myprofessorvoip blog

I have seen millions of dollars spent on IP PBX’s (VOIP) for features that are very basic and customization that could be performed better on a less expensive platform. I can honestly tell you that I have done installations of the Asterisk PBX which is free and depending on the size of the installation it really does not demand much in hardware.

If you don’t believe me, download it yourself and in minutes you can have a pure IP PBX solution and place calls within the hour. Asterisk server does everything that most enterprises request and more. There are so many developers on the Asterisk project that all requests get added to source fairly quickly. Voicemail, voice-to-text, and even advance call routing are all features that come with Asterisk base system. Unified messaging free, go figure and trust me when I say that Asterisk is easy to support. I have worked on Nortel PBX’s as well as Cisco Call manager solutions and Asterisk is simpler, cheaper and at the same time complex.

Another PBX which isn’t free, but based on a Windows platform is 3CX. What makes 3CX and Asterisk solutions appealing is the support for SIP. More vendors develop products with sip functionality than they do for Skinny(cisco) and Unistem (Nortel). Which means more flexibility and cost effective solutions for your business needs. Want a video/voice phone? Google one in minutes. Open source means freedom, but unlike most things that are free, support is accessible for fractions of the cost and all of the documentaiton is free.

Next time your establishment wants to look a VOIP, do them a favor and demo Asterisk. I am sure they will be impressed by the performance and the price tag.

3CX
Asterisk

-Professor

You can walk around Best Buy or Circuit City and take a look at all of the small home office routers on the market. If you are looking for something that you can plug in with very little work involved, by all means invest your money into one of these cheaply manufactured devices. However, if you are reading this post then you are interested in providing this functionality yourself.

In making a decision as to what you would like in a home router/firewall, first ask yourself the question, “what features and functionality do I need?”.  Here are a list of features that I wanted to use in my home office and what they provide:

Firewall: I wanted full control over what I want to protect. I wanted the ability to port map, meaning I want to connect to my home devices from anywhere I travel. Using RDP I want to connect to my windows desktops to perform support for my family and also retrieve files that I have lazily left on my home pc.

Router: I wanted to provide DHCP with more options, such as being able to provide more subnets, multiple dhcp ranges, and remotely but securely manage without worrying about https bugs causing my router to become unresponsive.

Content filtering: I do not have a problem with my teenager going out to adult websites or harmful websites, but I do feel the need to make sure that I understand that all content being access is acceptable. This control is a necessary feature I feel that all SOHO firewalls should support.

IDS: Like all devices that sit on the public network, you should have a clear picture as to what vulnerabilities that exist.  I am able to analyze all traffic that are potentially harmful to my firewall. Or all vunerbilities that I am not protected against. An IDS system provides that information and makes me more security aware. I also have my webservers monitored by my firewall even thought they sit outside my network.

Scripting:

I use Awk, Perl, and Bash to provide automated services. My scripts let me know what I need to worry about and alert me of problems so that I do not have to manually look for them.

Everything I have named here either comes with the Ubuntu linux OS or can be readily downloaded. I must say that it took me a week to properly fine tune my firewall to my liking and it resides on a pretty old PII pentium server. I use snort for IDS and squid for Proxy. My firewall filtering is provided by iptables, which can be fairly difficult. You can download a program to act as iptables for dummies. I chose not to do that.

Most of you by now have wireless routers. The professor uses a wireless access point which is a router that I chose to disable to routing functionality. The reason for, hacking wireless access is fairly easy due to the lack of wireless security in home networks. I do not want my wireless router controlling my home network. I treat wireless access like any unsecured device accessing my network.  This way I am able to quarenteen any security breach. What I do use for wireless security is an IDS monitor on my private ethernet interface so that i can analyze traffic, I use WEP ( which can be readily hacked), but i back that up with Dot1x security. So whenever I have guests I disable 802.1x and have them use my wep key. But majority of the time, my devices use mac security.

