larchesdanrew posted:

I found out who it was

after the principal emailed me (with the director CC'd) fussing that I had not taken care of this issue yet.

wolrah posted:

Did they get poo poo phones without enough buttons? Every VoIP system I manage (FreeSwitch/FusionPBX, Freeswitch/Kazoo, Asterisk/FreePBX, and Asterisk/Grandstream) supports having BLF buttons pointed at parking spaces directly. Users can either put a caller on hold and press a specific parking space or just push a "park" button which will read back to them which space it was placed in, then others can just pick up the phone and push that button to pick it up (or dial the parking space extension if they're on a cordless phone)

This shouldn't be a technically challenging problem as long as the right phones were purchased.

If you have users who just absolutely refuse to learn anything slightly different, figure out some business-friendly way to tell them to eat a bag of dicks. The concept of lines is dead, it's never coming back, and that's a good thing. Parking spaces, when used correctly, provide the same benefit.



We're not on mechanical phone switches nor connecting a physical outside line the moment you press the trunk access key anymore.

There's not really any good reason to require any of these. In 15 years in the VoIP industry I've never had a problem with just letting people pick up a phone and dial a number, either 10 or 11 digit style. We set up our systems to strip preceding 9s in case someone has bad habits and then just let it go. It works great and users who are used to cell phone dialing these days love it. We don't enable 7 digit dialing by default because most of our primary area has overlays, but we have done it by request. Trunk access codes are a legacy thing that made sense with the limitations of the ways things used to be done but aren't relevant to anything not involving actual analog lines.

NAL but I'm pretty sure that's not legal, or at least not a good idea. We looked in to what we could do when a resident at one of the nursing facilities we manage kept dialing 911 and our lawyer basically told us not that if a legitimate call is impeded we'd be vulnerable to a very expensive lawsuit. We eventually just got the facility to take her phone away.

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

oh hey Freeswitch/Asterisk buddy!
What's your favorite physical IP phone make and model?

quote:

I'm currently suffering through a new NEC SV9500 deployment with old rear end DTERM phones and a few lovely DTERM IP phones. The phone part isn't the problem, it's that the keys are all programmed the way that every individual wanted them, and not the way my boss wants them, which means I have to go reprogram key data for like 300 phones, on top of all the other actual important configuration that needs to be done.

quote:

...Now the voicemail system is a whole different story.
That's just hosed because people are either not responding to my requests for input or just have no idea what an IVR/auto-attendant/phone tree is and expect me to 'just make it work' for them without any input as to what it is they need or want.

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

The phone part isn't the problem, it's that the keys are all programmed the way that every individual wanted them, and not the way my boss wants them, which means I have to go reprogram key data for like 300 phones, on top of all the other actual important configuration that needs to be done.

larchesdanrew posted:

I found out who it was

after the principal emailed me (with the director CC'd) fussing that I had not taken care of this issue yet.

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

loving Grandstream 10,000 line config files.

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

loving Grandstream 10,000 line config files.

stevewm posted:

Edit: We went with 2170s because everyone was adamant about being able to see everyone's status at once. The big screen and bunch of buttons makes that easy. But we came from a system with these phones:



So people where used to being able to see everyone's status.

We only paid $90 each for the phones, which was cheaper than the phones for our old analog system!

Entropic posted:

Oh man I just had to deal with a site using these today. I remotely logged into their IP Office and was like wtf is this, first time I had to deal with a system set up in what the older techs apparently refer to as "muppet mode".
I get that it's meant for plug-in-and-forget systems, but these guys actually had Auto Attendants and stuff set up on it, which, ugh, compared to how it works with an Essential Edition license is such a huge pain in the rear end to work through if you're not familiar with Basic mode.

Dirt Road Junglist posted:

I used to be a certified Avaya IP Office technician Good times.

D. Ebdrup posted:

You've never had the pleasure of sendmail configuration files, eh?

EDIT: For anyone who hasn't had the pleasure - the readme file for sendmail.cf, which is just one of a handful of files that'll need configuration, is almost 5000 lines long.
Then there are the sub-categories for features, mailer macros, per-domain configuration, ostype configuration (which helpfully mentions 4.3BSD, SunOS 1, and others), and one helpfully called 'hack' - all of these are in their own directory.
A big sendmail configuration can easily be 100k lines of config - unfortunately for me, I have intimate knowledge of it (you could almost say carnal, since I've been hosed by it).

Contrast that with delivermail (which Eric Allman wrote before sendmail), which on 4.xBSD would deliver via ftp over NCP on ARPANET and basically just required a hosts file (because nobody had thought to invent DNS yet).

Entropic posted:

I actually like working with Essential Edition IPO systems if they're properly configured.

I think the biggest problem with IPO and VMPro is that there's a ton of different ways you can do the equivalent of writing undocumented spaghetti code, and trying to work out the call flow on a system someone else who only half-knew what they were doing programmed 10 years ago can be an Adventure. The things I've seen people do with dummy users, unconditional forwards and short codes...

