IT Infusion Inc.

For those of you who aren’t yet in the know:

“Asterisk is the most popular and extensible open source telephone system in the world, offering flexibility, functionality and features not available in advanced, high-end (high-cost) proprietary business systems. Asterisk is a complete IP PBX for businesses, and can be downloaded for free.” – www.asterisk.org

I’ve installed Asterisk several times and used it off and on for over a year now. I have to say that it is probably the coolest, most fun to play with, open source project that I’ve come across in all my years. I can’t believe how powerful, functional, easy to configure (with a little help from FreePBX) and stable this software is. The fact that Asterisk is free boggles the mind.

I’ve recently switched all my business voice communications to an Asterisk server and I’m not looking back. I’ve got follow-me ring groups, IVR menus, voicemail, callback dial tone, and SUPER cheap long distance for a mere fraction of what it would cost through Telus. Even though I’m using less than 10% of Asterisk’s extensive features, it is going to save me a bunch of money and make my communications much easier to manage.

Check out the list of features! Can your phone system do all this stuff? How much are you paying the phone company for all of your fancy calling features that could be handled by a free.

I have a client who is switching to Asterisk and he estimates it is going to cut his phone bills (which are over $2000/month) by more than half.

If you’re looking to add calling features while watching the bottom line, you owe it to yourself to look at Asterisk a bit closer.

Give Microsoft credit for trying hard. But this is just funny:

http://www.microsoft.com/canada/getthefacts/default.mspx

Seriously. If your Linux machines are crashing on a weekly basis then you have serious problems. Maybe instead of switching back to Windows Server 2003 you should consider just getting out of IT altogether?

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had a system crash on a Linux server that could be traced to the operating system in years. Sure, the odd hard drive or power supply craters, but that has nothing to do with Linux.

Nice try Microsoft. I’m not sure who you’re targetting with this marketing campaign, but most geeks tuned out the anti-Linux and BSD bashing a long time ago.

I realize that not all of you are on the Mac OS X train. Having said that, this is pretty funny even if you are one of those “dyed in the wool” Microsoft types. Wouldn’t life be a lot easier for everyone if there was just one Vista instead of six?

You just lost all of your excuses for not setting up a LTSP thin client network.

You can now install a working LTSP network by simply installing an additional NIC in your Ubuntu server then typing a single “apt-get” command. The good folks at Ubuntu Linux have teamed up with LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org) to integrate LTSP 5 tightly with the Ubuntu OS.

The Ubuntu wiki has some great documentation so I’ll spare you the reading here.

We’ve been running a LTSP thin client network at my son’s school for months and it is great. Super slow P3 computers now seem like Intel Core Duos. The kids have NO IDEA that they are running thin clients. Very cool.

Please Note: This is up for historical purposes and is getting pretty dated. I’ve since upgraded to Asterisk 1.4.13 w/ FreePBX and, while it is a similar install, I think that it’s probably actually easier. I didn’t use it, but this guide for installing version 1.4 on Etch is probably a good place to start…

Some changes in my business have meant that I finally have a business case for running my business (and home) phone lines through the open source Asterisk PBX. For those who aren’t familiar, Asterisk is a very powerful VOIP (Voice Over IP) enterprise phone system that runs on Linux and Unix servers. It provides all the features of proprietary PBX phone systems at a mere fraction of the cost. The software itself is free and it runs on commodity server hardware. The savings are really quite significant.

I installed a fresh Debian Etch stable server and then went to work on compiling Asterisk. Why not just install the Debian packages? Well, even the unstable packages aren’t that current and Asterisk changes fairly frequently. Compiling is the best way to stay current. A lot of Debian folks don’t want to stray too far from “apt-get” but it really isn’t that hard to compile Asterisk once you’ve done it a few times!
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The Press Release

Perhaps the worst kept secret in years has finally been confirmed by both Dell and Canonical: Dell will be pre-installing and supporting Ubuntu Linux on Dell hardware.

My take: In the short term, this has the potential to put Ubuntu in front of a significantly larger group of people. Hopefully Dell will do a good job of educating potential customers regarding the potential “gotchas” that they may experience when converting from Windows to Linux (“No, there is no version of Quickbooks for Ubuntu Linux”). In the long term, hopefully the relationship with Dell will result in continued improvement along the lines of hardware integration and open source device driver development.

We may look back on this as the day when desktop Linux finally hit the mainstream. Or we may look back and say this was the day when desktop Linux “jumped the shark“. Hopefully it is the former and not the latter. Although, jumping sharks on water skis is still pretty cool.