September 2003 Archives

I've just read The Cathedral and The Bazzar by Eric Raymond, and when I was looking at some PBX solutions I was very pleased to find Asterisk, the Open Source PBX. This is software written to run on PC class hardware to provide features commonly found in more expensive proprietary systems. (ie Lucent/Avaya Nortel et al.)

The Asterisk project is managed by Mark Spencer, who originally wrote the software. Now code is reviewed and "patched" or improved on a daily basis by "contributors from around the world". Mark Spencer has a company, Digium which manuafactures hardware to interface PC to the PSTN, either via T1, or of more interest to small business, they have products which can connect via individual POTS interfaces.

I hope I have time to put one of these together and experiment with it this winter.

When you are told to update software, you should consider the source. Microsoft always distributes software via CD-ROM or the Internet, they do not email patches to users.

Recently there have been several email messages going around the Internet which falsely claim to come to from Microsoft and requests the user apply an attached patch.

Do not do this.

When ever you have a question about the validity of a patch, go to the software manufacturer's site. For instance, todays MS home page includes a link to this page explaining the MS update distribution policy described above.

And if someone mails you directions to fix a "virus", please check it out first at your virus checker software manufacture's page. See our previous article called Hoaxes are Bad, or maybe for a lighter look at the issue, the VMyth.com site.

"hypercomplex System"

But since our old friend AL scored us a nice piece of networking equiptment for free, that mostly works... this is for him. (And for the rest of you, I think this is a joke, because although the program is powerful, the setup is almost too easy.)

3D traceroute is an interesting tool to help network administrators understand traffic problem in the network. You can fire up this free tool written by Holger Lembke (after you get it at this site: http://www.hlembke.de/prod/3dtraceroute/ ) and do just about anything a network administrator might want to do.

Scan ranges of IPs to see what is up, look at individual hosting in your network to see what ports are open. Do whois lookups against a wide range of whois server.

But mostly, it makes really nifty 3D graphs that will help network administrators understand where the problems in their networks are.

As I mentioned last month, I was working on a 3 column site and I used information from the p.i.e. site.

I turned the site over to my client the other day, you should drop by and see it. (especially if you are in the market for a home in Columbia County) www.cresinc.com is nice and fluid design, based on a printed sketch supplied by the client. It renders cleanly in the latest Opera, Netscape and IE, and it validates both for CSS and XHTML.