Wowha what happened to the last 3 months?

So best laid plans and all.. I was going to spend sometime this new year building loads of cool VoIP and IM cost saving projects - but the day job kinda got in the way. So what's new and what's really been going on in my head around cost savings and VoIP for businesses in the economic downturn?

Well I have actually completed one project in my lab - A skype to SIP gateway is now up and running. Wey-hey! Actually really cool for quite a few reasons:

• My Asterisk PBX now talks Skype, so as a small business I'm now always online, well virtually anyway. My Aeonvista skype account can be connected to my PBX which customers, friends and family can now skype me for a VoIP call and my PBX can do all that clever find-me follow-me routing and even play and IVR message or leave a voicemail, which can be emailed to me anywhere.
• My Oracle Contact Centre Anywhere application can now call out and receive incoming calls from Skype, so I can do agent based routing and screen pop for calls coming in over skype.
• For Site to Site traffic I also have a cool NAT savy, encrypted, VoIP VPN.
• For travelling when I would have used my IAX softphone to get through those double NAT Hotel hotspots to phone home for free, I can now just use skype, call my family on the house phone without needing a PC at home turned on or them all crammed around the laptop.
• My OpenFire IM server which has and Asterisk plug - now has a Skype plug-in, without having a Skype plugin if you follow, at least for VoIP calls, no IM sessions. But its a start.

Been working closely with the CCA product for a couple of customers and been on a full time contract - so been a little strapped for time.

Also been tinkering around the edges of IPv6 on my Vyatta router. I now have a 16-bit subnet of IPv6 address space - Hmm not sure what I'm gonna do with that yet, but can at least play with some OSPF v3 and MP-BGP set-up to get my head around IPv6. Also I've not got the version 5 release of the Vyatta software to play with so lots more tinkering to do.

So the Office/Lab is in refurb mode, which was partly caused by a living room redecoration - I know but some how the living room refurb spread to the office. The good news is whilst the lab is down for a little while, I get to install one of these beauties from Kell Systems http://www.kellsystems.com, This means all my kit keeps cool and quiet.... That means the lab now really is a study which the family can use. Now for the wide screen Flat panel TV and AV set-up in there and we're getting there.

So at least one of the ideas for cost saving got off the ground - Skype to SIP gateway that seems to work pretty well and has some other side effects in my lab.

Happy New Year to all!

OK so that's the New Year greetings sorted, but what about the New Year - "credit crunch", Cost reduction and of course savings.

It looks like we're all in for a tough year or more, so what can we do to shave some off the bottom line. Well as I've written before I'm a keen advocate of Open Source and VoIP, so what can these do for us in the coming tough period. Well in the blog we've taken a look at Vyatta if a little briefly, but I'll take a look at some of the best Open Source telephony and Video products and projects out there over the coming weeks.

Finally a platform for IPTV that claims to be standards based

This post on FierceIPTV looks interesting, Ericsson have launched a new Middleware product for IPTV based on Open TV Forum specifications. AND IMS capable.

Finally my vision of a presence centre may well be realised

I've just been reading the announcement from Astricon from Skype and Digium on Fierce VoIP. I've been using Asterisk for sometime and even built an ISTP business on it and solutions such as Trixbox. And I have to admit to being a Skype user too, even with my own telco.

However back to the announcement - I can offer Skype presence to customers and even publish my "presence" state on my corporate website, that actually reflects the presence not of an individual, but of the ability to route a call from a web page through to my PBX, with it costing me a dime!




Here's my presence Icon, with the Asterisk/Skype Connector, this routes to my PBX, which can route this anywhere else including a Queue of customer support or sales representative.

Back From Holiday

Back from leave with new ideas and now using the Vyatta software to build some appliances having got VRRP working the way I want it, I have the hardware ready to build a nice customised appliance - fully solid state and the same depth as the Netgear switches I use (GSM7300 series).

Having fun with VRRP and Clustering on Vyatta

Having had some time post teaching to get my head down to some serious network building, I've been investigating building high resilience in to my hosted call centre designs.

I base my design as much as possible on Open Source technologies, since it gives me and the people I work for the biggest bang per buck for the technology deployments. There's been discussion on a number of blocks about Vyatta's claims around their router performance vs. Cisco and even some flaming of both parties - none of that here!


Vyatta has a place in any network. Why? Flexibility (well and of course cost), by utilising open source, standard hardware and pre-integrated hardware like Sangoma cards, you have a very versatile routing capability. Plus its easy to extend to to anything you can imagine. For example - for building redundancy across a number of routers to cope with failures VRRP has been developed in the IETF (based on Cisco HSRP), but failing over things like IPSec tunnels can be a bit more fun, so use clustering instead. HA cluster is already well implemented under Linux, but combining in a routing platform is genius, especially when its easy to configure.

We've been building routers and firewalls using Linux for a while (IP Tables and the Kernel can be a pretty slick firewall if you're happy to roll-your-own, and to be fair there are a few ways of doing it including other open source solutions like Smoothwall. Horses for course - Yes I like Smoothwall too!

The other main bonus of a Linux based Firewall Router is virtualisation - with huge pressure on data centres both from the power consumption and cost plus the greening up of IT, virtualising the resources of service and your routing/firewall infrastructure is very compelling. No a don't think a Vyatta pizza box could replace the layer 3 48Gpbs non-blocking switch right now - but if I'm virtualising my data centre - where's the switch? Actually there are fewer switch ports too, because each server could be running many Operating System instances with "software" ethernet bus bridged to the physical NICs on the device. We're in a position to team NICs in to an aggregate LAN connection of say 8 Gbps with 8 NICs in a team, and handle massive amounts of compute power in a single redundant chassis.

So just how easy does something like Vyatta make say VRRP:
interfaces {
ethernet eth0 {
address 172.16.0.252/24
hw-id 00:15:c5:fa:3c:1a
vrrp {
vrrp-group 100 {
priority 200
sync-group hotswap
virtual-address 172.16.0.254
}
}
}
ethernet eth1 {
address 192.168.25.252/24
hw-id 00:15:c5:fa:3c:1b
vrrp {
vrrp-group 200 {
priority 200
sync-group hotswap
virtual-address 192.168.25.254
}
}
}
loopback lo {
}
}

The configuration above creates a VRRP enabled interface (the master router), which will swap over to a slave in a pair (or more you can have more than two routers) if either of the Interfaces fail. Sweet.

So putting that kind of thing to good use - I can put a NIC from each router onto a separate switch if the switch fails connecting the master, then the backup will swing into action within a couple of seconds. (TCP connections won't see the joint). Now depending on how the servers connected to the switches are configured, combine NIC teaming on the servers, and you have a highly available solution.

Combine allow that with the flexibility of IPTables and an easy configuration you've a lot of bang for buck!

Update on the Missing Standard

OK - So maybe I was a little premature, since there are clearly standards emerging in IPTV with the Open IPTV Forum and the ITU-T work. BUT are the manufacturers still doing there own thing?

Now yes there are a number of underlying standards that are already in there as I mentioned in the previous post.

And the DVB and ETSI specs seem to be making progress to a architectural and in some cases Java Doc specification for the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP). Again the question is any of the manufacturers using these standards to provide interoperability between applications, platforms and services?