Introduction to Asterisk
- The speaker slept through the beginning of his talk and then there were setup issues so this was fairly rushed.
- There are service providers that will accept IAX connections from your own Asterisk server (on in Australia is austechpartnerships.com). Some won't charge you a monthly fee since you are running your own equipment and will only charge for calls.
- Uniden make pretty nice, cheapish IP phones, specifically the UIP200 was recommended.
- Recommended soft phones were schtoom and sjphone (not sure it's the right sjphone).
Lunch with MySQL
- Ran into the MySQL folks and had lunch with them.
- Need to make sure we have query caching enabled.
- They are working on an AJAX form/report builder which might be an interesting way to "replace/supplement" Filemaker. It's one of the many projects though and could use someone to fund it.
- They are an interesting company. They have about 300 employees and the vast majority of them work from home. I want to talk to them more to understand how this works and doesn't work.
Unwired Australia: The Largest Pre-Wimax Rollout in the World
- Really great talk, Unwired knows their shit.
- Built their own layer 2 captive portal server from a hacked dhcpd and a lying DNS server.
- They tied the MAC to the customer id and discovered that it a great tool for forcing communication with clients (eg. client breaks the AUP, so next time they renew their lease they get dumped back into the walled garden and as soon as they open a browser window they get a message saying what the problem is and what they need to do).
- The monitor everything.
- Coverage maps are important (and hard). If they are conservative you loose customers because people think they can't get access, if they aggressive then you irritate people that try.
- Using commercial modeling tools you can get the maps very accurate if you can get up to date clutter information (buildings, forests etc).
L2TPNS
- The main value to Optus of making it open source was QA rather then development. Especially testing against a much wider range of CPE.
- Interesting tool for aggregating lots of tunnels.