My web wanderings

Kerry Garrison - Building your own PBX
Building Your Own PBX with Asterisk
Kerry Garrison
What would it mean to you to have your own full-featured PBX system at your home or small office? What would it mean to you if you could build an entire PBX system (minus the phones) on hardware you probably have laying around, AND that it can probably also save you money on your phone bill? Sounds too hard to believe doesn’t it, but using old hardware and some open source software, you really can build a commercial quality phone system that would normally cost thousands of dollars.

The Hardware
As I mentioned in the opening, we are going to build our PBX system from equipment that we have laying around the house. After cannibalizing three spare systems, what was left was a PII 450, 386mb RAM, 12gb HD, 48x CDROM drive, and an Intel Pro 10/100 network card. This is all you “need” to get going as long as you are going to get VOIP dial tone service from a company like BroadVoice (more on this later). If you want to use regular analog phone lines you will need modem card. Not every card will work properly, however, the most recommended card is the Digium Wildcard X100P FXO card which can be purchased brand new on eBay for $6.95 each. So far, total out of pocket expense for the card plus shipping: $12.90.

This site has a guide to extracting Tivo data and burning it to DVD. Here is the direct link to the really geeky stuff.

I really need to get around to putting a homepage up for this site. I really love some of the stuff that these guys do. I have been thinking about a old green screen terminal look to take me back to my DOS days.

What I really need to do is spend some time learning about how to use Outlook to become more organized. They also have training on all there other Office 2003 products.

The one and the only RRDtool

• Cacti is one of the prettier network monitoring and graphing tools - plus it runs on MS
• Oh here is a gallery of RRDTool uses.  This is an intresting one that tracks tickets in RequestTracker.
• Here is an advanced implementation at Library consortium
• I know Jason hopes that one day we will monitor our servers this well
• Last but not least here are some frontends for RRDtool

Microsoft appears to have decided that business users are their best hope for selling Office 2003. There’s a special Tools for Your Job section on Office Online, and a press release titled Microsoft Office System Survey Says Solving Tough Problems Beats Promotions and Pay Raises as America’s “Greatest Moments at Work”. Yeah, right. Management is eternally trying to convince themselves that Attaboys are more important than pay raises. I am reminded of William Wimpisinger’s response to some asinine management “job enrichment” proposal, back when he was president of the Machinists’ union: “If you want to enrich the job, enrich the worker.”