TechSneeze.com

It is common to setup a phone switch with multiple T1s, each purposed with a special use. An example of such a configuration might be to have one used for local calls, and one for long-distance calls. To test the route that the call will make through the switch, you can run a couple commands and get a great deal of information.

One of the great advantages of using Drupal for website content, is the enormous amount of modules available to enhance end-user experiences. In general I try to use the CVS versions of Drupal, for easy upgrade capabilities. In the same way I prefer to use CVS to check-out the modules that I add-on.

I have written a simple script to automate the download of modules from CVS into the site. The script lives outside the Drupal folder, to keep the Drupal folder clean.

The Avaya Audix VoiceMail system is fairly common in today's VoIP environments. I recently had a user report that they were unable to contact the Audix server. When the user tried dialing the Audix extension, it just kept ringing and ringing.

To check on the status of the channels in use, I used my browser to login to the server. I did the following:

It is good practice to check on the health and capactiy of your phone system. Ideally you should regularly check to see how many of your T1 channels are in use. On a typical T1 PRI, you have 23 voice channels available for calls. To view the number of channels in use....

If you are having outbound call problems, it is recommended that you check your equipment before calling the phone carrier. It is likely that your phone carrier will try to blame your equipment, and you need to make sure you've done your homework. You can check the health of your T1 PRI on an Avaya Definity gateway by doing the following...

I have been using MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org) for several years, and recently realized I should better monitor the health of the system. Nagios (http://www.nagios.org) is currently deployed to monitor most of the components (i.e. memory, cpu, disk usage, processes, etc). However, it is not uncommon for issues to arise, which may cause problems with obtaining the Guide Data. I have a desire to create a more thorough system, but have temporarily made a simple check for how many days of guide data is currently available.

Today was a day filled with phone calls to Avaya Support regarding their SoftConsole application. The SoftConsole application is intended for a switchboard style view for a receptionist/attendant.

The receptionist was given a new computer with a fresh install of SoftConsole. Avaya Support was contacted, because the SoftConsole would crash and lock the computer everytime an inbound call was received.

A legacy Samba server recently stopped allowing users to connect to its shares. This was very odd, that this began happening, since this machine has been in service for years. One thing that had recently changed, was that there were some Active Directory Domain Controllers demoted to be decommissioned.
I began looking in the logs and found the following messages:

When doing any moderate to advanced networking, you are likely to have to deal with subnetting. While some people have an ability to do the binary math in their head to figure out the correct subnet-mask, I prefer to use a tool to give me the answer. I have used “ipcalc” on my FreeBSD machines for years, to give me the answers to my subnetting problems. I recently tried to use the ipcalc tool on my Fedora machine and found it to be completely different. Apparently RedHat has developed their own ipcalc tool, with the same name as another project. It is not terribly surprising that this situation could have happened, as both projects attempt to provide similar information.

In my humble opinion the RedHat ipcalc is not nearly as informative as the tool created by Krischan Jodies found at: http://jodies.de/ipcalc At their site they provide an online version, for quick access. If you want to download the tool for use on a Linux/Unix machine, it can be found at: http://jodies.de/ipcalc-archive/

When creating user accounts on servers and devices, it is important to use strong passwords that will be difficult to guess or crack. It is often preferred to at least create accounts with a random password, and allow the user to change it to something they can remember. A great Linux tool for creating passwords is “pwgen”. Most distributions have “pwgen” available in their package management resources. To install the tool on Fedora, use: