we sort of do want some of that action.

Maintaining a good balance there would be ideal.

My final response on that article would be: I don’t really care about 20 years from now, right now. I just want faster upload right now. That’s what I really want. Better value, and faster speeds, we can get right into a future proofing plan when we catch up to today’s speeds.

OzVoIPStatus is going to keep getting more and more work. I have .. mountains of plans for it. And I will go through with them, just in time.

Enjoy your logos, display them proud, or unproud if you have a unreliable VSP, or better, move to a reliable VSP and display it proudly.

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 connection, basically merging 3 cables into one device, that’s, ADSL modem to it, and router, as well as server to that device. It doesn’t work in any mode but switching.
3. Linksys WRT54GL – This sucker is running DD-WRT firmware, with a recompiled image to limit the upload of the bulk pool to 50% of available capacity at all times. If only we could get it to identify BitTorrent easily, we’d have a great QoS implementation. I’m working on it. It’s my favourite right now.
4. D-Link DGL-4300 – Was my absolute most favourite device, cause of its Gigabit capabilities, and QoS – that sort of seemed to have worked. D-Link haven’t updated the firmware after I sent them a list of bugs, and I replied to their recent contact, but haven’t heard back in around 2 months, checked just now, no new firmware to fix bugs. Now use it simply for a Gigabit switch, and connection to the DD-WRT.
5. From the DGL-4300, we branch off to PC’s, and internal network for servers, and virtual machines, ATA, etc.
6. Linksys PAP2T – VoIP ATA, I found this device a rather overly feature rich device since I bought it, unfortunately, due to the complexity of how the options are worded, it’s near impossible to hope to find out its full feature set with everything else on the list.

Anyway, with all those devices, and machines, managing cables is a bit of tricky task. Generally, it involves splitting network and power away from each other as much as possible, so that all network cables go one way, all power and .. other cables.. go another.

Now, that works out nicely, but when we set everything up, it takes several hours to do so.

Just today, we split it all out again and cleaned it all up. 2 hours of downtime according to the bandwidth graph.
I’d love to find a great cable management solution that would mean all cables stayed apart, but the solutions available are generally for long haul cables, and not for machines and network split apart.

What I guess would be ideal would be to have a patch panel and network and power connecting that way, but I don’t think we are able to do that here, so it’s a matter of having things set out differently.

It’d be great to roll the network device into one device that can do all, that is, connect to the adsl modem, and provide access to establish another PPPoE connection, seperating both networks to two seperate IP addresses, provide gigabit connectivity on its LAN ports, have a great QoS implementation, and be as feature rich as the DD-WRT, at the same time, be rock solid.

I’m still disappointed at D-Link, the device retails for 200 odd dollars, and basically, I can’t maintain the suggested usage out of the device due to several bugs within the devices web interface, and they provide no other manner for setting configuration data, and beside that, the QoS was what I wanted to take ultimate advantage of, but it has bugs, and they aren’t maintaining great contact in fixing them.

Hopefully tomorrow, I can do a few things to OzVoIPStatus, I know I keep saying its coming, the code is done, it’s sitting on my local test server, ready to upload. It’s the upload and update the website bit that remains undone, and I have a great new addition to come to the provider table soon too. They might not like being monitored if the stats show a negative trend in reliability, but I form the opinion, the users must see this.

So, hopefully I get onto that tomorrow, and we can start enjoying the coding I’ve done for it. Don’t get too excited on the feature, it’s nothing overly exciting, but its a feature none the less. Been very busy lately. Excessively busy. In fact, just the other day, I was awake til 1.30 – 2am dealing with an outage logging issue, and that was very much annoying to me , but anything for those that enjoy using the service I suppose .

Enjoy, and tomorrow, should be about OzVoIPStatus!.

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 topics, like “VoIP Gateway”. What on earth are they trying to pull there? Trying to sue all VoIP gateway providers for providing a VoIP service.

Actually, just looking at this for a moment, Verizon taking Vonage to court, it’s very well possible the same could happen with sites like e164.org, which basically use ENUM to turn telephone numbers into .. anything, including IP addresses.

The patent owned by Verizon I’m lead to believe is exactly that. They turn a phone number into an IP address. That’s not a crime. Actually, here’s something, the inventor of TCP/IP could sue Verizon for breaching the design priniciples of end to end translation. Or, how about the same principle with DNS ? Core network protocols, and they don’t scream patent breach.

