Moving Untangle to a Mini PC

After years of using the free components of Untangle as my UTM, I finally decided to bit the bullet and purchase the NG Firewall subscription for it.  I have to say I am sorry I didn't do it sooner.  The paid versions of the web and spam filters alone make it work the cost.  Oh and the bandwidth control is nice too.    Since I spiffed up the software for the box I decided it was time to move it from a old workstation to a nice, small form factor box.

The Untangle software is more interested in the number of cores than the speed of the processor which opened up a nice selection of small boxes.  One of the requirements is a dual nic box which you can't get in the Intel NUC's and Gigabyte BRIX's.  I found a small box called a Fitlet from Compulab that had 5 nic's which would give me more options in creating zone policies.

Unfortunately the Fitlet turned out to be a royal pain in the you know what.  The box would not post. I tried different DIMM sticks, removing all components, resetting the BIOS, etc.  I considered getting a replacement, but during my troubleshooting I found very little information on this box. Ether no one was using them, or they were very quiet about it.  I've pronounced it useless and it's going back.

My next attempt will be a Jetway box with dual nic's.  I'd prefer more, but I can live with two as long as the box works. :)  It also has a wireless adapter which Untangle can use to create an AP.  I could not determine if the chipset on the wireless adapter is supported, but even it it doesn't I am fine with it.  I'm not getting it for the wireless.  The main reason I chose it is the wealth of information on the box and the active community.

The Jetway box should arrive tomorrow, I hope it goes much better than the Fitlet.

-Keith

Easy (and cheap) SQL Server Backups

The Backup/DR solution I use at work, like most of them, requires extra licenses to backup MS SQL databases.  I happened to be SQL happy and have databases running on 4 or 5 servers (yes I lost count), purchasing a license for each one can get expensive.  To get around this I had been using a isql from a batch file to dump the database files to a folder before the backup, and while this worked fine it had two problems. First it wastes a lot of space, and second I have no way of knowing if the dump was successful   I know, I could have written a complex batch file to notify me but I am not a fan of batch files, if I am going to bother with that I will just write something in c or vb.net.

I came across SQLBackupAndFTP, and it's a slick solution with a not too sophisticated name. It will backup and compress your SQL databases, handle full and incremental and even purge old backups.  It apparently will FTP them too, but I have didn't bother with that.  It will also backup SQL database from remote servers with a little extra configuration.  They have a free version that will backup two databases (I use that at home) and various paid versions that will backup more.  If your Backup/DR solution gouges you for SQL backups you should check it out.

SQLBackupAndFTP.com

-Keith

We have out grown our home grown auto attendant prompts

Since, and before, I was sitting in this chair the company I work for has used in-house talent to create the voice prompts for our Cisco phone system.  Management has decided to use an outside firm to create the audio which I think is a good thing. Anyway, part of what we want to accomplish is to have different MoH (Music on Hold) streams for each queue a caller can be placed in.  

Currently everything uses the default Cisco MoH stream.  It was relatively easy to create the new audio sources for MoH, but what took me a while was figuring out how to apply that new source to the queues.  Most information I Googled mentioned setting them in the CTI Points... It was only after figuring out that that didn't work that I came across an article that correctly stated you had to change the CTI *PORTS* not Points.  Our UCCX server was using a single Call Control Group with 100 CTI Ports for both the sales and support queues, I created a second Call Control Group and moved 50 of them to the new group. Then came the fun part, going through all 50 CTI Ports and setting the MoH source.

So in a nutshell, if you want to use different MoH audio sources for the queues on your UCCX (or IPCC) server, first make sure your CRS scripts uses the standard Call Hold and Call Unhold commands.  Then create a Call Control Group for each queue and create or shuffle around your CTI Ports so that you have enough in each control group, and finally in CUCM locate the CTI Ports (they are listed under Phones) change the MoH source for each port.

Hope that helps.

-Keith