Article on "High-speed TCP eases WAN congestion"

Interesting article on how a new flavour of TCP can prevent WAN congestion by modifying the window.

Link to the article

How to change an extension or station number on Avaya Communications Manager

Quick tip:
"change extension-station " from Communications Manager allows you to change the station number of station without having to recreate the extension.

Here is a screen shot of the command:

Using 46xxsettings.txt to apply settings based on MAC address of Avaya IP Phones

Here is just an example of how you can use the 46xxsettings.txt file to set options/settings on the 46xx Avaya IP phones by making entries in the 46xxsettings.txt file that is stored on the tftp or https server.

IF $MACADDR SEQ GOTO HSECURITY

# HSECURITYSET
MCIPADD x.x.x.x
SET PHY2STAT 0
SET OPSTAT 000
SET STATIC 0
SET PROCPSWD 8123456
SET SNMPSTRING XYZ

#end

PS. You can find the MAC address of an IP Phone on the sticker on the back of the 46xx IP Phone, or by "status station " from the Communication Manager you can see the output below:

Cisco hurting their reputation

Is Cisco killing their own reputation? by ZDNet's George Ou -- Last Wednesday in Las Vegas Nevada, Michael Lynn delivered a message to the IT world that they are not safe. On that same day, Mr. Lynn became unemployed and the target of a massive lawsuit from Cisco Systems. His only "crime" was that he exercised his first amendment right of free speech to talk about [...]

VoIP Security concerns for IT Managers

The following is an interesting link on hype of the security concerns in regards to VoIP, from Network World.

Click here to visit the article.

VoIP Security Articles

I came across some good articles on practices that should be taken to protect your VoIP network at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website. These are definity worth taking a look at, you can find them here.

ROI for VoIP Article

Here is an interesting article from NetworkWorld on ROI (Return on Investment) for VoIP, it is based on Nemertes Research interviews with 65 IT executives at leading-edge companies across a range of industries.

Link to Article

VoIP Security Thesis Article

The following is a very interesting article on Security in VoIP - Telephony Systems that was written by a German University Student.

The following is the link to the PDF Article http://www.iaik.tu-graz.ac.at/teaching/11_diplomarbeiten/archive/thalhammer.pdf

A good HTTP Web Server for IP Phones

Now with Avaya IP Phone firmware R2.2 the phones can download their firmware using HTTP or HTTPS rather than using TFTP. So now you can a secure web server to provide the firmware to the IP phones. The following is a nice small HTTPD server that you can use for this: http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/

How to enable TFTP service on Windows 2000 / 2003 Server

Copy the tftpd.exe file from \%systemroot%\system32\dllcache to \%systemroot%\system32.

Then, use the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit's Instsrv utility to create the service as follows.
instsrv tftpd c:\winnt\system32\tftpd.exe

To start the service, enter
net start tftpd

You have now created a TFTPD server on Win2K. To test the server, enter
tftp -i put

The service will create a directory named tftpdroot in \%SystemDrive%, and the file whose name you entered above will be in this directory. This is where the first issue arose. We already had an existing data directory that needed to be available via tftp, and we do not serve any content off the system drives of any servers – it is both a security and common sense issue. Therefore, the service needed to be configurable.

Because this isn’t a supported service, finding documentation on it wasn’t going to be easy, and after a few minutes with Google, I determined I’d have to create my own documentation. Since it only makes sense that a Microsoft application would look to the registry for configuration data, I grabbed my copy of RegMon, the free registry monitor from Systernals, and got busy.

After tweaking RegMon’s filter to only show the tftpd.exe process, and setting a highlight on the service’s registry key (HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TFTPD), I started the service. Looking through the dozen or so highlighted registry accesses revealed the start of something good – an OpenKey attempt for this key:HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TFTPD\Parameters
A quick glance in RegEdt32 showed that key didn’t exist, so let’s add it. Many Windows services have a Parameters key, so this is a good sign.

After adding the key, a stop and restart of tftpd shows a sequence of QueryValue commands – attempts to read a set of values. The values it is looking for were:
HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TFTPD\Parameters\directory
HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TFTPD\Parameters\clients
HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TFTPD\Parameters\masters
HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TFTPD\Parameters\readable
HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TFTPD\Parameters\writable
BINGO! The first parameter tftpd is looking for is called directory. Let’s add a value of type REG_SZ with the value data set to “D:\tftpdata” (our tftp data directory). Following a restart of the tftpd service, we’ll retest (as described above) and we got it – the service now points to our data directory, and the file we just uploaded. Unfortunately, none of the other values are documented either, so they are probably best left alone.

Another TFTP Service available free of charge that will run on Windows is tftpd32 which can be found at http://tftp32.jounin.net/ and the following link discusses how to use it: http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/tftpd-service.html

Reference: http://www.wiredeuclid.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=10

Free Network Monitoring Tool

Torrus can be used as a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) collector. A single server can handle a few hundred network devices and it's network discovery engine supports multiple vendors and device types.

It can collect information such as SAA agents, temperature sensors, CPU and memory statistics.

The key feature of Torrus is it's capability to monitor Cisco class-based quality of service (QoS), which is very useful in a network with VoIP devices. All of this is done in the system via the http web interface.

This software can be found at torrus.org

Thanks to Cisco's First Quarter 2005 Packet Magazine for this information.

Welcome!

Hello Everyone,
I would like to thank everyone who visits, I am going to try to keep this up to date will all of the latest information related to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). I hope you find my posting informative.