Well, the last few months has been pretty interesting at work - started my new job at Les Mills Asia Pacific (http://www.lesmills.com.au), don't panic - I'm still in IT!

Asterisk First project involced setting up an Asterisk server for a call center (using a Digium TE-120P card to interface with an ISDN PRI connection).

We used some pretty nifty features, including setting up a primary menu system that routes calls into incoming call queues (that agents are subsribed to), most of the configuration was done using the AsteriskGUI web interface (the remainder performed by hacking the individual config files.

I found the freely available Asterisk: The Future of Telephony book very useful. We use a combination of Snom300 and Snom360 VOIP handsets throughout the organisation (in conjunction with switches that support power over ethernet) Dirvish, Backup Exec and Lacie Big4 Second project involved ensuring that all of the corporate servers are backed up properly - ended up using dirvish for the Unix servers and Symantec Backup Exec for our primary domain controller.

Offsite backup is performed using rsync to a Lacie Bigger Disk Extreme (at least until our Lacie Big 4s arrive - these are cool becuase they support RAID 5, and user replaceable drive modules).

Cacti and Opennms While setting up the backup system, I thought I had better set up some monitoring software - I first ran with cacti (which supports snmLatsp monitoring), unfortunately cati does not support alerting (out of the box), so I ended up setting up Opennms which does provide alerting facilities (and some pretty sweet network autodiscovery facilities).

Fry riends of mine have had a lot of success with Nagios - I didn't get a chance to fully evaluate it, but it did look very promising.

Zimbra Most recent project was setting up a groupware server (supporting email, calendar, contacts - among other things) - we selected Zimbra with the Outlook connector and Mobile options.

Zimbra has one of the best Ajax webmail interfaces I have used (which rivals gmail), it also ships with the Lucene serach engine and Verity html conversion tool (that allowews you to view common attachments as html).

If our business requirements did not include Microsoft Outlook and mobile device integration, I'm sure we could have happily used the open source zimbra offering.

I must admit, being able to sync my iPhone's calendar and email (via ssl) to work is pretty neat (and keeps the CEO happy).

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