Mark Thompson’s blog

We have just installed a video conferencing system for a client who has offices in Boston, Mass. and Bath, England.

They didn’t want to spend a fortune of a Cisco Telepresence system or other proprietary a/v system so turned to us to come up with a solution.

Having seen another client essentially run their business using Mac’s and iChat we looked at putting together a system based on that technology. Using Mac Mini’s with a big screen (I mean an NEC 60″ plasma screen!) seemed the obvious thing to do. The Mac combined with the very sexy Mac bluetooth keyboard and Mighty Mouse and a Logitech USB microphone provides the bones of the system.

Many Mac users have the immediate advantage of having the built-in iSight camera. These give an excellent video output and if you can live with a screen of up to 24″ you have everything you need. However if you want to put a system in a boardroom and have a screen big enough for several people to sit round you need another camera.

Up until this month (July 2008) there has been next to no choice. The Mac works best with a firewire webcam and there are very few of those on the market. You might find it easier, as we have done to date, to use a digital camcorder with a firewire output. Our Sony camcorder works brilliantly with Mac’s (leave the DV tape out if you want to prevent it going to sleep after a period of inactivity) and we specifed our clients system with cheap firewire camcorders as the webcams.

PC users have had the choice of the excellent Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 to use for a/v systems and these can output up to 720p HD video which is more than good enough for an internet based video conference.

However up until now Logitech seemed to have no interest in providing proper OS X support for the QuickCam 9000 Pro and our experience of them with Mac’s was that the video output in iChat was disapointing. But just as we are putting this system in place Logitech take us by surprise and suddenly announce the QuickCam Vision Pro that is ONLY supported under Mac / OS X. This webcam will apparently give us the auto-focusing and full 720p HD (960×720 pixels) output in iChat! Just what we want!

We’ve put an order in for one with Ingram Micro so we now just have to wait for it to come into stock.

As soon as we have it we will test it and let you know what the iChat output is like.

UPDATE 21st July
Cancelled order with Ingram Micro as they were still showing no stock date. Instead we have bought one direct from Logitech off their UK website.

This arrived today and at first glance it is an exact match for the PC version albeit a slightly more silvery black colour. It is recognised in iChat and the auto-focus works and there is no software to load. Without another QuickCam user to iChat with it is hard to tell at the moment what the resolution over the internet will be.

We have been using Asterisk in-house now for some months with a view to (a) providing ourselves with a professional phone system and (b) with a view to reselling VoIP services.

This has been quite a steep learning curve on several fronts but I think now after 6-9 months of using VoIP in-house we have now sorted out most of the pitfalls with Asterisk and VoIP in general.

Our first learning curve is getting used to using Linux. We have had it in the office before with a view to building low cost NAS servers based upon a rack mount chassis but we have now got to grips with using it as the platform for Asterisk. We are currently using Fedora although John has actually been off and had training on SUSE Enterprise. We now have a stable Asterisk server/PBX based upon a Fujitsu Siemens Econel 100 server. This has plenty of space for call recording and runs very sweetly. The only downside is that we now know that the Econel 100 SATA RAID drivers are only written for Redhat and SuSE Enterprise and do NOT work with other versions of Linux at all. Still the software RAID works well.

The second learning curve has been working with ITSPs - Internet Telephony Service Providers. We have yet to find the perfect partner but Telappliant and AQL are proving to be reliable. We have tried both SIP trunks and IAX and have now settled on IAX as being more reliable. We have also played with various CODECS and now use GSM. This gives the best compromise between bandwidth and quality. When you call us you will find that the quality of the speech (and on-hold music) is excellant, better than ordinary analogue is most cases.

We now have an Asterisk in-house telephone system that provides the following:

* Call transfer, hold, conference, CLI, etc.
* Out of Office anouncements according to the time and/or day or the week
* Voicemail and voicemail to email
* Easy call diversion to other numbers (mobiles for example)
* Interactive voice menus (IVM)
* Music or messages on hold
*Automatic fallback to an analogue phone line in the event of the internet failing
* Full digital call recording of all calls - internal and external
* Very cheap loca, national and internation calls - from 0.9pence per minute

The features of the system are legion and the benefits it brings are many. For example myself and John have fulltime VPNs to our houses and hardware IP phones at home. The office can now transfer calls to us at home, across the internet, and callers need not know we are many miles away fomr the office. There is no reason why you could not have operators in another country if you have a decent VPN in place.

We now feel confident enough with our systems and our ITSPs to start rolling this out to selected clients.

Target clients will be those how might typically only have up to 10 simultaneous calls, currently rent multiple analogue or ISDN lines and have home workers or branch offices. Also for some the digital call recording will be very important and enough alone to justify the system.

In the near future we will create a hosed Asterisk system so we can provide better services to the micro users who currently just have a basic SIP account.

We are also working as a matter of urgency in creating a unified messaging system that will link Asterisk and our Microsoft Exchange 2008 server. The main stumbling block here is that one system uses UDP protocols and the other IP protocols but we beleive that this is surmountable.

Keep you posted on progress.

We have had several clients affected by the recent flooding here in the UK.