You can easily implement what I have in my home to an enterprise. What I will say is that even though if properly configured this can be just as secure as any enterprise, but automation may take special skill sets as there is not alot of engineers that think, they have their vendors think for them. Checkpoint and Cisco ASA’s are both devices that come with solutions that automate much of your protection. But think about this, now a days most of the cars are automatic. If you ever driven a stick, you can tell by the sound of your vehicle how your car is running. Automatic cars create automatic people who are unable to tell if the pulse of their car is operating correctly. Manually handling your own security makes sure you properly understand how your security is working and not take the word of a device which claims they are protecting your network properly.

Last week, I heard the senate passed a new bill that made it illegal to spoof caller-id. I wish I could remember the link that I read it, but I am sure you can find it. How absurd. Just like my blog about the guy who got caught stealing wi-fi, how can you get caught spoofing caller-ID. Technically this is what we have to deal with. Here is a sip packet, in it you will see the where the number is that displays the caller-id.

<ommited> technical difficulties

To spoof all you need to edit is the Call-id field. As simple as that. The only way to get caught is if someone is mirroring your traffic. That simple. The carrier only keeps cdr’s of traffic so that is only the source, destination, and call duration. They are not worried about what the call-id says. In order to block call-id all they have to do is edit the sip packet to exclude the call-id. It isn’t recorded. Make laws on something you know about, not VOIP.

News in New Zealand

New Zealand went totally VOIP. Their service offering is VOIP over dsl, which is the same offering Verizon has, but unlike Verizon they have entirely change the way the process Class 5 calls.

Voip forecast

Look around and you will see that PC graveyards are growing and growing. It’s not like you need the new specs, but Microsoft and software vendors of the like tell you what you need to run their programs. At times I can care less if I am running 32 bit or 64 bit. I don’t play video games or do I need to watch high definition streaming video on all of my computers. However, it is part of the deal that Microsoft has made with AMD and Intel to keep them in business and to help their stock price.

This is why I love Ubuntu. You can load Ubuntu on a PII processor pc and get out of it the same that you would if you loaded Vista. You may not get that high end definition, but why do you need that surfing the web or creating a document. Be realistic. If you into saving the world, recycle a PC. To be honest with you I have converted all but my main work laptop over to Ubuntu and I am not missing a thing. Little things that I have taken advantage of like downloading flash so I can watch interactive websites I have to do over again, but for the most part I am very happy running Linux.

Now office is a different story. First let me tell you that Open office is equal to MS Office. And get this, it is for free. Why isn’t everyone jumping on this deal? I tell you why. Anyone who has prepared for a presentation or created a document is scared of something happening at the time of saving their doc or presenting their presentation. Let me tell you that open office has never let me down. I used open office when I was in college with great results. It never let me down so I can tell you the next time you think about spending over $300 for an ms office license, just jump to open office. You will not be disappointed.

All of this for the price of $0.

Google is a major player in providing what defines open source mentality. Provided they do not use much as far as open source technology, they are opening up their services to provide a shared technology environment for free. Take for instance Google documents. I am a big fan of Google documents because primarily it is free. I can edit documents, share documents, and open any type of document for free.

Free is the best word in the dictionary. Take in account that google provides google chat with no advertisements, google voip, and google maps which is my favorite. All other satellite map services cost money, Google equals free in the professor’s dictionary. Google helps me organize my PC’s with Google desktop, even though it learns too much about my tendencies so that it could present better suited advertisements. How Google has grown has me convinced that it is the best search engine out there. I have wanted lycos, yahoo, and excite all become dinosaurs over night.

Take a really good look at Google and see for yourself what it offers. My homepage will forever be Google. Well until they get complacent like Yahoo!! www.google.com/ig - try it!!

You are only reading this to see if I have any secrets that you don’t already know. I don’t, and you are too old to believe that anything in this world is free. The object of open source is something I believe in and it isn’t’ because it is free. It makes me a part of a community that wants to advance technology and not put money in the pockets of business men who can care less about technology. Ever wonder why Microsoft is so powerful? Because it pays money to engineers to stay ahead of those who work together to provide open source solutions for free.

I don’t mind paying for open source. I would rather pay a small license fee that pays for the effort that hundreds of engineers put into developing creative thinking and not to put people on top of the billionaire list that takes the ideas of open source and expose it. I am not against Microsoft, I am against those who are addicted to Microsoft. Corporate reliance on Microsoft is what I call “corporate ignorance”.

