Matt G. Watson

Synopsis

Sendpage is a SNPP server available for Linux (and other UNIX varients probably) that allows you to send SMS text messages to either your cellular phone or pager.  How does it differ than using the SMTP gateway that your cell carrier probably already provides?  Well the biggest benefit is that it does not require Internet access to deliver pages.  Instead Sendpage delivers pages to your device through Paging Central servers that most cellular carriers offer - many of which for free.  Paging Central servers implement a protocol called TAP which is used for one-way text messaging.  This means if you are using paging to notify support employees about server outages and such, your monitoring/alerting solution does not require internet access to deliver pages… which means if your internet connection is the device that dies on you, your support people will know about it.  For instance, we use sendpage in combination with ZenOSS core for alerting our support staff of problems.  ZenOSS has native support for SNPP built right in. (more…)

Synopsis

This How To will be a guide to installing Zenoss Core on Gentoo Linux. Zenoss is an enterprise-grade open-source IT Monitoring and Alerting suite. This guide should work on any Linux distribution, but it has only been tested on Gentoo Linux. (more…)

Well I myself just attempted to sign up for the Vyatta referral program last evening. I got half way through filling out the form and was sad to discover that the program was only available to US residents.

Believe it or, but I was just informed this afternoon by email from Tom McCafferty, Director of Marketing for Vyatta Inc, that the referral program is now available to non-US residents starting today!

Matt,

You have incredible timing. I was in the process of updating some of our partner programs last night when your e-mail came through. The web referral program is now available to users outside of the US. You can apply at http://www.vyatta.com/partners/webref.php

I encourage any of you interested in this program to sign up for the Vyatta referral program.

This would probably also be a good time to encourage those of you unfamiliar with Vyatta to download a free copy today and check it out. Whether you are just using a Linux box as a router doing IP Masquerading / NAT, or your using Cisco routers or PIX / ASA firewalls, I really recomend you give Vyatta a try, I think you’ll be incredibly impressed. If you are using Linux boxes as routers, I think you’ll really appreciate the streamlined configuration that Vyatta gives you using its Fusion CLI. If you are thinking about purchasing some Cisco gear, you’ll be even more impressed with how Vyatta is competing with Cisco at a fraction of the cost!

Vyatta offers its product in several forms, there is a free community edition, a subscription edition which includes enterprise support, and Vyatta appliances.

Continuing on from part 1 of my Migrating to Asterisk VoIP PBX - Part 1 series off. In part 1 I talked about the problems we faced with our current PBXs and what the general plan was to fix it. In this part I’ll be discussing how we got our infrastructure prepared and began to take the idea from research to an implemented stage 1 of our plan.

I believe I failed in mention that in Part 1, as part of our research we needed additional software on top of just Asterisk. Management at our company wanted the system to be maintainable by the non-nerdy, mostly to just be able to do basic things, create extensions, change voicemail passwords, these kinds of things. Originally we outright said “sorry, thats not going to happen”, our initial plan was to write the entire Asterisk dialplan by hand, seeing as how Asterisk was new to use we knew this was going to be a challenge, but we were prepared to do it. Asterisk dialplans I consider to be a bit of an art form, while in a sense it is just another programming language, once you get into it you quickly realize it shares very little similarity to any programming language you already know. Asterisk does however offer an alternative to its regular configuration language that is a more programming-like language called Asterisk Extension Language (AEL). AEL however is considered experimental, that word alone was enough to make us shy away from it. I kept asking my friend Matt Gibson about Asterisk and how he managed it, he pointed me in the direction of FreePBX which is essentially web-based configuration utility for Asterisk that writes the majority of the configuration files for you, not to mention gives you a ton of features out of the box without having to write any dialplan by hand. Score 1 for management, they got the ability for the non-nerdy to manage parts of the system even after we said it wouldn’t happen!

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