J
John S
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
I had tried every useful tool there and got nothing. Including
anything on the domain registration.
Did my link help any?
I had tried every useful tool there and got nothing. Including
anything on the domain registration.
Those were real trains,
these days the slightest snow on the rails already stopts the high speedtrain here.
Designed by an Italian company, those probably never heard of snow:
http://nos.nl/video/463149-fyras-beschadigd-rijden-morgen-niet.html
Now that is not much snow now is it !
Like I said: We no enter the post technology era.
All true, but in the end it seems not to be worth it. If you want a
dedicated LAN just for VoIP why do it in the first place? It means tons
of new cable runs, jackhammers, dirt, dust.
Jasen said:it shouldn't need new cable runs, there should have been excess
capacity when the cable was installed.
The voip phones I've seen all had internal 10/100 switches, if you want
to go faster you can't use the passthru socket you need a separate run
to the switch.
If you have several phones in a room you can daisy-chain them and use
wall-warts for power or put them on a local POE switch.
Jeff said:Most server based VoIP systems (i.e. Asterisk) include SNMP
monitoring. Alarms and traps are generated whenever something goes
awry, out of limits, or hiccups. During the 1990's, I used to do
quite a bit of SNMP "instrumentation" for server farms. MRTG,
RRDTool, Nagios, HP Broken View, and others were the front ends.
Sounds like monitoring nirvana? Nope... it was more like monitoring
hell. No matter how I tried, I could never get the NOC to respond to
alarms and traps. Nobody wanted to jump when a message popped up on
the console, or wanted to slog through reams of Syslog reports looking
for the culprit.
What did work was pretty pictures and graphs. Network traffic was
plotted using various tools. The admins could look at the graphs and
instantly tell if something had changed. Zero traffic is a good clue
that the line is down. Maxed out bandwidth is a good clue that the
system is under attack, or that some router was misconfigured into
dumping all its traffic via that line. Lots of other possibilities,
but the point is that a graph will show the past history, when things
changed, and what are the gross effects.
The only people that do alarms and alerts are the burglar alarm
companies.
There are IT service companies that specialize in maintaining Asterisk
VoIP servers. However, you're correct that these companies don't want
to deal with customer network related issues. I don't have an answer
for that problem, except to find an IT service company that can do
both.
For the last 30 years, my company motto has been:
"If this stuff worked, you wouldn't need me".
Nobody has ever disagreed.
VoIP should work out of the box, but rarely does. In my never humble
opinion, VoIP configuration is the most complicated, obtuse,
confusing, difficult, and buggy part of network computing. ...
... I have
dealt with network sniffing, analysis, diagnostics, and performance
issues that are comparatively trivial compared to the mess surrounding
VoIP. Unless some industry group starts over from scratch (as they
did going from ITU H.323 to SIP), it will only become more complicated
and more difficult.
<http://www.packetizer.com/ipmc/h323_vs_sip/>
My POTS phones can just be ... plugged into an RJ-11 and that's it
No wall warts, no PoE. Best thing is, they always work and there are
never interruptions.
Spehro said:Generally the jacks need to be run back to a PBX or something of that
ilk, unless you only have one or two lines. That's the same work as
running another set of CAT5.
PoE is better than regular phones because they generally need a wall
wart each.
Unless you're still using those black rotary dial phones.
You mean they should have run two CAT-5 instead of one, just for the fun
of it?
No way, not in business. Ok, in my case I did but to run POTS
over the other CAT-5. No way I'll let VoIP in here.
Then, you can run four phones over just one CAT-5. I my case several
links are RF so no wires at all.
Jasen said:You can run enough data to run 30 voip phones over two cat5 pairs.
Jasen said:Yeah! it's a lot more fun to run cat _before_ the drywall goes on.
VOIP doesn't have to be unreliable.
Jeff said:Close. The graphs get generated continuously, whether you need them
or not. The past history is what's important. One should be able to
look at the graphs, and instantly tell that something has changed. No
waiting for the alarm in order to start graphing. That's the way all
the network monitoring software works, including the VoIP stuff. As
for the "Check System" light, don't bother. It will be lit
continuously as errors and glitches are chronic.
Aerospace responds to alarms and alerts because failures tend to be
catastrophic. Even so, such alarms and alerts are of marginal value.
For example, there were some warnings prior the space shuttle
Challenger falling apart on re-entry, but nobody could interpret their
meaning. Same with various airline accidents, where something went
wrong, the alarm goes off, but nobody knows what it means, much less
what to do. ...
