Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries

I just checked in to see search queries listed from my Google Webmaster Tools account for my local website cotswoldpc.com

interestingly these search results have been thrown up

  Query                                Impressions clicks  ctr     avg.position
    seo moreton-in-marsh     106              0     0%     36
    seo stow-on-the-wold       93               0     0%     18
    seo chipping campden     47               0     0%     43
    seo chipping norton        27                0     0%     42

Now i know the amount of impression here are slightly false, i cannot believe there is this volume of search for these keywords, i have popped on to the google adwords account and cannot see any search volume to be found for those types of keywords.

I suspect some kind of foul play here.

To anyone researching for an SEO expert i would strongly advise seeking more than one professional opinion on SEO for your company.

SEO done badly can and will lower ranking for your website, be very careful when opting for an SEO expert. Find examples of their work, google their own name and company to see if you can find a trail of bad practice.

SEO should be thought of as part of a whole package.

The basic rules of successful website SEO

• Decide upon a strategy of what suits your business.
• Create a brand and logo that clients and users will recognise and want to come back to, to revisit you time and time again.
• Create a trust factor that again users and clients will be confident in coming back to you.
• Design your website to a high standard, make sure that your website is mobile friendly too for users with smart phones.
• Consider using social networks in a way that will interest your users in either communicating directly with you or by finding information from your website.
• Market your websites via social networks, blogs and paper adverts

 The rest of the myths that you may get told can be very damming to your business in the long run

SEO Mythbusters

• Building a campaign purely around back-links will harm your website, back-links should be natural, your website should be inspiring enough for other websites to create a link to your website.
• Making statements on social network sites like "what a beautiful day" just to fill space will not enthuse anyone to view your website.
• Do not let companies run social campaigns for you, they simply will not understand your clientèle. 

How to be successful and rank high in the search engines?

It is actually very simple, just forget about them. Concentrate on what is important to you - your customers!!!!!!!

When they are happy the rest will follow.

Can i get Fibre Broadband? If not? Why not?

This last 6 months i have had to learn an awful lot about the reasons behind which BT cabinets are being enabled for FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet).

Living in the Cotswolds has proved to be an interesting learning curb about the problems that are faced in making your nearby cabinet enabled for fibre broadband.

What is fibre broadband and how does it work?

Many of my customers do not understand the basics of how will being superfast broadband to your house.

Simply put a fibre optic cable has to be linked to a new larger fibre cabinet near to the original cabinet where your existing copper line is routed to.

Your existing copper lines then carry the new superfast broadband to your house, using a new type of router (Vdsl) to connect to the new fibre service.

The fibre can either be connected to a phone exchange or a main route of fibre cable nearby that BT own. Many main roads have had fibre cabling in them for years and this can mean that if your village or town has easy access to the road it will be cheaper to connect to that using splicing equipment than link to the main phone exchange.

Why is my cabinet not being enabled with fibre?

This can be quite annoying when you find out that your cabinet is not getting fibre broadband. These are reasons that i found out so far.

In the Cotswolds all projects are council funded with the BDUK scheme.

They may see that there are just not enough clients on the cabinet and it is not worth doing.

The cabinet could be just to old and not enough expansion capacity therefore proving to expensive to upgrade.

There is no easy route for fibre to get there with no ducting underground etc.

I have been told i have an exchange only line and wont get superfast broadband what does that mean?

If you have an exchange only line (eol) that means there is no cabinet for your phone line, it links straight to the telephone exchange. This means in council funded projects that you have to hope they are going to cater for exchange only lines and will put in an cabinet near to the exchange.

We are not getting funding from the council we wont get superfat broadband?

If you have exhausted all avenues and there will be no funding for your area, dont give up, maybe residents in your area share the same interest and you can raise enough finances to contact the BT private funding dept. They have the ability to install FTTC funded directly by you.

My neighbours get superfast fibre broadband why cant i get it?

They can be on a different cabinet to you, their cabinet may be enabled and yours is not. Enter your phone number into this line checker to find out if you are on a cabinet, which cabinet number or if you are an exchnage only line.

 http://dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.TelephoneNumberOutput

I am to far away from the cabinet to get FTTC?

Alas you will have to wait for technology to get better over a longer distance.
Fibre seems to work safely about 1500 meters to maybe 2000 meters after that it fades away.

I cant find information about my area for fibre broadband?

