One of our buildings is old and really pre-dates when network cabling was standard. As a result we have a hodge podge of cable strung around that is difficult to manage, exposed to anyone who walks by and just generally doesn't look very professional.

Our ownership is planning to renovate one part of this building that happens to be where our "server room" is. I use this term loosely because it is just an unused office with a wall rack where the network cabling comes together. I want to see if as part of the renovation I can pitch cleaning up this mess that we have in that building, though I know the expense of rerunning cable may not fly.

It got me to wondering though, is there any reason I shouldn't plan to just go entirely wireless in that building? I was thinking this may be a method to redo some without having to re cable the entire building. As long as I plan AP placement correctly (which shouldn't be hard, the building isn't that big) would this be viable for a production corporate manufacturing facility and office?

My thought would be to run a few cables for the AP's and maybe the printers but just plan for everything else to be wireless. Is there an issue that I'm not considering that would negate this idea?

Thanks for any feedback.

We want to add a small 5 port switch to the control cabinet of our primary manufacturing machine. The only power I have in the cabinet comes from a UPS with the following specs and connector. Does anyone know of a source for a small switch that would work in this scenario.

Thanks.

Our leadership is discussing possibly building a new facility over the next few years. What would be some things you would take into consideration for a new building design if you could start fresh with a blank slate.

The one's I initially think of are planning networking for WAN, LAN, wireless and phones. Also server, workstation and processing equipment planning. Access control and cameras.

I bought one of these phones to try for our receptionist as a secondary phone for roaming around the building when she needs to.

The only issue I am having is that occassionally the phone will not respond timely to the sip server. The most obvious way I see this is just with a continuous ping. As long as a call is active I get consistent sub 5ms ping times. However, if a call is not active then the ping response will vary but will range from 50ms to 3000ms. This is very repeatable.

When in this mode the phone will sometimes not respond to an incoming call before the sip server abandons trying to reach it. I've had several times where I will dial the extension and the calling phone will hear two rings and then a busy. However after the busy, the Grandstream will ring. I think this tells me that it did receive the SIP message to begin the call but didn't respond in time before the server abandoned it.

I thought maybe there would be a keep alive type setting on the phone that I could shorten to keep it connected but I haven't found it in the settings.

Has anyone ever used one of these and experienced similar?

@BraswellJay

I finally figured out what was causing my issue.

In FreePBX under Settings->Asterisk SIP Settings there is a parameter to set the External Address used. I had this still set to the public IP of the original interface. Once I changed that parameter to the public IP of the new interface then all started to work over the new interface as expected.

@BraswellJay

I did a asterisk message trace for each case, once with an incoming call using the original interface and then again using the new interface. The traces appear the same until I get to the following line in the asterisk dump:

ORIGINAL (working audio): (I replaced the actual IP address with w.x.y.z but the actual IP address shown is the same in both sampels)

    -- Executing [s@ivr-2:5] Answer("PJSIP/Skyetel_Outbound-000030f0", "") in new stack
       > 0x7f516013c880 -- Strict RTP learning after remote address set to: w.x.y.z:28586
       > 0x7f516013c880 -- Strict RTP switching to RTP target address w.x.y.z:28586 as source

NEW (no audio):

    -- Executing [s@ivr-2:5] Answer("PJSIP/Skyetel_Outbound-000030f1", "") in new stack
       > 0x7f515c07ba80 -- Strict RTP learning after remote address set to: w.x.y.z:25804

When using the original interface, I see that second message about switching to RTP target address ... as source message that is not present on the new interface. This appears to be repeatable results from the samples I have run.

I'm not sure what asterisk is trying to do but the fact that it appears related to RTP suggests to me that his is the source of my problem. Does anyone know what "Strict RTP learning" and "Strict RTP switching" is? Does this pertain to any configuration parameter on the trunks maybe??

@JasGot said in What determines the interface that SIP RTP streams over ...:

@BraswellJay
Do you mean which physical interface in your router?

