I did some work recently for a client at work who were having issues with their Trixbox system. This involved going on site and deciphering the problem with their network and figuring out exactly what was going wrong. It turned out that all the problems were related to a Trixbox misconfiguration in the sip_nat.conf file where localnet was set to 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.0 and thus Trixbox was trying to do NAT when talking to any phone. This was putting extreme strain on the ADSL router at the edge of the network and causing no end of problems.

It’s unsure where the misconfiguration came in, but all has been resolved now. The client has blogged about it and it has even gained some press from ZDNet.

Anyway, the way we solved the problem was by testing the network from a baseline which we knew *must* work. This led us to trap the problem between the Trixbox server and the ADSL router, which in this setup, shouldn’t have needed to talk to each other. That led us to check the NAT setup which is how we found the problem. I planned the work we carried out the day before and it just goes to show that prior planning leads to a successful days work.

Well, we at Senokian, did it! Operation Canine was launched and we managed to create a web app in 3 days!

Spend Meter was launched at 17:29 today, which was 1 minute before the deadline! It really does show that you can design and implement a solution to a pretty basic problem in a pretty short time frame. My favourite part is that we used Asterisk and PHP together, along with bespoke scripts to get the data to synchronise between the two systems to enable the software to work!

GO TEAM CANINE!

At work, we’ve been working on Operation Canine for the past 2 days with today being the final day. We’re trying to set up a company and build a product within the 3 day time span, using just a handful of people. I am working on the phone system for it, which has been coming along nicely and I am very confident that we will reach the goal and have something released today.

The idea of this task is to show that you can get the ground work done for a new company is a very short time frame and that you don’t need to have an absolutely 100% completed project at first – you can start small and work from there. The aim of Operation Canine is that the product will be developed over time if it starts to become popular (i.e. make money!).

Today is launch day, so check out the website and look back at 17:30 GMT for (hopefully) a release!

I started my job at Senokian yesterday and it’s been a very fun couple of days so far! I’ve been getting into one project and will hopefully be able to get into some other projects soon, hopefully on the telephony / internet side of the company, which will be really cool.

Ever set up a server? Ever managed a server? Ever wondered if there’s a tool out there to help you do these things? Well (as far as I know) there isn’t such a tool out there in the open source world yet.

That’s why Paul and myself decided a while ago that it would be a good idea to make one! I am hoping that we’ll actually get round to doing some work on it now that we’re both going to be working in Coventry. That is assuming we actually get some spare time!

So, watch out for it!