If you are not happy with what your local council or fibre broadband info website, then just email the council, they will have all the cabinets listed and a rough time of how long before they get enabled.

I spent many weeks tweeting my local fastershire website and i was not happy with the answers they gave, they always seem to just say refer to the website, you can check on the BT when and where website too. I found the answers directly from the council were a lot more informative.

http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/

Good luck to all with their hopes of having superfast FTTC broadband.

SSl Certificate error in latest chrome problem

I thought it would be a good idea, to post a few notes of the current problem we are experiencing with the latest chrome browser error we are getting using our updated ssl cert purchased from rapidssl.

With our updated ssl certificate purchased from rapidssl for another 2 years, our green padlock disappeared from chrome replaced by the warning message instead.

We installed the certificates as usual and tested on all other major browsers, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. The result in those browsers was the normal padlock secure connection.

Why in chrome was it not working? I contacted rapidssl support via their chat, upon testing the certificate initial tests showed nothing wrong.

They thought it may be my own browser i am using
Version 39.0.2171.71 (64-bit)

We left the error with them and they have emailed back with this reply as of Monday the 1st December 2014.

"The course of the error is domain Vetted SSL certificates. The only certificate type that will not come up with that Error message are EV certificates.

This is Chrome pushing this.

http://www.certificate-transparency.org/

http://www.trustico.com/news/ct/chrome-certificate-transparancy-plan.php

The choice going forward will be that everyone will need to have an EV certificate or have that error message in Chrome.

There is nothing wrong with the certificate itself and the connection is secure and Trustico as stated in Chrome. Just that it gives more information to the customer about the connection now."

and a follow up reply to to my reply

"At the moment just leave it with me in regards to the upgrade and I will certainly let you know the procedure. We are waiting for more information from Chrome and Symantec on the issue before we start forcing customers to upgrade to the EV certificates."

For the moment we are having to wait on the solution i will post as soon as we get a reply, hopefully this may help with anyone else suffering the same fate .

Not all chrome browsers will be displaying this error just the very latest chrome updated versions.

A Further thought has just occurred to me looking at the bigger picture,  Google have in 2014 stated that using https or a ssl website will have a ranking boost for a website.

The question that has gone unanswered is to what level of security would benefit?

Is this the first indication that a website using EV ssl (Extended Validation Certificate) will gain higer ranking and trust than those that do not?

An EV Certificate is where you will actually have your certificate verified by phone confirming your address and company name etc.

This does feel like it is an opportunity for Google to start streamlining out a business owner who are not serious about their website, thus demoting their website easily, compared to someone that is prepared to go the "whole hog".

It is an easy algorithm for them, a verified website paid for by the owner, a "we are who we say we are" algorithm.

Quote from chrome
"HTTPS sites whose certificate chains use SHA-1 and are valid past 1 January 2017 will no longer appear to be fully trustworthy in Chrome’s user interface."

*2015 update*
Latest chrome is now displaying a green padlock will keep an eye on it over coming months, not sure if it has been fixed by chrome or rapidssl

Outlook 2013 empty address book after contacts csv import

Found an unusual problem with outlook 2013.

I had to export contacts from windows live mail in a csv file (comma seperated values).
After importing to outlook 2013 contacts (people folder) the address book was empty.

Tried all suggested methods out there including creating a new profile etc
Also tried using contacts as address book was ticked, still no joy.

Phoned microsoft and found out that importing csv in 64bit outlook on windows 7 will not work only in windows 8, so downloaded 32 bit version of outlook 2013.

Then after the import still no email addresses had gone over to contacts.

So redid it and had to map custom fields

Making sure by dragging from left hand side to right hand side of custom fields box that, name goes to name, first name to first name, middle name to middle name, last name to last name and email address to email address, all then works fine and the contacts now populates with email addresses.

I suspect that Microsoft have change field mapping for csv files in outlook 2013 so that it no longer matches the colums/fields of older csv exports.

Please make sure that when you export contacts as a csv file that you tick first name middle name and last name if you use all these fileds so that you can match them on your import.

Hope this helps somebody, wasted hours on this.

Panasonic ncp500 asterisk sip trunk no audio issue

Just a simple note to myself for the next time i forget, the dsp card, must be given an ip on the same network as panasonic.
In my scenario the ncp500 has a network address of 192.168.17.101
the dsp card should be 192.168.17.102, this will enable the codecs on the same network.

