Sheep Guarding Llama

After working on building a working 3CX PBX yesterday we finally came to the conclusion that there are technical limitations that for our somewhat uncommon and incumbent network infrastructure cannot be overcome so this morning the decision was made to revert to working on an Elastix-based Asterisk PBX instead.  The upside to Elastix is that I know it cold so this is way easier.

So my entire day, and thus my entire weekend, was spent building another PBX.  It took a bit of the day but I got it done and up and running without outside trunks in under an hour, that was easy.  Then a little bit of time to migrate stuff over from the old system and everything was working except for the trunks.

Due to some changes in how Elastix 2.3’s version of FreePBX handles trunks, there were some issues there and no documentation that I could find from the trunk provider or online would get the trunks up and working.  It took many hours before I got incoming calls working and outgoing, well that will just have to wait until some later date.

It was a long and exhausting weekend and I feel like I got zero time to relax.  But at least the phone system is up and working.  And the system is a brand new one, costs less and is easier to maintain than the old one.  So overall, it was a win.

So once I got up this morning my project for the weekend is to work on the phone system that went down yesterday.  The decision was made that since the phones had gone down we don’t want to rely on, or spend the extra money on, the PBX being hosted on a cloud in Chicago but instead we want to put it in Toronto where the platform is already paid for completely.  Plus we are making an attempt at migrating from Elastix to 3CX for the phones – this will be interesting.  I had kicked off some work on 3CX last night but it didn’t work out well and so we have to redo that work today.  Fun.  I could build an Elastix system from soup to nuts in about an hour but this is taking forever.

I spent the entire day sitting in the play room working on the PBX.  What a long day.  I did get the 3CX up and working today and it is pretty neat.  I learned a ton today from working on it.  But, at the end of the day, it looks like it is not going to work for us.  It lacks the networking robustness that we need.  That is disappointing.  So my day was pretty much just a learning day.  Tomorrow I will be focusing on building a new Elastix 2.3 system from the ground up, again.  At least we get a fresh start.  Ha ha.  I just wished that I hadn’t burned my entire weekend on this.  I just don’t have that kind of time to spare these days.

Today is Friday and it is a pretty nice day out.  I’m looking forward to a relatively relaxing weekend at home.

We managed to go all week without any additional information on the project in Saudi Arabia.  For all of the panic that they put us through to get us ready to go they sure aren’t bothering to let us know anything.  I’ve had so many projects like this fifteen years ago, this is following the pattern of so many bad consulting gigs.  I’m losing faith quickly.

It was a more or less normal Friday.  At the office today.  We are getting pretty strong information that we are relocating to another facility a few miles away in a few weeks but we really don’t have very solid information.  I hear this stuff so often, I am not holding my breath.

Chris and I went out for lunch today.  It’s Friday so I almost never go home on Fridays.

This afternoon turned into a crazy one when we discovered that many of our servers were down including the phone system.  That was quite a rude afternoon awakening.  Now suddenly I have a lot of work to be doing this weekend.  Not going to spend much time worrying about it tonight but all weekend I am going to be working on the phones.

This evening, after the girls were asleep, Watson, Andrew and I went to Redneck for late night drinks.

Today is the big day, we are doing a joint event between the Upstate NY SpiceCorps event which Danielle, Jeremy and Kasey are running and hosting at Danielle’s house and SpiceCorps DFW which is getting together at our house here in Carrollton.  AVer is sponsoring the event today and as they do video conferencing so it is perfect because both groups are able to watch each other on camera, and we have the projector and screen that we got last week for our local SpiceCorps event so we get to reuse that already.

I was home today to help out with getting ready for the event.  We aren’t expecting a big crowd, just like a dozen people for this “small” event.  We don’t have food being catered or anything.

Today’s event was on the very early side as the NY groups starts earlier than us normally plus there is an hour of time difference so we needed to be up and running by four thirty in the afternoon.  For the first while it was just Dominica, Chris and I on video as the NY event ramped up with Liesl and Luciana running around.

By the end of the evening we ended up with eleven people in DFW and about the same in NY.  The event went pretty well and the AVer did a good job.  I gave a presentation on “One Big RAID 10 – The New Standard for Server Storage.”  The talk went over pretty well.

It was a nice evening.  Relaxing, interesting presentations and not too much stress from having too many people.  We didn’t go crazy late tonight either, just until around eleven.

Another day of just “waiting” to see if news comes in.  Nothing today.  Not a peep.  After the call last night we were pretty confident that we would hear more today but we didn’t.  Not a thing.

I was in the office as usual.  Normal day, with the added stress of maybe having to leave for Houston at any moment.

I am holding off on writing my SGL updates because we can’t discuss the project while it still might happen.