VoIP Trends in 2009

I went over the nice article about VoIP Trends in 2009 published by VoIP News. Its a good summary of what can happen in VoIP industry in 2009.

The main points covered are:

* Hosted IP PBX functions requiring only IP or other phones on a customer's premises
* Service providers will start pushing HD voice
* Increased IP PBX, call-center and CRM integration
* Yet more mobile WiFi VoIP

I'm missing two things in the document. First we should have seen WiFi phones with roaming capabilities and second important one is security. Does anyone in VoIP industry cares about security? We have standards like SRTP but service providers are not pushing them hard. I think we will see similar scenario as it happen with HTTP and HTTPS.

External 1TB

I just get my first external terabyte disk for holding my personal backups. Replacing my 500 GB one which is much lighter! ;-)

Holidays

Tried to make several calls today and most of them were not answered because of vacation. Time to figure out some vacation as well!

IT ops becoming more business and application savvy

I wish more companies follow this recommendation (grabbed from Forrester article):

"Start by getting IT operations professionals to enroll in application boot camps, brush up on certifications, and spend more time interfacing with business counterparts. For example, one large Wall Street bank requires that IT ops managers spend one week per quarter “outside the datacenter” rotating among business units. Not only do frontline IT managers come to understand true business pains, but it also provides an opportunity for soft marketing ops to demonstrate IT-business alignment, even if it’s just a water cooler chat on technology that boosts productivity."

We've doubled the number of R&D servers over the last 6 months

We are continuing in moving our R&D services into virtualized environment and finally we have reached 1:1 ratio between number of virtualized servers and physical dedicated servers in R&D serveroom. We have actually doubled the # of R&D servers over the last 6-8 months and # of physical servers is lower.

I have already mentioned in my previous posts that we're running VMWare infrastructure and so far its running OK. We have had some performance issues in the past which were caused mainly by storage performance issues. We didn't buy enterprise storage (FC SAN) yet as I believe properly configured NFS servers on high-speed LAN can do (almost) same job for fraction of costs. Anyway we have had to deploy "cluster" of NFS servers to share and distribute the load between them. We also invested into more RAM for our physical VMware hosts, so most of them have 20 GB of RAM.

UniConvertor - Universal vector graphics convertor

I have found a very nice, free, multiplatform tool called UniConvertor which can convert between various vector graphics formats.

Now I can use my favorite Inkscape for reading formats like .ai (adobe illustrator) .cdr (corel draw) and others.

Packet filtering in Microsoft Windows

I needed to configure little bit advanced firewall on Windows 2003 machine. Builtin Windows firewall GUI is poor. Its not possible to specify inbound firewall and link it with only specific IP subnets, use port ranges etc.

The solution for this is to use builtin netsh command which is used to configure not only ipsec rules but also packet filtering rules. I created file with netsh command rules (aka iptables) and then run netsh -f and gotcha it worked!


I used these two scripts as templates to make my own:

1/ Template 1
2/ Template 2