I took the plunge this year and ended up buying a 22" Samsung smart tv for the bedroom, to my enjoyment it has been by far my most enjoyable purchase this year.
To use with Vortexbox which acts as a DLNA server to stream movies and music to the Samsung smart TV, all you have to do is connect the tv to your network either via cable or WiFi. For my setup i used WiFi and have experienced no problems at all.
The Vortexbox is an old acer revo which i had kicking around with a 500GB hard drive, again to load Vortexbox is very simple.
When you have the Samsung Smart TV Networked and also the Vortexbox, no configuration is needed simply go to the menu option for recorded TV and you Vortexbox will show up as media server.
You can then stream any movies or music that you have stored on your Vortexbox Dlna server.
The LG smart sound bar works with a very similar approach once you in the home menu your Vortexbox will show up as an option again it will be called media server, you can call the DLNA server anything you wish by logging into the Vortexbox settings and there is an option to name your DLNA service.
The great advantage for me of purchasing the LG Smart Sound Bar was that my 32 inch Samsung TV in my living room was not a smart TV, by adding the LG Smart Sound Bar to it not only gave me grat sound for my Freeview TV channels via an optical cable, it also adds smart functions from the Smart Sound Bar, giving me apps like netflix and BBC iplayer. Again i can stream movies and also music from Vortexbox too.
Another twist is you can setup Bluetooth from your smart phone or tablet PC, i use an Iphone and i can stream music from that to.
On Both the sound bar and smart TV i have spotify which i have a premium account for.
Please check out my video for my Samsung smart TV review
Also my LG Smart Sound Bar Review
Saturday 30 November 2013
Friday 8 November 2013
Panasonic NCP500 VPN testing one way audio sip
Panasonic NCP500 VPN testing work in progress
Having issues on one way audio using a pptp VPN to Panasonic NCP500
Using a Mikrotik router with pptp server.
Cannot get audio from the network to the end user from any of the extensions.
Using two adsl lines bonded by sharedband with all ports transparently sent to the router from sharedband.
Same VPN works on freepbx server on network with no issues.
Tried installing DD-WRT router with pptp server calls are succesful and no one way audio issue.
Then on DD-WRT turn of force encryption back to one way audio again.
Next to try on Mikrotik is enforce encryption to see if this is the issue
Have try disabling service ports on the firewall which made no difference, i am thinking more likely the encryption, because the DD-WRT works out of the box so to speak.
Will test some more with encryption settings.
Update
Seems to be a problem with mikotik on sharedband service
there are two cards on the ncp500 one for sip traffic and ip phones
thesecond card handles the rtp traffic
This i believe is where the problem is, testing on asterisk there is only one ip address for all protocols
with the panasonic there is 2
the rtp traffic is unable to work over the mikrotik vpn
testing a site to site vpn still have problem with one way audio from remote phone over external calls.
Have programmed a staic route from Mikrotik back to router B on site to site but not getting accross the lan.
The Voip DSP card is the problem
Though now testing sip accross site to site it seems very unstable, so will have to avoid site to site on this particular connection as think sharedband is not handling the vpn very well
Having issues on one way audio using a pptp VPN to Panasonic NCP500
Using a Mikrotik router with pptp server.
Cannot get audio from the network to the end user from any of the extensions.
Using two adsl lines bonded by sharedband with all ports transparently sent to the router from sharedband.
Same VPN works on freepbx server on network with no issues.
Tried installing DD-WRT router with pptp server calls are succesful and no one way audio issue.
Then on DD-WRT turn of force encryption back to one way audio again.
Next to try on Mikrotik is enforce encryption to see if this is the issue
Have try disabling service ports on the firewall which made no difference, i am thinking more likely the encryption, because the DD-WRT works out of the box so to speak.
Will test some more with encryption settings.
Update
Seems to be a problem with mikotik on sharedband service
there are two cards on the ncp500 one for sip traffic and ip phones
thesecond card handles the rtp traffic
This i believe is where the problem is, testing on asterisk there is only one ip address for all protocols
with the panasonic there is 2
the rtp traffic is unable to work over the mikrotik vpn
testing a site to site vpn still have problem with one way audio from remote phone over external calls.
