SmashTech

FlowerCo uses extensions which start with an 8 (well, technically they have 3 digit extensions internally and use 8 as a prefix on incoming calls). Switching them over to an NBX will be easy, except for the fact that by default, 8 prefixes are for the 8 pool, and extensions start at 1000.

Open up your dialplan and delete any TableEntrys which reference your 8 pool route, then update your ExtensionRange to include 8000 series extensions. If you want to maintain the functionality of the 8 pool, you can change it to use a 7 as the prefix by deleting references to the Diagnostics route in your initial tables, and replacing that TableEntry to be Local pointing to your 8 route

ExtensionRange Telephone 8000 8099
TableEntry Create 1 30 8 4 4 Internal  0 8
TableEntry Create 1 10 7 8 8 Local  0 1

Don’t forget to update your auto-discover settings to start assigning phones at 8000 (System-Wide Settings -> Enable Features System-Wide). If you want to remove the 8 pool entirely, just remove any of its entries in Table 1 and Table 2 of your dialplan.

If you’ve been to my place, you know my basement sounds like a hair dryer. I have 5 machines running 24/7 most of the time. Noise and electric bills finally got to me, so I picked up a Kill-A-Watt to track power usage, per machine. What I found out is that having those machines on constantly accounts for 1/3 of my electric bill, almost 330 kilowatt-hours per month.

The 2 biggest hits towards power usage were # of drives, and processor type. More drives = more motors to spin. The most power-hungry drives were the Ultra320 SCSI drives, followed by PATA drives and finally SATAs. Processor power usage seemed to follow a slightly different curve, with a 2nd gen P4 using the most power, followed by P3s, Pentium Ds, and the Core 2 Duo.

Continue reading ‘Going Green in the Home Datacenter’ »

Orb is a media server application which allows you to stream all of your videos, music, and photos to almost any device on your network or the internet.

However, it is not officially supported on Server 2008. Since 2008 is based on Vista, I figured why not give it a shot. And it works. There is just one small problem: It throws an absolute fit if it can’t access a file and starts filling the drive with log files. That causes problems when a machine goes to sleep and Orb tries to index files from a SMB share.

I managed to put together a small batch file which will stop the Orb services, clean up the log files, and restart Orb. Running this on the scheduler once a day seems to have stopped the drive space problem.

@echo off
net stop OrbMediaService
taskkill /f /im orbtray.exe
taskkill /f /im orb.exe
taskkill /f /im orbmediaservice.exe
c:
cd\programdata\orbnetworks\logs
del *.log1
del *.back
net start OrbMediaService
cd\
cd \Program Files (x86)\Orb Networks\Orb\bin
start OrbTray.exe