The setting then if a sip extension is setup on the ncp500 for example 404 on the asterisk piaf is as follows

incoming
username=404
type=peer
secret=404
qualify=yes
port=5060
nat=no
insecure=very
host=192.168.17.101
fromuser=403
dtmfmode=rfc2833
dtmf=rfc2833
allow=ulaw
disallow=all
context=from-trunk
canreinvite=no
maxexpiry=3600

outgoing

type=user
secret=404
allow=ulaw
disallow=all
context=from-trunk

then on inbound route for that trunk set
Pause Before Answer to the amount of time to ring before voicemail cuts in eg 17 seconds, about 3-4 rings

Freepbx - Asterisk multiline pstn same number setup

I had to setup a multiline on a asterisk PBX the other day for the 1st time, the VoIP was so bad because of the poor broadband, we decided to opt for the multiline pstn option.

I could not really find much on the internet with any help to setup.

So i installed my new fxo card to sit alongside the other that i already had.

The Important settings.

You have to create two Dahdi  trunks - call them say Mulitiline1 and multiline2

My setup in the PBX was actually for 3 pstn dahdi lines incoming and i had 1 fxs card.

Line 1 FXO - Dahdi trunk = channel 1 (original spare bt number)
Line 2 FXO - Dahdi trunk = channel 2 (1st of the multiline channels)
Line 3 FXS - not used at the moment = channel 3
Line 4 FXO -- Dahdi trunk = channel 4 (2nd of the multiline channels)

On my setup it sends to the ivr then queues the calls to the two office phones.

Actually the owner wanted 3 options on the ivr, you may ask how do you know what the call is for if it rings the same two phones at the same time.

What i did was to make an announcement, for example if one is press by the caller for sales, the announcement  tells either phone sales and they then know what the call is for. Two is for enquiries and information etc etc

The first trunk should go through to the ivr, followed by the second which is automatically switched at the phone exchange.

The outgoing rules are very important  to make this work.

In your outbound route
where the section at the bottom for
Trunk sequence for Matched Routes is
add multiline1 then add multiline2 for your failover.

Finally back to the trunks edit your multiline1 and set max calls to 1
this then tells asterisk that the line is busy when in use and it drops through to multiline2.

Of course to keep the the multiline as free as possible, you may want to use another line for outbound calling or VoIP if your broadband is better than ours.
 

My new Electric Bike, Kudos Tornado e-bike review

Last Saturday - the 24the May, was a day i had really been looking forward to. After spending weeks of trawling for information on electric bikes or e-bikes as they are more adequately named, i had drawn a blank on what exactly to buy.

The terrain in the Cotswolds is extremely hilly, my local areas that i really need to get to may only be 4-5 miles away most of the time and some are actually quite flat to get too.

My need for and electric bike is quite simple, i can no longer drive as i have been diagnosed with macular degeneration and my eyesight no longer meets the visual fields requirements needed for the DVLA.

With an electric bike the simple requirement for not needing a licence is that it can go no faster than 15 mph either by throttle or pedal assist, well let me paste the gov.co.uk regs below

EAPC requirements

The requirements are:

• the bike must have pedals that can be used to propel it
• the electric motor shouldn’t be able to propel the bike when it’s travelling more than 15mph
• the bike (including its battery but not the rider) must not be heavier than 40 kilograms (kg) if it’s a bicycle, or 60kg if it’s a tandem or tricycle
• the motor shouldn’t have a maximum power output of more than 200 watts if it’s a bicycle and 250 watts if it’s a tandem or tricycle
• the bike must have a plate showing the manufacturer, the nominal voltage of the battery, and the motor’s power output.

 Ok thats out the way

I purchased a Kudos Tornado, it has a battery with the samsung cells in, which after research seemed a good idea.

The battery is cheap to replace from Kudos at £200, so thats another bonus.

The Kudos Tornado has 5 speed assist, at the moment because my level of fitness is very low i am using mainly assist level 5, heres the thing though, you have to remember that if you are descending a slight hill the battery cuts out at 15 mph and you can either carry on pedalling or roll, so the battery is not always being used.

I have made 2 journeys so far to the extent of what i want it for, both around 12 miles in total, each journey has used i would say 25% to 35% of the battery. Now if you had bought a throttle e-bike and was not pedalling this would easily use up more, for me the idea is to get fit as well as be able to get to places that i just could not with a normal bike.

