Telephony, Running Servers, & Other Hackery
If you folks out there are interested in running servers out of your house, be it mail servers, web servers, streaming media, VoIP, what-have-you, or you’re interested in home-brew telephony projects, I highly recommend a blog called Nerd Vittles. Clever name, if you ask me. The site, run by a guy named Ward Mundy, contains countless full-blown, step-by-step guides to setting up all kinds of homemade systems such as Asterisk, the open-source PBX. I’ve read most, if not all, of the guides he’s got on his site and they never fail to impress. I mention this because lately I’ve been really looking forward to getting more into the whole PBX/telephony/Trixbox scene so that I may then sell my services to whomever would like them. You could easily save any small business about $10,000 per year on telephone lines, problems, and service and support from your telecom vendor. All these godforsaken proprietary PBX systems have to be the bane of every overworked engineer-cum-IT support specialist on the planet. I know every time we need ANYTHING done on our system at my office, we’re required by contract to have the lazy guy from the telecom company take his sweet 2 to 3 weeks to come out and fix it. That fat check he gets must be well worth it! Anyways, I can’t wait to turn some 2 year old machine we’ve got sitting around the office into a VoIP telephony powerhouse… and all for the cost of a few hours of research and study. I will soon supplant Johnny Repairaphone as the goto telephone master!