Archive for April, 2006
Switching to Asterisk, an open source phone system
Posted by Chris Hardie on April 28th, 2006When we started in 1997 and then opened our first real office in 1998, the first phone Summersault ever owned was a small, gray two-line office model with, I believe, five separate voice-mailboxes. It cost us around $200, after we spent a long time researching and discussing just the right one to get. It sat quietly on my desk, and when the occasional call did come in (it could even do a conference call!), everything worked just fine - we never had to open it up, reprogram it, reboot it, back it up, or monitor it. It’s not hard to long for those days, as Summersault’s growth has meant some costly and time consuming expansion in our phone infrastructure over the years. But our recent experience installing and configuring the Asterisk open source PBX phone system has given me some hope that we’re returning to an era where the phone is once again a useful tool that saves people time and makes communication more efficient, instead of less so. This article touts some of the benefits of this kind of phone system, and has some notes and tips on how it might help your business or organization - large or small - have enterprise-level phone system features on the cheap.
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More on Unsecured Home Wireless Networks
Posted by Chris Hardie on April 7th, 2006I did an interview this morning with Chris Nolte on 1490 WKBV AM about the “dangers of unsecured home wireless networks.” I thought I would post a few follow up notes about that issue here:
The general problem is that a lot of vendors that make home networking products want their items to be as easy to use “out of the box” as possible, and so they make the default mode of a wireless access point to be one where anyone can join the wireless network created by that device. For the average home user, this means that as soon as they plug in their wireless router to get their own laptop connected wirelessly, they’re also providing a free ride to anyone within a radius of that signal.
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Notes from a web host on coping with a time zone change.
Posted by Mark Stosberg on April 4th, 2006Now that the dust has settled on Indiana’s switch to Daylight Savings Time on April 2nd, 2006. here are some notes on what worked for us at Summersault.
As a web hosting and development provider, we have been located in Richmond, Indiana since 1997. We have never had to update our time zone configuration or even change our clocks until now.
Although there already some good resources about coping with the change, my search turned up a number of additional resources I thought would be useful to share.
The opinions expressed by individuals posting in the Summersault Blog are not necessarily those of Summersault, LLC. While we try to insure the quality and accuracy of the information presented here, we make no guarantees about its suitability for any particular purpose.