Yes

Not exactly sure what you mean by "new WAN interfaces"

We have new external WAN service from a different provider. We had service and our public IP was w.x.y.z

We now have a new service on a different port on the router that has public IP of a.b.c.d

The SIP trunks work fine over the original interface (w.x.y.z) but have no audio when that interface is disabled.

The SIP traffic will use the interface assigned to the gateway address your are providing the phones, either static or DHCP.

The phones are all connected to a FreePBX instance. The SIP trunks are configured from the FreePBX machine.

No Audio is almost ALWAYS a NAT issue. Look at your NAT settings on the old interface and compare them to the new interface.

What make and model router are you using?

The router is a Meraki MX67-C. I have double checked the settings here and believe that all of the port rules that apply to the original interface (w.x.y.z) also apply to the new interface (a.b.c.d)

There is something I need to update on either the Meraki, FreePBX or Skyetel that is set for the old interface but not the new but I can't seem to find it.

We recently updated to new WAN interfaces at two of our locations. We use @Skyetel SIP trunks at both sites. From the Skyetel portal, I added the IP addresses of the new interfaces to the appropriate IP groups, and the health in the Skyetel portal is showing ok for both.

I disabled the old WAN port at location 1 and all SIP trunks continued to work as before with no issues.

I disabled the old WAN port at location 2 and SIP is not working. The calls are completing, both inbound and outbound, but there is no audio from either direction. I re-enabled the old WAN port and call audio immediately resumed.

My takeaway from that is that the SIP messages are correctly using the new interface, but the RTP streams are not. They seem to still be using the old interface. Is there a setting in either Skyetel or FreePBX that sets what interface the RTP streams use? I always thought that they would use the same interface that the SIP messages were using and I don't remember having to set anything specific for RTP when these sites were set up other than firewall rules for the associated port range.

@BraswellJay

Turned out to be a SIP port issue. I remember when I set this particular site up I ended up using port 5160 instead of 5060 but when I configured the new IP group in the skyetel portal I didn't change to the correct port. Once I made that change the portal now shows the new interface as healthy.

@BraswellJay

According to this link https://support.skyetel.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041178573-IP-Health it is a just a ping to determine if the interface is up. I'm able to ping the new WAN interface from other devices.

We are in the process of changing our WAN access and I activated the new WAN port this afternoon. I had thought that I could create a new IP group in the Skyetel portal and copy the trunk defintions from the old WAN IP address to create new trunks in FreePBX. I did this and FreePBX is showing the trunks as online :

However the Skyetel portal is showing the status as offline:

I figure this must be a firewall rule issue on the new WAN port but I can't see it. The rules are the same on both ports. How does Skyetel determine the health of a link?

@Obsolesce said in Can the target of a One Drive link be changed ?:

@scottalanmiller said in Can the target of a One Drive link be changed ?:

I don't know any platform like that that has built in editors to modify the files that are in the storage

OneDrive does let you edit files directly, in the storage.

How were you able to bring up the editor? Did you just click on file name? When I do that on a url link file it just takes me to the file that the link is pointing to. I can then edit that target file. In my case it brings up an image editor since the target is a .png file. I can't seem to find a way to edit the text of the url link file itself without downloading it first.

@scottalanmiller said in Can the target of a One Drive link be changed ?:

@BraswellJay said in Can the target of a One Drive link be changed ?:

@scottalanmiller said in Can the target of a One Drive link be changed ?:

@BraswellJay I must be confused. Don't you just edit the file itself, it should be a text file containing the link.

That's what I want to be able to edit. Unless I'm missing something you can't edit the url link file directly in the onedrive portal. If you try to edit from the portal you're taken to editing the target of the link and not the link itself.

I can download the link file and edit it and reupload. I just thought there would be a way to accomplish that directly from the portal without having to download, edit, and reupload, but maybe not.

Oh, no, you definitely have to download it and edit it. OneDrive doesn't give you a generic desktop to edit files from. It's just a storage solution itself. I don't know any platform like that that has built in editors to modify the files that are in the storage except for NextCloud. And it's always super limited because there are challenges to that.

Ok, thanks. That answers my questions then.

