Noel's Muses

Post Updated February 29, 2020

There have been a number of installers using the Ness 3G dialler for Alarms and Lifts in past few years, I myself recommended their use - along with the warning that Telstra for one, will be as of June 2024, turning off its last 3G service, with other carriers to follow sometime after. As of that time most the 3G diallers would have been installed for over 5 to 8 years, If you have a tech offer you a Ness dialler solution in 2020 (onwards) please ensure it is 4G model now reflected below in the updated post. do not accept them installing the older 3G models and be prepared to upgrade your older dialler to 4G.


Emergency phones like those in Lifts, Security and Fire Alarm Systems with back to base monitoring are also affected by the NBN changeover and cut-offs, therefore building owners, tenants, and managers need to start considering what action they need to take, even if the NBN is not as yet active in your area, it likely wont be that far off, so you'll need to start planning for the changeover, it's also beneficial to change earlier, cheap PAYG M2M plans are more economical for standby emergency and idle telecommunications than PSTN line rental. As for Alarms, some B2B providers supply you with a SIM that includes all signalling calls in your monthly B2B plan.
Continue reading "NBN And Emergency Lift Phones, Alarms, And Other Fixed Diallers"

Whether it's DirectAdmin, cPanel, Plesk, or some other commercial hosting control panel, I pretty much dislike them all. They do their best to present an eye candy appealing image to help for good customer experiences, and I guess most of them do that well, probably far more appealing than the cobbled together scripts that I use allowing my hosts to manage their websites, but I guarantee you mine are probably more secure, efficient, scalable and redundant - capability beats looks any day!

In a few weeks time it'll be 2018, yet they still treat us like it's the 90's, limiting us to what daemons we can use on our own servers, limiting us to their choices of Linux distros, if it runs on RedHat, Debian, and FreeBSD, it'll run on SuSE, Slackware, Gentoo and others, but the biggest gripe of all, is they continue putting everything on one server. The process is along the lines of your customers sign up online, probably using Hostbill or WHMCS, it then shoots off to the current new hosts server's telling the Control Panel to set up the domain, its DNS, Email, Databases and Website structure - all on that one single machine, putting all your eggs in one basket, I guess they think hardware is infallible, where the truth is far from it.

Continue reading "Why I Hate Commercial Control Panels"

So your business is running an old analog multi-line PABX that you've used and trusted for years, you've also just been letter dropped that the NBN is ready for service in your area, ok, so that means you have 18 months to migrate to an NBN service before Telstra cuts off your existing copper services, you know it's wise to move sooner rather than later because you don't want to get caught out and be without a phone service when everyone waits till the last minute, and there's not enough techs to go round.

You decide you better start talking to some RSP's (Retail Service Providers), or worse - you get one of those pesky door to door sales people, either way, during your conversations all of a sudden your ears prick up because you've just been told that your trusty existing PABX wont work, it's incompatible with the NBN and you need to replace it. There is a tiny bit of truth in that, and I do mean tiny, like it wont work as is, but If you think it sounds more like a rort, you're probably right.

Continue reading "NBN And PABX Phone Systems"

Australia's NBN, how it will affect your existing landline phones when you are migrated depends on how your home is currently wired and how many phones you have.

There's been a bit of rubbish being spread by RSP (Retail Service Provider - AKA: ISP) sales type people telling you your existing phones wont work when you're moved to the NBN. There is some truth to this, but no you likely do not need to re-wire your entire house or some such rot, or buy dect phones as only means of more phones, as many are being told, and despite other rhetoric from these sales geniuses, you can have more than one fix wired phone.

There are issues with leaving multiple active outlets in place on your original phone line when NBN connects your new service with their VDSL modem that's for certain, they can and do create issues that result in poor performance with your service, that's one of the few things NBN chief Bill Morrow and I actually agree on

There are typically two wiring layouts of a home with multiple outlets and ADSL, the first and most common is daisy chained, that sort of looks like this

Continue reading "NBN With Multiple Phone Outlets"

In 2015, we ran a test on our most commonly used sites for IPv6 responses which yielded pathetic 8% results, so
this is a quick update to the article I wrote back then - IPv6 Reality Checks, but it seems here we are two and a half years later, only a handful of the previously IPv4 only hosts have managed to graduate to IPv6.

These hosts have since IPv6:

www.9news.com.au 

bbc.co.uk

cnn.com   

www.yourtv.com.au

mypolice.qld.gov.au

www.webhostingtalk.com

www.datacenterknowledge.com

techdirt.com

planefinder.net

comlaw.gov.au  

However the following, the over whelming vast majority, still have yet to add IPv6 - Continue reading "Ipv6 2017 Check Update"