The brakes are fantastic, just touch them and i am stopping like i request them to do.

Going up hills so far is not bad, because the tornado is very light, this leaves more power from the motor to help you with the assist you need.

I still have to get used to the saddle, i am sure this is just a bike thing that i am not used to.

Next test is to go a little further afield when i am a bit fitter.

How did i decide on the Kudos Tornado, well i did speak to a few places, i ended up speaking and then going to Fosse Electric Bikes, near Leicester who advised me on what the right e-bike would be right for what i needed it for.

At £1095 it has proven to be excellent value, so much that my fiancée now wants her e-bike, so time to put on our saving hats and get another.  

I will include Fosse Electric Bikes video review until i get my own done.


I will also add that so far my 6.2 mile return journey took 25 minutes and getting there took 30 minutes (slighty uphill) will post results of times as fitness level hopefully rise.

Keyword not provided or not defined google seo solved (sorta)

For ages i have been running Anaytics on websites, either using Google Analytics or Piwik.
Piwik is my preferred methos of measuring website traffic and stats as for me it has a much more friendly user interface.

The problem has occurred from Google that they hide keywords that land on your website when web users search Google.

Their policy has been to use https or ssl on Google searches, thus encrypting the data when searched so that analytics programs cant see them.

Bing do not do this and thus  you can see keywords searched on Bing.

The result is seeing a keyword not provided in Google analytics or Keyword not defined in piwk.

Now you should have a general idea what keywords are being searched to find your pages on your website, simply using the on page seo that you have titled and described your pages with.

The Key now is to use Google Webmaster Tools, this lets you see searches that are being made to find your website, although not as accurate as it appears, it does give you a very good clue to how people are finding your website.

Morally im not sure that this information should actually show on Webmaster tools either but at the moment it does, so make good use of it before Google pull the plug on this too.

What it wont do is show which pages the keywords are landing on, so you will have to assume which pages are associated with which keywords are being searched.

Feel free to watch my video on this subject

Making mailchimp archives value for seo, dofollow links

Well i sat on my pc the other day, and was looking at the mailchimp archives that have been created when we do our newsletters periodically throughout the year.

For our client we have been running a promotioonal offer on their website, of course we are trying to attain a high ranking on google for that offer.

So always as ever looking for a way to get good quality backlinks back to that offer page, as you probably already know Google have tightened down the hatches with it's latest algorithms, it will not have spam links but also now low quality backlinks are of no real value.

So how do i make real use of those mailchimp archives, after all they are web pages, or are they, when delving into the code i could see that the links that you have created in your newsletters did not have a nofollow attatched to them, i began to get excited.

This got my brain ticking but alas the actual archive page seems to be a noindex a complete noindex so the page will never show on search engines and then no link value.

More thinking required.

I have all these juicy newsletter articles with fresh content which is original with backlinks to offers and packages and i really want to utilise these.

Step two.

After having ignore feedburner for a while, google rss sydication service, i did notice that can create folder in mailchimp and create RSS feeds from each archive folder.

So over to feedburner and to pull in those feeds.

The big thing here, the way i see it is to turn off noindex in feedburner in the rss feed in the publicize settings. This way i am pulling in the whole newsletter with it's fresh content and i may add not written by me but by their marketing team.

You can see what i am trying achieve here with the dinner bed and breakfast deals we are promoting for the Inn in the Cotswolds.

Thats my feedburner feed that i want to index with Google, not sure if it actually will or not yet but one can hope.

Indications are that Google no longer index feedburner pages, so i may need to find somewhere else with high page rank that can display my mailchimp rss feeds.

Remember this is original content as it is not indexed anywhere else on the web, so it is worth a bash.

Any other ideas please comment, always welcome to suggestions.

Actually a very quick edit now trying freepress to see if that indexes, so changed the link in the content accordingly, now off to ping it.

Another update
A few days has passed and it looks like google does not index rss feeds at all, or avoids them as best as it can, so in the end , i am now using a wordpress plugin to pull in rss feeds, wp-o-matic, but still have to tidy it up some what afterwards, as it pulls a lot of garbage code in.

Please comment if you have had more success.

A busy Winter and Spring

Its been a rather hectic Winter and Spring working for the two delightful Inns that i am very lucky to have as clients. The Kings Head Inn in Bledington and The Swan Inn Swinbrook.

My role at these two pubs is to look after all their IT needs from tills to computers, broadband and WiFi.

