A while back I did a fairly major upgrade. Because systems had to be down it had to be done overnight; not a big deal, it's a perfectly normal thing to do as a techie. My colleagues and I spent...

We're in the process of taking on a new partner to look after some of the systems whose support we've decided to outsource. It's nice letting someone else deal with all the RFP guff for once; all I really have...

Last year I moved into a cottage that didn't have anything resembling a phone line, let alone Broadband. A colleague had at this time been waiting a number of weeks to have his Broadband installed, and the light at the...

It's a while since I played with (and, for that matter, wrote about) the Asterisk Open Source IP Telephony package. But as it happens I was having a pint with a friend from the telecoms industry last week, and he...

I'm about to get my eye back into .Net development on Windows and C development on Linux, primarily so I can do a couple of projects I've been promising myself for ages I'd have a bash at. Being the user...

I had one of those odd problems today. You know the sort: something stops working for no apparent reason, and although there are two identical machines sitting next to each other, and you can ping them both, but you can...

I've worked with both large and small suppliers a great deal over the years - but it's the large ones that frustrate me most.  Well over a year ago I invited one of the biggest to implement a WAN optimisation project...

The guru from my PBX maintenance company was in this evening to do some work. As we waited for things to reboot (you know the drill: ten minutes to make the change, 45 to wait for the multiple reboots to...

I have three types of telephone system in the company I work for: Mitel 3300, Cisco Call Manager, and ancient monster that's soon to be replaced. With the exception of this third category, all these systems are pretty new,...

I had to send out a corporate communication the other day. I wrote it in Word, with some words and a few little graphics (flags, screenshots, and so on). Came to 148K, which I thought was pretty good. As I...