Have programmed a staic route from Mikrotik back to router B on site to site but not getting accross the lan.
The Voip DSP card is the problem
Though now testing sip accross site to site it seems very unstable, so will have to avoid site to site on this particular connection as think sharedband is not handling the vpn very well
Sunday 3 November 2013
BT Openreach have become a disgrace
Another rant
I recently took on a job for a customer in the rural area of the Cotswolds.Their complaint was that their broadband had become unusable.
I checked the router and when it did sync it felt like dial up speeds.
So i began the usual checks of the internal wiring of the telephone wiring.
I also when to the neighbours who live 20 yards away, with a quick test on speedtest.net i could see they were getting a steady 1 meg/
Sure enough it was not suitable and felt that a re wire from outside with a new cable may help the situation, so i called in a local Cotswolds Telephone Engineer
A new cable was ran still no sync, unfortunately they were with AOL so i insisted that we move them to my Entanet as i am a partner which makes support very quick and easy rather than hours of calls to AOL.
Openreach were then duly called out.
1st appointment:
Faint beeping on the line: Openreach engineer seemed to think that as we had left the faceplate cover off that would fix it, actually we left the faceplate off so the extensions in the house were not on to help the broadband if a fault was found, he left not actually checking the phone, the phone still had faint beeping (crosstalk).
2nd appointment:
Engineer tested line went to the cabinet about 1.2 miles away, said 5 meg speed there. He went to the exchange did a lift and shift on the port in the exchange, phoned us to say it may settle. Still no sync.
3rd appointment:
This time a openreach coach turned up with a another engineer, these guys gave me hope, again i explained that we had ran new wire, so they tested the line found it was touching dead wire which explained the crosstalk, but they then revealed the real reason broadband was poor. Aluminium lines in the ground, this was something that was laid in the seventies and eighties as a cheap alternative to copper, fair enough broadband did not exist then but now it causes major problems. They began to test every spare pair but the light ran out and they left a note for the next engineer.
4th appointment:
Notes from last visit were ignored, openreach engineer suggested putting the line on 1/2 meg fixed rate line, which i sorted with enatnet for the next morning.
Next morning still no line sync and a note to Entanet from BT that they cannot deliver broadband due to length of line. Blaming the fact that there are to many broadband connections going into the village.
My complaint here
a: I had to tell each enginner from openreach what the last one did as they dont and cant see notes form last engineer visit.
b: They did not test all pairs in the ground.
c: Aluminium needs ripping out replacing with copper, to lose 5 meg in 1.2 miles is disgraceful.
d: when FTTC (Fiber to the cabinet) comes the villagers will still not get anything because of poor lines.
e: openreach engineers are poorly trained and do not have enough time to repair what needs repairing.
f: BT openreach and BT Wholesale are to concentrated on saving money, not reinvesting where lines need it.
g: No contact can be made with openreach, they can hide behind a invisible wall, the only way something could happen now is if we write a letter to our local MP to explain the problem, as they can communicate with openreach, the local MP for this rural area happens to be David Cameron whether this is a good thing or bad i dont know.
Shame on you BT openreach i really hope that 4G will answer rural communities problems and people cancel their problem riddled telephone lines and replace with a reliable 4G connection.
Openreach should not exist in my opinion and should be broken down into smaller localised companies who understand the local problem with the BT lines.
I would love to here your comments about your problems with the poor service BT openreach have given you.
I recently took on a job for a customer in the rural area of the Cotswolds.Their complaint was that their broadband had become unusable.
I checked the router and when it did sync it felt like dial up speeds.
So i began the usual checks of the internal wiring of the telephone wiring.
I also when to the neighbours who live 20 yards away, with a quick test on speedtest.net i could see they were getting a steady 1 meg/
Sure enough it was not suitable and felt that a re wire from outside with a new cable may help the situation, so i called in a local Cotswolds Telephone Engineer
A new cable was ran still no sync, unfortunately they were with AOL so i insisted that we move them to my Entanet as i am a partner which makes support very quick and easy rather than hours of calls to AOL.
Openreach were then duly called out.