Now I am a hypocrite, I admit it. In fact, I am using a laptop running Microsoft XP Professional. This is the result of corporate ignorance. There are no choices given serious consideration. If a business purchases a computer, by default it is a windows operating system. In fact, most of those making purchasing decisions are not aware of the other choices. A CIO, a CTO, or even a CSO aren’t even aware of the benefits. These are the gentlemen put into the position to mold technology.

The fact of the matter is that none of these gentlemen remember the early 90’s. None of them remember the growing pains of Window’s 3.1. Sure we all remember how happy were were to have solitaire at work. But do we remember how difficult it was to configure a printer or to peer with other computers in the office. The blue screen of death every time the network got congested. It was during that time that Microsoft improved. The patience of consumers were because they were spoiled. Being able to create and edit documents and not have to use a typewriter. And during this time serve as Microsoft’s free Quality Assurance engineers. Reporting problems and ignoring the growing pains. You, the user, made Microsoft. We are the reason we pay $399 for a licensed copy of Microsoft. We are the reason we have to deal with crappy expensive Microsoft support.

We need to change this. Microsoft is not the only target. There are the Verizon’s, the Sprints, the Novell’s, the Sun Microsystems, the Cable providers, and last but not least Apple. You think because Apple has 7% of the market that I should forget them? Look at the price tag on the proprietary systems that Apple produce. Sure I like the Iphones and the IPODS, and Itunes, but come on. I am forced to utilize their products because there is no real competition.

What power do you have? You are the consumer. Do you know if the Linux community grew to 25%, Microsoft would have no choice, but to be competitively priced. That is still not my goal. My goal is to see my kids, your kids, and the kids of every blue collar worker have a computer that didn’t cost a mortgage payment. To construct a document that could be opened on a free software package and not a $600 version of Microsoft Office. (See Open Office). That is the closest thing to free that I can think of. And you need to join me in the fight.

Voice over IP is the wave of the future. It has been existent since the late 90’s, but held up by the telecommunications companies because it marks the end of their dominance. VOIP to VOIP calls will always be free. VOIP to PSTN comes at a cost. The goal is to make toll charges obsolete. Ten years ago unlimited long distance calls for $20 bucks a month was impossible. Now it is a reality.

Ever use a flavor of Linux? 5 years ago it took rocket science to get working. And after you get it to work you play around for hours for it to play nicely with Microsoft. With the Dell deal, Ubunto will make Linux the easiest kid to play with in the playground.

Be a hobbyist, be curious, play a role and advance technology. Take the ride with the Professor!

Ten years ago, the internet was full of possibilities. Everyone experimented and at the same time had fun. I remember when AOL was the hot meeting place. Of course you still had perverts, but my information was semi-safe considering. It was the real world that frightened me. You couldn’t walk outside your house with fear of something being stolen or answer your phone because of telemarketers, tons of junk mail in your mailbox.

The internet was my safe haven. Now, I can’t even bare to read my email. Even with the strongest of spam filters I still get the occasional Viagra ad. Like most people I have mastered clearing my cookies and tying to eliminate my web trail, but still what bothers me are the scum of the internet that sell my information. The information that I provide them to use their service gets sold to others just for the sake of making a buck. I am one of those guys who refuse to run from spam. Of course I delete majority of my email if it looks suspicious, but I can brag about having the same mail account for over 10 years. 10 minute Mail

I remember seeing a service on the web and saying “who would ever need this service”. Now I recommend it. The service is called Ten-minute email. It provides you an email address that will work for 10 minutes that is just for those sites that refuse to give you business if you don’t enter your email address. You may think of this as dishonest, I don’t care. Who plays fair no-a-days? I even made up an email on my domain just for the sake of downloading some VOIP documents. They ran a domain scam and found my legit email address? Smart bastards. Try 10 minute email it will save you the headache of using the delete key.

The internet has lost its class so there is no reason to keep yours.

Check it out

                I have not been keeping up with IPTV like I would want to, but I will provide feedback with either a blog or an article at a later date. I want to publish news that should make you excited. It seems that a telco in Poland just signed a contract w/ Nokia/Siemens to provide IPTV.