Core Networks

Recently the family and I went to Hong Kong for a few days holiday. Besides the obvious tourist sites and shopping, there were a few technical requirements that needed to be covered off to ensure the business kept running and relatives new we were having fun!! .  In no particular order, they were …

• Internet access in the hotel room
• Ability to put photos online at the end of each day for the family and friends to view
• Check voicemail on the mobile phones
• Access to particular computers at home for banking and other activities
• Voice communications with friends, family, customers and staff
• Email (rather obviously)
• GPS Mapping of the local area so we didn’t get lost

As it turned out, with a bit of planning, all these items were covered off nicely, lets get into it!

The EEEpc 1000HA is a great laptop and we took it along.  Being light in weight and small is size made it the perfect traveling companion. It did the job well, allowing us to check emails and surf the web for information on the following days activities.  Internet access was provided by the hotel using an Ethernet cable patched to our room.

This type of connection is pretty standard so I pre-purchased an Apple airport express (which is about the size of a packet of cigarettes). We plugged in the Internet cable which gave us secure wireless Internet throughout the hotel room, the convenience of using the laptop and or the iPhones anywhere within range was very handy!

I checked out a couple of online photo storage tools and settled on Google’s Picasa.  Once the easy signup was completed, I was given a specially crafted email address which you could  email photos to and they would appear on the private web page directly.  The subject field of the email became the caption for the photo!

We had already tested the camera on the iPhone and for our amateur shots, it was fine.  The shots were clear and bright and without needing to carry a separate camera, they definitely would do. At the end of each day we would come home and using the wireless Internet link, send off multiple emails to our Picasa address from the iPhone and the images were seen minutes later by everyone we had invited to view the page on the Picasa web site.

For the voice mail on the mobile phones, our provider (3) sends all our voicmails to web mail so setting up a pop3 account on the iPhone allowed us to get them delivered to the phone where we could listen to them without incurring international call charges.  The second thing we did was to install skype on the iPhone and add some call credit.  Again, using the wireless link, we called anyone we needed to for a fraction of the dollars we would have been charged using international roaming or the hotel phone.

We had decided against taking our everyday computers on holidays, if they were lost or stolen, restoring from backups just didnt seem worth it, not to mention the added weight.  At the end of the day, the EEEpc did the job well but there are applications that are not on this machine that we might have needed to access.  Using the LogMeIn application, and by leaving the computer attached to an active Internet connection back home, we were able to get to these machines whenever required as if we were sitting in front of  them!

Email is email and we had Internet so there was no issue there.

My last technology problem was international mapping.  I did not want to be carrying paper maps as I figured if I was armed with the iPhone, something had to be available to allow me to find my way.  The app I settled on is called OMAPS which uses open street map to download maps of the area you choose and saves them for offline use.  The impressive thing is it saves all zoom levels and doesn’t require an Internet connection once the initial download has occurred and you can drop pins along the way to mark special sites.  This software gets a double thumbs up from me!

So, there you go.  With an iPhone and an airport express and a little help from google, you and your friends can enjoy your holiday while keeping the business running all for a very reasonable cost!

As the title says, we have launched a  newsletter with various snippets of information related to personal and business computing.  Its only a short read with some useful information that might be of interest to you.  We usually have a couple of applications listed that are worth trying out, a couple of websites and some general tips relating to useage of various operating systems and devices.

You are welcome to join by visiting   http://www.corenetworks.com.au/lists/

The usual disclaimer applies, we dont use your email for any purpose other than to send you the newsletter and  you can unsubscribe at anytime by clicking the links.  Joining and leaving the newsletter is completely automated.

Enjoy!

Following the burning of some midnight oil, the automated Asterisk script has been updated and works as it should with Lenny and the latest version of Asterisk, Dahdi etc.  Also added some minor error checking which looks at whether the script has run previously and cleans up the source trees if required.  This means if the script is interrupted before it finishes (eg Internet drops out), you can just restart the script and it should continue and recover.

A classic example of the script being interrupted is the error “amportal binary can not be found (/usr/local/sbin/amportal)”

Also added fixes and suggestions from those comments left in the wiki. (thanks for the feedback)

Lastly, Digium seemed to have moved the asterisk-addons version info off the front page of the website with their new design.  You can still find the info here.   http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/

As of the date of this post, the Asterisk version information within the script is current.

Feedback is appreciated, get the script from here

http://www.corenetworks.com.au/wiki/doku.php?id=debian_asterisk_freepbx_script

-Matt

In the last few weeks, Microsoft have released their own version of antivirus software called Security Essentials.  It is a slightly strange name but it seems to be a good product.  I have not seen or heard any bad comments about it and have been installing it on family and friends computers to see how it goes, so far so good!

We can recomend the download, it is only about 8mb and doesnt have any nag screens or software bloat that other well known AV products have.  As your current AV software comes up for renewal, you may want to give it a try.

If you dont have antivirus on your machine currently then you really need to head over to the web page and get some installed quickly.  Of course if you have any type of virus issue, Core Networks would be glad to assist, check out our contact details in the “About” page.

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/

There has been alot of talk recently about VOIP and its benefits to companies who need to reduce their call costs.  VOIP is obviously a great solution but when everyone is forging ahead with the latest and greatest, lets take a step back and consider an alternative solution that can be setup and deployed quickly and will integrate well in almost any network.

Let me introduce “Jabber”, an open source fast and secure chat program that you can deploy within your network and be in control of authourisation and security.  Users cannot access other chat networks (unless you specifically allow them) and the server also resides within your network.

Jabber runs on the XML protocol and supports file transfers and excellent levels of sercurity.  While Jabber does well within the same building, it really excells at the WAN level.  Deploying a server in one country then allowing all users in various locations around the globe (or in the next suburb) to login will reduce business call costs by a decent percent.

Many of us prefer to use mobile phone TEXT messages to communicate short messages rather than a phone call as it is quicker and provides a nice little audit trail for both the sender and the reciever.  Thinking along these lines when installing a Jabber server will allow staff to send and recieve short text messages across the Jabber server instead of making a potentially more expensive telephone call.  Multiply this method out by many staff and the potential for saving become very clear.

Core Networks can install a Jabber server on your network.  Please visit the “contact” link at the top of the page.