1st appointment:
Faint beeping on the line: Openreach engineer seemed to think that as we had left the faceplate cover off that would fix it, actually we left the faceplate off so the extensions in the house were not on to help the broadband if a fault was found, he left not actually checking the phone, the phone still had faint beeping (crosstalk).
2nd appointment:
Engineer tested line went to the cabinet about 1.2 miles away, said 5 meg speed there. He went to the exchange did a lift and shift on the port in the exchange, phoned us to say it may settle. Still no sync.
3rd appointment:
This time a openreach coach turned up with a another engineer, these guys gave me hope, again i explained that we had ran new wire, so they tested the line found it was touching dead wire which explained the crosstalk, but they then revealed the real reason broadband was poor. Aluminium lines in the ground, this was something that was laid in the seventies and eighties as a cheap alternative to copper, fair enough broadband did not exist then but now it causes major problems. They began to test every spare pair but the light ran out and they left a note for the next engineer.
4th appointment:
Notes from last visit were ignored, openreach engineer suggested putting the line on 1/2 meg fixed rate line, which i sorted with enatnet for the next morning.
Next morning still no line sync and a note to Entanet from BT that they cannot deliver broadband due to length of line. Blaming the fact that there are to many broadband connections going into the village.
My complaint here
a: I had to tell each enginner from openreach what the last one did as they dont and cant see notes form last engineer visit.
b: They did not test all pairs in the ground.
c: Aluminium needs ripping out replacing with copper, to lose 5 meg in 1.2 miles is disgraceful.
d: when FTTC (Fiber to the cabinet) comes the villagers will still not get anything because of poor lines.
e: openreach engineers are poorly trained and do not have enough time to repair what needs repairing.
f: BT openreach and BT Wholesale are to concentrated on saving money, not reinvesting where lines need it.
g: No contact can be made with openreach, they can hide behind a invisible wall, the only way something could happen now is if we write a letter to our local MP to explain the problem, as they can communicate with openreach, the local MP for this rural area happens to be David Cameron whether this is a good thing or bad i dont know.
Shame on you BT openreach i really hope that 4G will answer rural communities problems and people cancel their problem riddled telephone lines and replace with a reliable 4G connection.
Openreach should not exist in my opinion and should be broken down into smaller localised companies who understand the local problem with the BT lines.
I would love to here your comments about your problems with the poor service BT openreach have given you.
Saturday 19 October 2013
My Build of Raspbx, asterisk and freepbx on the Raspberry Pi
I just received my Raspberry Pi kit which i bought from amazon
I am buliding an asterisk pbx systems on to it, the Raspberry Pi is a revision 2 512mb Ram.
Having read up before i build the system raspbx comes with i hope the fail2ban service, which i will find out as i write this post.
My Main intention for this is simply to make it into a voicemail server as an addon for a panasonic pabx which has the sip utility.
Although is should be fine for VoIP calls.
The First thing i need to do is download the raspbx image from here
I then need to write the image onto the sd card, which has come with Noobs pre installed, i am going to overwrite this.
My PC is ubuntu so to write the image i am following this video from YouTube, this particular channel the guy is great to follow for all sorts of howto's on ubuntu, this video is explaining howto write the raspberry pi image but i'm going to try writing raspbx instead.
Opened the disk utility and unmounted, now to do the dd write commad
my sd card is /dev/sdb1.
I have download my image to Desktop and created a folder call raspbx which i am going to extract the image in.
Opening a terminal i am going to change directory #cd Desktop/raspbx/raspbx-12-08-2013/
I am now in the folder with the image next the write command
# sudo dd bs=4M if=raspbx-12-08-2013.img of=/dev/sdb
press enter and type password this can now take a few minutes.
My SD Card Is 8GB so the initial image is 4GB and i will be looking to extend the space to 8Gb later.
Its Now built 2 minute job
Plugged in watching a boot screen could see on the boot up it has an ip of 192.168.0.122, that may help in a bit.
Logging in from ssh in ubuntu is going to be
ssh root@192.168.0.122 for me user root password = raspberry to start
Now presented with this terminal screen
At this stage is have typed raspi-config which now presents this screen
I selected expand_rootfs and now it has asked to reboot lets do it finish and then select reboot.