Anyway, you dig deeper and you can see patents lapsing because they weren’t renewed for example. Looking at the costs, you could also agree that it is kind of costly to maintain a patent as well, espiecially when you are only buying into patents to abuse them and sue anyone that develops anything surrounding the technology.

What’s next? Telstra suing iiNet / Internode for being the leader in marketing ADSL2+?

I do hope that things work out well for Vonage, because this is absolute trash. It’s not within the realm of patents which is to protect someone’s intellectual property (ie, inventions) from being copied, and Vonage provided a simple number to IP translation service, that seems fine.

Actually, if you really think, long, hard and deep about it, the VoIP technology is basically turning a phone number into an IP address. Let’s see Verizon try and take on the rest of the world’s VoIP providers for providing free on-net calls, ie. translating 101 into sip:101@123.456.789.012 – nearly exactly what the case is with Vonage.

Patents are there to do a few things, but inclusive in that is to ensure unique developments in the science realms, we don’t really need 5 of everything developped, if the first one isn’t being held in an anti competitive monopoly. We do need more innovation, it’s the way forward, right? What’s the point in moving forward in areas, if everyone’s gonna try and sue you for.. innovating? Utilising science, or for want of a better phrase, bringing the future to you – “Using their heads”.

I should just go patent the “concepts and theories of creating a patent”. I could from that point on take everyone of them down for thinking of a patent. It’s kind of restrictive. I think people deserve a right to see their work protected, but at the same time, they shouldn’t be capable of suing someone just because they came up with a genuine use for an idea, or modified an idea to fit into a different realm. The ambiguity of some of them is very bad. They could be expected to detail, in great detail, and possible applications, of their invention, and that’d probably narrow things down a bit more.

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 known in various areas, for example, a while ago, we had a bank issue, went to the bank, and the lady who served us also said she was with iiNet.

Well, we are no longer with them, they shafted me on customer service once, but the new plans were something I was waiting on to see if value improved for the remaining 2 customers that are to move away from iiNet the moment contracts are finished and the market shows a little more certainty on where the better deals are going to be for faster speeds.

On an unrelated note, OzVoIPStatus just got some sections smashed out of it. I know, it looks.. minimalistic, and poor (the provider pages) at the moment, but that’s not entirely intentional, as I plan to basically figure out a new layout for that page, and some better data to place there, in a more logical manner.

The idea would be to basically list them as a “Provider” and not just highlight their monitoring statistics (though the sites original intention was to be solely statistics, I’ve been wanting to, and have been branching it out).

Unfortunately, finding time to smack code together in a straight row involves a few things:

1. Finding time to actually do it.
2. Remembering when I have time to do it.
3. Figuring out the path for it.
4. Actually doing it.

Now, by the time I get to number 2, there’s something else shoved in my face, and whilst my editor remains open to continue work on that section, opening it, and continuing work on it sometimes goes waiting for a while, as I work on other tasks.

For example, a task I just got stuck back into today, was a task I started .. a while back, I think the month was December, and the year wasn’t 2006 – i think.

Anyway, it’s been idle for sometime, and recently the priority of that task moved to 1, and that’s what I got stuck into .

The good news for OzVoIPStatus is I do have a feature ready to release (i think), I simply need to upload, and obviously create a page outlining how to use it, I can then go back to the other feature, and the other set of features I still have in mind for the site. It’s intended to be continually updated, however, I can’t seem to set aside the time for it constantly.

I’m also waiting on some fantastic data from one of the nice Aussie providers on the list, and hopefully that data will kick off yet another set of features.

I’ll also have to sit down and finish checking which providers are actually online (have visible servers), and add those, and it doesn’t stop there, I have to go and check all the Plan Search data, and compile a new set of plan search data for all providers (now the list is more … extensive) and get those plans searchable.

Oh, someone asked a bit back why ISPhone was no longer monitored: They emailed me and asked. I posted a news story about that. They claim to be primarily wholesale, and would rather not be monitored.
Can’t monitor them if they aren’t willing, don’t really want to annoy any companies out there!

On that note now, expect more, a lot more, just when I get around to it.