One of my ideas some time ago was to implement a WiFi Hotspot at the Swan Inn. Access is free but the client has to input their email address to use the Free WiFi.
In aroud 18 month we have gained over 2,500 email addresses to add to the newsletter list. you can view my Mikrotik Hotspot setup article here.

We use can use emails from the accommodation booking system and customers who come to lunch and dinner, to send out promotions for current offers etc. We use mailchimp as our mailing list sender.

Traditionally of course as you would expect in the hotel sector, Trade is harder to come by in the Winter, especially accommodation. Summer we dont have to promote quite so much.

This Winter we all put our heads together after many years of just running discount accommodation, which we felt had come a little stale, this year we came up with dinner bed and breakfast deals. An all inclusive package deal including a 3 course dinner with accommodation. 

So far so good, a freshening up of the old guard as such. We sent out the first push on dinner bed and breakfast deals with the Kings Head Inn only, using mailchimp, response was good, so we then add the promotion to the website, which got received really well.

We now have introduced, after its success at the Kings Head Inn Bledington, dinner bed and breakfast offers at the Swan Inn, and although in its early stages, the offers again seem to have been received very well.

Although sometimes fighting with a computer trying to rid it of a virus, or removing Jammed paper from a printer, It can be great fun to be involved with the marketing and advertising, and the final reward is to see happy customers leaving for home with a big smile.

Vortexbox with my Samsung Smart TV and LG Smart Sound Bar

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

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

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.

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.

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!!!!!

Mikrotik routerboard rb750up as a switch

If like me you need to setup your rb750up as a switch, i have managed to bridge ports 1,2,3,4 so you can use port 1 as a poe power source and then use ports 2,3,4 to power your ubiquiti devices. Port 5 is only used for access to the router board with winbox etc. I have left the default dhcp on port 5 so you can access via 192.168.88.1 but port 5 is not bridged.

download the config Routerboard RB750UP switch config
just use winbox to connect to routerboard then drag the backup file to files in winbox, highlight and restore.

coova-chilli build on ubuntu

This is my install of coova-chilli on ubuntu 8.04 server
I already have a radius server with wireless orbit
so install ubuntu with no extras (ftp apache mysql) and setup the eth0 interface network
set up a user account as asked and password
once built
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
apt-get ssh
log into ssh with host username and port (22) and password
sudo wget http://ap.coova.org/chilli/coova-chilli_1.0.12-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i coova-chilli_1.0.12-1_i386.deb
sudo nano -w /etc/default/chilli
change
START_CHILLI=0
CONFFILE=”/etc/chilli.conf”
to
START_CHILLI=1
CONFFILE=”/etc/chilli.conf”
ctrl x – yes – enter
now at this point i have a chilli.conf already made with the lines
include /usr/local/etc/chilli/main.conf
include /usr/local/etc/chilli/hs.conf
include /usr/local/etc/chilli/local.conf
deleted
here is my chilli conf
________________________________________________________________________________
#
# Chilli Configuration
#
# To configure chilli, see /usr/local/etc/chilli/default
# and then create your own /usr/local/etc/chilli/config
# start / stop chilli with /chilli
#
# For help with coova-chilli,
# visit http://coova.org/wiki/index.php/CoovaChilli
#
# This file can either contain all your chilli configurations, or include
# other files, as shown per default below. The idea here is that main.conf
# contains your main configurations, hs.conf is for your configurations
# delivered by RADIUS (using the Administrative-User login), and local.conf

cmdsocket /usr/local/var/run/chilli.sock
pidfile /usr/local/var/run/chilli.pid
net 192.168.180.0/255.255.255.0
uamlisten 192.168.180.1
uamport 3990
dhcpif eth1
uamallowed 69.36.234.20,www.paypal.com,
www.wirelessorbit.com,paypal.112.207.net,www.paypalobjects.com,portal.wirelessorbit.com
uamanydns

domain lan
dns1 192.168.180.1
uamhomepage http://192.168.182.1:3990/www/coova.html
wisprlogin https://coova.org/app/uam/auth
wwwdir /etc/chilli/www
wwwbin /etc/chilli/wwwsh
locationname “HotSpot”
radiuslocationname HotSpot
radiuslocationid isocc=,cc=,ac=,network=Coova,
radiusserver1 69.36.234.20
radiusserver2 (leave blank for wireless orbit)
radiussecret *********
radiusauthport 1812
radiusacctport 1813
uamserver https://portal.wirelessorbit.com/portal/index.php?portal_id=**********,
radiusnasid nas01