... My favorite was a private plane that did a wheels up
landing while the tower was yelling over the radio at the pilot to
abort the landing. When asked why he didn't respond to the tower's
warning, he indicated that he couldn't hear the radio over the alarm
buzzer. Plenty of other dumb stories of alarms that were ignored.
Rewind please. It was you that suggested that they were hundreds of
miles away and too busy to deal with such trivial customer complaints.
Since I'm effectively doing much the same thing for my customers, I
have a little experience in how it works. It is impossible to respond
to every complaint, especially automated alarms and automated trouble
ticket spam generators. Even worse are customers that don't want to
bother their service providers with issues that they really don't
understand and usually can't explain in detail. I had one piece of
software that I helped produce, that shipped about 2000 copies before
anyone bothered to mention that it didn't run.
Anyway, what works best is to have a single point of contact with the
customer, so that the service company is not getting conflicting
guesses. Remote admin and logging is mandatory. Outsourcing the
switching, intercom, voice mail, etc to offsite saves considerable
effort (at the expense of additional internet bandwidth). Redundancy
and fail-over solves many reliability problems but increases costs.
The most difficult part is finding someone who can decode the
complaint, make an intelligent assessment as to its severity, and
dispatch someone with the appropriate tools to actually fix the
problem. In my limited experience with VoIP, that's incredibly
difficult bordering on impossible. It's not that they don't want to
deal with the customers issues, they simply don't know what needs
fixing.
Yeah, that works. I think I've spent more time dealing with the
issues of having a hot standby system, VLAN's, fail-over, etc than
with single stand alone systems. Redundancy is not easy.
Incidentally, only the largest systems have separate CAT5 for the VoIP
system. Most use the same wiring as the computers, but use a VLAN to
separate the traffic.
Believe me, I really don't want to do VoIP. It's way too much work
and involves far too many unrealistic expectations for the customer.
However, literally all of my business office customers want and use
VoIP. All I insist is that they have one POTS line handy not for
failures, but so I can take the system down without killing all the
incoming phone services (and talk to the VoIP service provider tech
support while trying to fix their latest screwups).
Nope. The concept is good, but the implementation is lacking. Lots
of reasons. I can detail if anyone is interested.
It's nice to have a fallback, but as I previously suggested, there may
be something wrong with the way this particular VoIP system works.
Except for my own office (long story here), all of my VoIP systems
work well thanks to QoS and adequate reserved bandwidth for the number
of instruments.
All true, but in the end it seems not to be worth it. If you want a
dedicated LAN just for VoIP why do it in the first place? It means tons
of new cable runs, jackhammers, dirt, dust.
But you cannot tap into that string willy-nilly fashion along its
course, and that's one of the problem, requiring some new
infrastructure. With POTS you can tap in anywhere.
Even POTS in homes is run in a star now. It's easier.
Jim said:That seems to be the convention around here... all new construction
has a central wiring closet for POTS, CATV and CAT5+
Well, our home is from 1970, so ...
But the new runs I did are all home-run style to a central wire closet,
of course.
THAT'S OLD! ;-)
Well, my houses (one is for sale) were both built in 2007. Both have
cute wiring. Both are wired in a star but one is missing some copper
in the middle of some of the runs and this one is missing the end of
the wires that come together. It seems inspectors miss little details
like that. :-( I'm rewiring it as need be. Other than the two
bedrooms upstairs, it's not too hard (unfinished basement). I'll have
to rip up some sheetrock to get the upstairs (one room won't be too
hard).
But you cannot tap into that string willy-nilly fashion along its
course,
Jeff said:Run conduit for the signal wires. That way you can add and delete as
required.
I like "Smurf Tube", also known as Carlon Resi-Gard:
<http://www.carlonsales.com/techinfo/installationtraining/IT-7F72.pdf>
<http://www.carlonsales.com/flexplusblueent.php>
Another vendor of similar conduit:
<http://store.cablesplususa.com/networking-infrastructure-premier-conduit-raceway.html>
Type NM electrical conduit will also work, but is more expensive.
Don't forget to leave a pull string in the conduit.
I have 1" conduit running between floors and to the roof in my house,
but not along the walls. Not optimum, but better than a giant tangle
of cables running up the walls.
One of my customers is currently ripping out coax, long CAT5e runs,
and 25 pair telco cable. They're being replaced by CAT6 and fiber. If
they had installed conduit, it would have been MUCH easier. Conduit is
also a good idea if you're thinking of home theater.