Thats killed my install so going to start process again,
This time to extend the partition i am going to plug the SD Card back into my pc and use gparted. No im not
Update the raspberry pi from the raspi-config, do all the updates now works fine.
Thats it my raspbx is now running configured with voicemail
just follow the official website for raspbx for any other info.
Buy your own raspberry pi kit the same as i bought here
Interested in a raspbx for your telephone systems call Union Telecom for further info for business telephones systems in the UK
Check out my video on youtube for the raspbx asterisk freepbx voicemail server.
Tuesday 8 October 2013
Google has become boring and safe.
A long time ago before Google was the main search engine, life was so fun using multiple search engines to try and find the answer to an internet query. All these search engines then started to disappear as we all hopped on the google bandwagon.
For a while google was fun serving up interesting results, websites that you never had seen before and finding new business enterprises selling interesting products or products that you had never seen before.
Then came the Google panda and penguin updates, what a bore.
Have you ever noticed recently that everytime you search for products that its the same old same ole being presented on the 1st page of results. Go on i dare you go to page 2 on google, well nobody ever does.
No matter what you are searching for it s the same, a product? Amazon then Tesco then bla bla bla, a Holdiday? well TripAdvisor of course the so called experts with millions of followers with grudges to bare because low and behold we dont give perfect service to every customer, we are after all only human.
Then you will see a wiki page in every top ten results, even when searching for maybe a specialist product, there it is the most inaccurate Wiki result with a paragraph of rubbish.
Google it seems is now playing safe with high street brands and large online stores like Amazon or Ebay.
Am i forced to use it well of course not but there is no alternative, Bing at a push yes maybe i will give it a chance but Microsoft hardly known for their own success recently does not gain my confidence.
Please Please Apple make yourself known on the search engine front. you have a captive audience with your own products, bring us competition, after all a search engine monopoly is just not good.
Google please return some of the old value of promoting unheard of small businesses, i hate the big brands dominating life.
There must be a way to do it, after all any old Joe Smoe could serve up results like you are thats not intelligent thats playing safe.
Well that’s my rant over, this of course will never be read by anyone as this page will just dwindle into the black hole of the internet to age over time.
Ps a note to Goolge
Maybe try an algorithm that actually looks at the speciality of the website, takes into consideration the personal touch of the website owner that a big business does not offer.
EG yes large companies with support not local to us here in blighty who actually are interested in profit only and not customer service which is the bedrock of any small business.
I dare you Google support the small business man!!!!!
For a while google was fun serving up interesting results, websites that you never had seen before and finding new business enterprises selling interesting products or products that you had never seen before.
Then came the Google panda and penguin updates, what a bore.
Have you ever noticed recently that everytime you search for products that its the same old same ole being presented on the 1st page of results. Go on i dare you go to page 2 on google, well nobody ever does.
No matter what you are searching for it s the same, a product? Amazon then Tesco then bla bla bla, a Holdiday? well TripAdvisor of course the so called experts with millions of followers with grudges to bare because low and behold we dont give perfect service to every customer, we are after all only human.
Then you will see a wiki page in every top ten results, even when searching for maybe a specialist product, there it is the most inaccurate Wiki result with a paragraph of rubbish.
Google it seems is now playing safe with high street brands and large online stores like Amazon or Ebay.
Am i forced to use it well of course not but there is no alternative, Bing at a push yes maybe i will give it a chance but Microsoft hardly known for their own success recently does not gain my confidence.
Please Please Apple make yourself known on the search engine front. you have a captive audience with your own products, bring us competition, after all a search engine monopoly is just not good.
Google please return some of the old value of promoting unheard of small businesses, i hate the big brands dominating life.
There must be a way to do it, after all any old Joe Smoe could serve up results like you are thats not intelligent thats playing safe.
Well that’s my rant over, this of course will never be read by anyone as this page will just dwindle into the black hole of the internet to age over time.
Ps a note to Goolge
Maybe try an algorithm that actually looks at the speciality of the website, takes into consideration the personal touch of the website owner that a big business does not offer.
EG yes large companies with support not local to us here in blighty who actually are interested in profit only and not customer service which is the bedrock of any small business.
I dare you Google support the small business man!!!!!
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