papalwaysok
uamsecret *********

ipup=/etc/chilli/up.sh
ipdown=/etc/chilli/down.sh

___________________________________________________________________________

before i do anything with my chilli.conf i start chilli
sudo /etc/init.d/chilli start
then stop it again
sudo /etc/init.d/chilli stop
this writes the defaults
then i transfer with a ssh file transer window
i use ssh secure shell but winscp will do
transfer into /home/username
then
sudo cp chilli.conf /etc/chilli.conf
finally
sudo nano /etc/rc.local
add the line
iptables -I POSTROUTING -t nat -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
to turn on nat
ctrl +x answer y and enter
you might also want a second dns server for you wan eth0
i use opendns
so
sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf
nameservers 208.67.222.222
nameservers 208.67.220.220
ctrl +x answer y and enter
sudo reboot and if radius configured correctly you should have a coova redirect page
then your login page with your radius server
i also fiddle with the index.html in /etc/chilli/www to put a company logo and name for the small redirect page before it goes to the main login page

Freepbx PIAF Atcom AX-100P install

I decided to purchase an atcom ax-100p for my home pbx as it was only £20.00 on ebay.
I decided on using Pbx in a Flash or PIAF. I inserted the card before i built the PIAF system.
AFter installing PIAF i ran the suggested genzaptelconf command which recognised the card.

I now went about configuring parameters for the card. Upon my first attempt i was able to get it working on incoming calls but not for outgoing it was coming up with stange results for the ztcfg -vvvv command saying i had 100 channels to configure so i new something was wrong.
So i decided to run the genzaptelconf command with options -s -d -v this then reconfigured the card but still it had an extra span in the zaptel.conf so i deleted that section and also the extra in zapata-channels.conf so there was only 1 span.
Rebooted made sure the zap channels DIDs was created in freepbx, and that i had a freephone number to dial using zap/go
and i was able to use my zap card.

Heres my working confs

Zaptel.conf
# Autogenerated by /usr/local/sbin/genzaptelconf — do not hand edit
# Zaptel Configuration File
#
# This file is parsed by the Zaptel Configurator, ztcfg
#

# It must be in the module loading order

# Span 1: WCFXO/0 “Wildcard X100P Board 1″ (MASTER)
fxsks=1

# Global data

loadzone    = uk
defaultzone    = uk

Zapata.conf

;
; Zapata telephony interface
;
; Configuration file

[trunkgroups]

[channels]

language=en
context=from-zaptel
signalling=fxs_ks
rxwink=300        ; Atlas seems to use long (250ms) winks
;
; Whether or not to do distinctive ring detection on FXO lines
;
usedistinctiveringdetection=yes
cidsignalling=v23 ; Added for UK CLI detection
cidstart=polarity ; Added for UK CLI detection
;callerid=asreceived ; propagate the CID received from BT
usecallerid=yes
hidecallerid=no
callwaiting=yes
usecallingpres=yes
callwaitingcallerid=yes
threewaycalling=yes
transfer=yes
cancallforward=yes
callreturn=yes
echocancel=yes
echocancelwhenbridged=yes
echotraining=800
rxgain=6.0
txgain=4.0
group=0
callgroup=1
pickupgroup=1
immediate=no
;faxdetect=both
faxdetect=incoming
;faxdetect=outgoing
;faxdetect=no

;Include genzaptelconf configs
#include zapata-channels.conf

;Include AMP configs
#include zapata_additional.conf

Zapata-channels.conf

; Autogenerated by /usr/local/sbin/genzaptelconf — do not hand edit
; Zaptel Channels Configurations (zapata.conf)
;
; This is not intended to be a complete zapata.conf. Rather, it is intended
; to be #include-d by /etc/zapata.conf that will include the global settings
;

; Span 1: WCFXO/0 “Wildcard X100P Board 1″ (MASTER)
;;; line=”1 WCFXO/0/0 FXSKS (In use)”
signalling=fxs_ks
callerid=asreceived
group=0
context=from-zaptel
channel => 1
context=default

After this i decided to have a bit of fun
so i created a dialout rule so if i dial 1471 it then passes to BT to get the last caller id
1472 as a feture code on freepbx for call trace for voip numbers.