Entropic posted:

Just a couple weeks ago I saw an IP Office system where whoever initially programmed it had evidently decided that the built-in address book / directory system was too cumbersome, so they manually programmed 200 short codes for speed dials and had printed out lists for the users to reference.

Entropic posted:

IP Office ..... "muppet mode"....

Dirt Road Junglist posted:

Oh yeah, I had all kinds of fancy work-arounds for call flows. Fortunately, we didn't have a lot of fancy routing to deal with, but we did have a horrible relationship with our telecom that ended up causing me a lot of stress.

The best part was that the company wanted to save money when we upgraded from a Merlin Magix 1.0 to an IP Office setup with a base unit in one office and hubs in two others, geographically separated by 2-5 hours worth of driving. I budgeted for a system with redundancy built in, but management balked and made me re-spec down to something with a single point of failure.

True to form, it died one winter. Our TAM overnighted us a replacement part. It took 3 days to arrive, during which we had exactly one working phone in each office. I forget exactly how much revenue it's projected we lost due to communication failures, but it was way more than the ten grand I needed for a backup main-brain for the phones.

stevewm posted:

We use IPO500 systems with Avaya 1416 phones in "muppet"/basic mode at most of our store locations. They are very cheap, super easy to config (we basically use the stock config), and just always work.
This is mostly because our phone needs at our store locations are much more basic than at our corp office. And secondly because it's a drop in replacement for the older analog systems. Existing wiring and jacks can be reused...

Entropic posted:

We recently had a site be down for a week while we got a replacement 30-port digital IPO expansion module shipped out to them because they hadn't wanted to pay to have any spares on-site.
Same-day shipping is not a thing in Moose Factory

Ganon posted:

Phones seem pretty interesting. We have hosted voip at our offices with a nice website to configure them and then just plug them into the network, so no exposure to how they really work. But the old systems are still in the closets, big beige boxes mounted on the wall next to old messy phone wiring. Wouldn't even know how to start with those if I had to, not even the 66 blocks.

When does it make sense to use on-prem phone systems vs. hosted?

Ganon posted:

Phones seem pretty interesting. We have hosted voip at our offices with a nice website to configure them and then just plug them into the network, so no exposure to how they really work. But the old systems are still in the closets, big beige boxes mounted on the wall next to old messy phone wiring. Wouldn't even know how to start with those if I had to, not even the 66 blocks.

When does it make sense to use on-prem phone systems vs. hosted?

Entropic posted:

and VOIP still has a reputation of being unreliable and having quality of service issues. Which it definitely still can, depending on your internet service.

spankmeister posted:

Which is why you should just use postfix

bell jar posted:

I don't know if this helps anyone here but out of habit from my webhosting support background I just install ConfigServer Security & Firewall which is free, and basically set & forget. Firewall and repeated login attempt denier with all the necessary ports configured already is just

Ganon posted:

Phones seem pretty interesting. We have hosted voip at our offices with a nice website to configure them and then just plug them into the network, so no exposure to how they really work. But the old systems are still in the closets, big beige boxes mounted on the wall next to old messy phone wiring. Wouldn't even know how to start with those if I had to, not even the 66 blocks.

The Fool posted:

I would like to introduce you to my current nemesis: conference rooms

Ganon posted:

But the old systems are still in the closets, big beige boxes mounted on the wall next to old messy phone wiring. Wouldn't even know how to start with those if I had to, not even the 66 blocks.

Thanks Ants posted:

quote:

When does it make sense to use on-prem phone systems vs. hosted?

Thanks Ants posted:

Thanks Ants posted:

Dirt Road Junglist posted:

Oh, so that's how this happened.

Agrikk posted:

During the dot com crash, I was working at a firm in the process of going bankrupt. One of the last days there, we got to let in a salvage company to our data center.

They came in with saws-alls with diamond blades and bzzzzzz across the top of the racks chopping through years of work in minutes. Like a hot knife through butter.

Satisfying and heartbreaking at the same time.

MF_James posted:

Carbon/carbide tipped blades are awesome, though I'm mildly surprised they used those on metal racks, they have specific blades made for cutting through metal; they might have been slower, but they are a lot less expensive.

I am not a huge fan of using saws-alls to do large metal/concrete cuts though, the blades warp really quickly; I guess a gas saw wouldn't be preferable since you're cutting sideways and they don't much like running without getting gas flow.

stevewm posted:

We bought and took over a building that previously housed a competitor that had went bankrupt. The building was only a year old at that point and had been fully wired with 4 network jacks to every wall. But the telecom closet looked just like that.. They had cut everything off nearly flush with the ceiling when all the equipment was ripped out.

So we ended up having to rewire the entire building. It was probably for the best though.. The old wiring had been stapled to the studs every about 4 inches, slightly crushing the wire with every staple.

larchesdanrew posted:

I found out who it was

after the principal emailed me (with the director CC'd) fussing that I had not taken care of this issue yet.