One, from Chelsea in central London, called us in a panic on Friday afternoon as water was starting to flood into their offices. Given that they are next door to the Thames we thought for a minute that the Thames flood barrier had failed but actually it was just storm water from the drains.

They wanted to know how to save the server in a hurry so we gave them an emergency shutdown procedure (i.e. stop the Exchange services and then Shutdown) and told them to lift it as far off the ground as possible. We also got them to lift up external disk drives and the brand new gigabit Switches we had just supplied.

Luckily the flooding only got as deep as three inches/7-8 cm but it has been enough to lift the flooring and no doubt there will be a lot of mopping up and drying to come.

Perhaps the lesson to come from this for any small business is to examine contingency procedures. What would you do if you had to relocate at short notice? Can you work from another location? What equipment would you need to take with you? Can staff work from home?

Actually much of the technology we sell aids this kind of contingency planning. If you can relocate your server to another location where you can get internet access the chances are, if you use Microsoft Small Business Server, you can carry on working to a greater or lesser extent. Todays smart phones can send and receive Exchange email, and using Remote Desktop employees can gain access to data and applications held on the server.

A:When the Blackberry Enterprise server fails and the mobile phone company refuses to support it until it has been formatted and re-installed.

This happened to us this week when a client reported that their Blackberries had stopped receiving email. Initially we pointed the client to the original installers of the BES system. It then transpired that the client no longer dealt with them due to their poor service. We then picked up the baton and called the mobile phone company to get support.

They, to their credit, were quite helpful, at least at first. Once we had sent them various log files that they requested they analysed them and then came to the conclusion that the BES server could not be supported as it had never been setup properly. The only solution to the problem, they said, was to rebuild the server and call them back for instructions as to how to install BES properly once that had been done.

We did an emergency callout to Surrey the next day and did as instructed - formatted the system, reinstalled Windows 2003 with the appropriate service packs, installed Exchange system manager, service packed that and finally downloaded and installed the latest version of BES. We then called the mobile phone company and spent the next three hours on the phone with them to set up BES to their standards.

At the end of the process we started all the BES services, logged in to Blackberry Manager and……….

……exactly the same problem occured - “Unable to retrieve the server’s distinguished name or allocate a MAPI buffer for this server.”

After then googling this error message I found someone else who had had exactly the same message and same experience and as it happened his solution works for us as well.

It turns out that the problem with BES all along had not been anything to do with how it was installed at all or the server. In the end the problem was simply that the service account that BES uses had become corrupt in someway and prevented it from running.

The resolution is quite simple in outline - create a new service account and change all the BES services to use that new service account. In practice this was quite an involved process but at the end the BES services started and we were able to get into the Blackberry Manager. Job done.

Why the mobile phone company Blackberry specialist support team (and we are talking a major, major phone company) were not able to use their own knowledgebase to provide this solution is beyond me and cost the client an emergency callout and two days without emails.

Update - if you think the above applies to your situation you probably need to go to this site RIM support and search for article KB04293

Just got back from an unusual site visit today.

One of our clients is Cumbria Wind Farms, part of EDF energy. They run a number of wind farms around the UK and our mission today was to fix the remote access to the Cold Northcott farm in Cornwall. Having recently installed ADSL at the control building the on-site staff did not know how to setup the required routing.

The problem was quite easily resolved so now the SCADA people can gain access to the telemetry system again. The client is happy as were the SCADA company as they now don’t have to drive from Suffolk to Cornwall. We’re happy because they’re happy and we also get to put some pictures of wind turbines on the website.

The Cold Northcott site is one of the earlier wind farms in the UK and the turbines are quite modest compared to the latest generation that Cumbria Wind Farms are putting in to the Fens. The pictured turbine is rated at only 300Kw whereas the latest units are 2Mw and the blade alone is bigger than the tower and blades together in this picture.

Last week we have problems with one of our DNS providers and that caused some of our hosted domains to be difficult to get hold of. The problem was resolved relatively quickly (by about 1pm Thursday) by moving name servers but did cause inconvenience for some.

We have just signed up as a reseller with a major VoIP gateway provider so we are now able to offer you VoIP service billed through ourselves.

We’ll post further about VoIP over the coming weeks but this is really the way ahead for small and medium businesses. We have been using it in-house some for some months now and would not go back to renting phone lines again.

We put in our first customer site next week and VoIP will immediately save them the cost of renting 5-6 analogue phone lines .

Update - 27th March 2007

The new site went live a couple of weeks ago now so they have been using an entirely IP driven phone system for their business for that time. A few minor tweaks to the voice on hold are required but other than that the syste has performed very well. The client is particularly impressed with the call quality as it is better than their last analogue phone system.

We have recently moved office, as you will see from the contacts page, and this has gone relatively smoothly.

However this week has been a nighmare as our partner and hosting provider also moved data centre. Our main web/email and dns server refused to accept its’ new IP address and we hadto spend many hours on the phone to Microsoft support getting the DNS service to start. All cleared now but a hectic couple of days.

Today (Thursday 1st March) just to round off the week we had a 4 hour power cut in the new office. Aplogies to anyone who tried to phone us and got the emergency voicemail service.