andrew's blog

It’s been a while since we did a CE certification training so I decided to do one in conjunction with ITexpo that is coming to LA in October. That way you can see the show as well as get the training. I recruited Kerry Garrison the former trixbox CE community directory to teach the class. With his experience as a trixbox installer and writing the trixbox book he has quite a bit of experience on the subject.

I’ll be out there to meet everybody and there will be lot’s of free goodies included such as a Yealink Phone. So sign up early to get the best rate.

I was reading a forum post yesterday that started out talking about the future of trixbox and ended up with the pros and cons of cloud computing. Cloud computing for anybody that has been under a rock is the idea that you run software hosted in a data center instead of on your own servers. You pay for the software on a monthly basis instead of a one time cost.

Although there has been a lot in the media about cloud computing the idea is far from new. A few years ago it was call SAAS and it has had other names before that. Like many things in technology it seems that when the tech magazines run out of things to talk about they rename an older technology so they can say the same stuff about it that they did 3 or 4 years ago. If fact if you were into computers in the 70s and 80s you probably remember the main frame. With a main frame you have a green terminal and you used to connect to a big computer in some unknown data center to do you work. There were even virtual machines inside the main frame that ran your processes (and you though VMs were invented by VMware). So you can see Cloud Computing has been around for quite a while even if it was called something different.

Banking and finical transactions have been done in "the cloud" for decades. Have you even gone into a bank and said “I would like to see the computer with my $20,000 savings account on it”, No you just assume that your money is safe. In fact I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in first bank. I imagine the conversation went something like this.

Customer: "So let me get this straight, I give you my money, and you put it in a strong safe, and I can come and see it whenever I want?"

Bank teller: "No we give your money to other people but we write how much you gave us in this little book. When you ask for your money back we take somebody else’s money and give it to you"

Customer : "Yeah, Right I’m going to bury the money in an urn in the back yard like my father did. That way I can always see my money and know that I still have it"

It took years for people to trust banks with their money but now we don’t even think about it. Cloud computer is here to stay and more and more things will be done in the cloud. Google and even Microsoft online have shown us the amazing idea that documents, spread sheets, and email can be done in the cloud (Although all this we being done on main frames in the 70s) There will be technical hurdles such as support to be tackled but most will be resolved over time.

In most cases running services in the cloud is safer and more reliable then on a local machine. Imagine if you stored your bank account of a local PC in your house and your house burns down. You lose your house and your account. People have an idea that if they can see something they can protect it better. But in the case of computing this is not always true.

People who have been selling traditional products sometimes have a hard time thinking about switching to selling cloud services. For example if you sell a 30 seat phone system for $12,000 you could make $3000 or more. That’s a nice paycheck. But if you join an affiliate network and resell a cloud based system such as Fonality Connect you will make maybe 5 dollars per seat per month. That $150 in your first month. Who want to install a phone system for $150? But remember that $150 a month forever… Sell 20 more systems and your up to $3000 per month. You can go on vacation for a month and still make $3000. Hmmm interesting.

Cloud computing has been with us for a long time and is here to stay. What it will be called in the future only the tech writes know.

Some users have mentioned that trixbox.org is slow particularity when accessed from countries other then the United States. trixbox.org is currently hosted from the Fonality data center in southern California.

Later this week we are going to move trixbox.org to a network of world wide caching servers. Fonality recently moved the rest of their web sites to this service and it resulted a massive speed increase in many parts of the world. This will also make trixbox.org more resilient to network failures.

A side effect of this is trixbox.org will be moved to fonality.com/trixbox. We will put a redirect at trixbox.org so it won't mess up any bookmarks you have. This does not change the status of trixbox in any way. trixbox is still an open source community project hosted by Fonality.

I hope this will make trixbox.org easier for our growing world wide user base to use.

We released trixbox 2.8.0.4 today. New features include

* CentOS 5.5
* Asterisk 1.6.0.26
* DAHDI 2.3.0.1

I would like to thank the community for all their help with features and testing.

I just posted another 2.8.0.4 ISO. All the major bugs should be resolved. There are a few problems with some of the add-ons like flite but all the core stuff should be working.