Carla Schroder

Recently we compared Asterisk and its new corporate sibling, Switchvox, which is really its offspring. Today we’re adding VoIP servers for our mythical 50-user office from Pingtel and Fonality. Pingtel’s SIPxchange ECS Pingtel was acquired in 2007 by Bluesocket. They’re still using the Pingtel name, which is convenient for those of us whose brains are […]

Sidux is a new Debian derivative that’s still just a baby, born in January 2007. Sidux announced a brand-new release on June 26, Sidux 2008-02, so we’re going to kick the tires and take it for a drive, and see what sets it apart from other children of Debian. Currently it offers a choice of […]

For lo these many years here on ServerWatch’s Tip of the Trade, we have toiled to bring you useful tips and tricks to make your job a little easier, and to help you keep up with new applications and useful products. This week, in celebration of summer and the holiday week in United States, we […]

Shopping for VoIP gear is a lot more fun than it used to be. Now you can get prefab servers and bundles with everything you need, and all you do is plug things in and start yakking. OK, so it’s not quite that easy, but the progress in the past couple of years in user-friendliness […]

Last week we learned a bit about the chaotic jumble that is audio on Linux, and about the new PulseAudio sound server that just may create bit of order, and perhaps some more user-friendliness. Several Linux distributions default to using PulseAudio, such as Fedora, Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and Mandriva. Many others now include it in […]

There are a lot of great sound-related applications for Linux, from basic audio drivers and sound servers to sophisticated mixers, editors, and special effects engines. Which is not much consolation for the user who just wants sound to work on her system, and these days everything old is new again–once again, getting sound to work […]

The ip command is part of the iproute2 suite of TCP/IP networking utilities. It keeps trying to replace the old familiar ifconfig and route commands, which do what they do splendidly but are a bit limited for today’s network environments. One thing ip can do that ifconfig cannot is assign multiple addresses to a single […]

Eager admins who want to give OpenSolaris a try are faced with a rather daunting installation process. One option is to use BeleniX, the excellent OpenSolaris bundle that comes on a live CD with a lot of useful extras, including the KDE and XFCE desktop environments, GNU tools, multimedia applications, and many other free/open source […]

The fine folks at Fonality (I like saying that for the alliteration and spray effects) sent me a trixbox Pro server to test. This is a prefab hardware and software bundle, ready to plug in and go to work. It comes in two different hardware configurations, the base appliance and the enterprise appliance. Let’s take […]

In part 1 of this series we learned how to rescue a failing hard drive by copying files to a second local hard drive. You can also copy files over the network, which is useful for nearly any problem, whether it’s software or hardware. You need a second PC running sshd. Suppose the second PC […]