@scottalanmiller said in Can the target of a One Drive link be changed ?:

@BraswellJay I must be confused. Don't you just edit the file itself, it should be a text file containing the link.

That's what I want to be able to edit. Unless I'm missing something you can't edit the url link file directly in the onedrive portal. If you try to edit from the portal you're taken to editing the target of the link and not the link itself.

I can download the link file and edit it and reupload. I just thought there would be a way to accomplish that directly from the portal without having to download, edit, and reupload, but maybe not.

I uploaded an image file to my one drive account. I then created a link to that file from the one drive portal. This creates a file with a .url extension. Is it possible to change the target that the .url link points to?

My use case is for the logo we use in our email signatures. I want to create a generic link that will always point to the current logo that our management wants to use in our email signatures. Then if they decide to change it later I can just update the link to point to a different image.

I can't fine anywhere in one drive that lets you change the target of a .url link file.

I guess I can use bitly but I was trying to keep it all within one drive since we already have access to that.

This is what I have at the moment:

primary-email-sig.url is a link to the other file. If I wanted to change that target to point to a different image can I do that? I can't find anyplace that appears to allow that.

We are planning a server upgrade and I find myself faced with the question of whether a SAN is necessary. I know there have been many posts both here and on other forums about SANs being oversold in situations where they are not needed. My gut instinct is that my situation is one that really doesn't require a SAN, yet I still find myself unsure that I understand the various questions that I should be considering when making this decision.

I bought a copy of Linux Administration Best Practices by @scottalanmiller and am reviewing the chapters on system storage, in particular the parts on SANs, local storage and replicated local storage.

Our needs are not sophisticated. We will have only a handful of VMs. A file server, sql server, freepbx, inventory management system server, security system server and an internal application server for a few internal tools. For most of these we can afford some downtime in the event of a host failure. The exception is really the SQL server. While it would not be catastrophic for some downtime it would be far superior from a continuity perspective if it could fail over to a secondary host if necessary.

With that in mind, I had planned for two hosts so we could survive a failure of one of them. My primary confusion though is how would I accomplish replicated local storage. Is this functionality that the hypervisor must provide? The best practices book mentions several technologies (DRBD, Gluster, CEPH) that can be used for RLS but I would think that these would have to run in the hypervisor itself and not as separate VMs on the host. Is that correct?

In general, for relatively small environments such as mine, is it feasible to even attempt local storage replication? Our MSP has quoted an EMC SAN device to the tune of $25k so that VMs could be migrated between hosts with storage being on the SAN. What would an implementation without the SAN look like if I wanted to maintain the replication and the ability for the VMs to be migrated between hosts?

@Obsolesce

Thanks!

That was perfectly reasonable and straightforward to do.

@Obsolesce said in Word to PDF converter ...:

@BraswellJay you don't need one with word. In Word, just export as pdf.

I can't do that in bulk that way though, can I?

My user may have 50 or so word files and she wants to convert them all to separate PDFs without having to open each one individually in word.

I thought there may be a tool that would just let her bulk select all and convert them all at once.

Does anyone know a good open source docx to pdf converter for Windows?

I have a user that wants to be able to bulk select multiple MS Word files and convert them to individual PDFs.

I found this tool which looks to do what I want but I can't find much else about it so I'm hesitant to install:

https://file-converter.org/

@JaredBusch said in Does the end of O365 Basic Authentication mean no more app passwords:

Customer has a LoB application called Enfocus Switch.

It has a mail retrieval function that connects via IMAP using an app password on a normal O365 email account with MFA enabled.

It stopped retrieving email on the morning of Wednesday October 12th.

Since Microsoft finally killed Basic Auth on Tuesday, I assume this is related, but I can find no information on this at all.

I got caught by this last week myself. There is a one time ability to reenable basic auth through the rest of 2022 which is what I did for now. According to what I found though this is a one time grace period that will not be extended again. I took advantage though to give a little more time to find a different method.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients-and-mobile-in-exchange-online/deprecation-of-basic-authentication-exchange-online

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-deprecation-in-exchange-online-september/ba-p/3609437