Friday, September 28, 2007

GrandCentral - One Number fo Life

GrandCentral is a Google owned service that uses VoIP to link a customer's phone numbers together. Simply stated, you get a free phone number ("for life") , coupled with a web-based unified communications platform that allows you to to forward calls to another number, ring multiple numbers simultaneously, and provides voice mail.

While it doesn't have all the functionality of a virtual PBX, the price is right: it is currently free. And it works.

I've been trying it out for a while and felt comfortable enough to make it the publicly listed phone number for my business. When I'm mobile, I forward the number to my cell phone. When I am at home, it is forwarded to my VoIP phone line. When at a client site, it is forwarded to the most convenient desk phone.

When I can't answer the phone, a voice mail is emailed to me.

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Posted by Joe Turner at 2:55 PM | | Comments

Friday, August 24, 2007

Roll Your Own Firewall, Part II

The 12U rack arrived this week and I assembled it in about 15 minutes, and due to the small size, it rack will fit under most desks. I hesitated on pulling the trigger on the purchase of the 1GHz VIA 1U bare bones system. I wanted to look for a cheaper/"better" solution. I even looked at FPGA development kits, but quickly concluded that anything I chose would only be cost effective in large quantities. After some serious research, it appears that the quiet, passively cooled VIA processor is exactly what I want. The 1GHz via combo is is powered by a passively cooled x86 processors that use just 7W at clock speeds up to 1GHz. The chips also feature hardware-based AES encryption and dual Random Number Generators (RNGs). With a powered disk drive, the entire unit can pull less than 50 W -- that is less than most light bulbs. Additionally, I believe I will have enough CPU left over there to make the server a Asterisk/VOIP server as well. So, the evil plan is now:
  • Purchase the 1U/1Ghz via server
  • install Linux from scratch
  • install/setup SmoothWall
  • install/setup Asterisk

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Posted by Joe Turner at 11:15 AM | | Comments

Sunday, July 8, 2007

F7: Installing Skype the Easy Way

After installing Fedora 7 (F7) and tweaking the setup just the way I wanted I discovered a shocking easy way of setting Skype. All of the dependencies will be taken care of automatically. Create a file entitled /etc/yum.repos.d/skype.repo, with the following in it: 
[skype]
name=Skype Repository
baseurl=http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/fedora/updates/i586/
gpgkey=http://www.skype.com/products/skype/linux/rpm-public-key.asc
Next, tell yum to update: 
# yum install skype

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Posted by Joe Turner at 11:06 PM | | Comments