Just came across a SIP client for Blackberry devices. It's called "Vippie", and they have a free demo app which allows 60 second calls.

Currently this works with GSM only, no CDMA phones. Sorry Verizon users.

I've included the link here: http://voipswitch.com/en/products/softphones/retail-shop

I have a test Asterisk based VoIP server at work, and this client actually works. I was able to connect my Blackberry Bold over our internal WiFi network. There is some slight delay, but  voice quality seemed clear. 

If you want the full version, it will cost you 20 bucks. Currently, I'm just testing this out, but I may plunk down the cash in the future.

"What If?" can be a daunting question to ask yourself. 

Sure, you can ask the basics, like:

What if the car doesn't start?
What if I lose my wallet?
What if the Devils don't make it to the play-offs?

Those are fairly easy "what if's" to comprehend and make quick decisions regarding the outcome.

If my car doesn't start, call the towing company and my repair center.
If my wallet is lost, call my bank to cancel my cards and get replacements, then go to DMV and get a replacement license!
If the Devils don't make the play-offs, I'm going to get upset!

 Let's extend this to the enterprise:

What if the office catches on fire?
What if my server decides to stop working with a small puff of white smoke?

Will YOU be prepared for what happens next?

UPDATE 2011-04-29:

NOTHING underscores the absolute necessity of being prepared for disaster than the recent storms that ripped through the South and in to the North East. (2011-APR-27 / 28)

I happened to be on a conference call with my DR/BC provider during the storms when they told us that MANY customers in our area had declared a disaster. Many were due to power and flooding. That's just a few hours of storm during an otherwise normal day!

UPDATE 2 2011-10-29

as in my previous update - AGAIN - NOTHING, and I MEAN NOTHING beats being prepared for a disaster than the freak winter storm that occurred in the north east on October 29, 2011. My company was without power for 6 days. We debated declaring a disaster, and would have if my colleague had the proper backup tapes in our bank deposit box... We did manage to pull through and service membership within one day utilizing other methods and people working in their home offices.  I was able to re-route our primary office numbers to a Google voice account where members heard our status announcements. Any voice mails were downloaded and e-mailed to our member support mailbox, which helped ease the burden when power was finally restored.

In my original post, I included some great Open Source tools I use to manage and monitor the network at work.

Since it’s been a while since I’ve posted, here is “Part 2”.

NAGIOS (www.nagios.org)

Nagios is a monitoring tool which can monitor just about anything. It has a myriad of plug-ins to check network traffic, the temperature (with appropriate hardware), the available space on a hard drive, etc.

I recently installed here at the “day job” and it’s been happily monitoring a bunch of servers, the network, and some UPS’s.

Since I have a Blackberry, I only have the system send e-mail alert if there is a problem, but it can also send texts.

I know… “What if the internet is down, and it can’t send and e-mail???” 

Working on that issue now with dual-paths to the internet, and eventually, possibly, some kind of air-card over cellular. Not a HUGE deal right now, as my workplace is really laid-back.

Nagios is basically configured by text files, and that is a slight pain. It does have a moderate learning curve, but once you figure it out, it’s easy to duplicate what you know to all the hosts on your network. I actually got the book Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with NAGIOS”, but most of what’s in there, you can find on the web someplace. It is a good resource, however, and I find myself going back to it every once in a while.

 Hmmm... What else?  

 Oh yeah... 

MRTG (www.mrtg.org),

MRTG is the Multi Router Traffic Grapher. Open source stuff that basically can graph any time based data you can throw at it. Currently, I only use it for monitoring network traffic on a specific port on a network switch. Nagios has a plug in to check MRTG data, and when it hits a certain threshold, it alerts me so I can go yell at people using too much bandwith. Nagios and MRTG run on the same virtualized machine.

Another cool app / operating system I'm testing is OpenFiler (www.openfiler.com)

OpenFiler is basically an operating system (Linux based) that gives you both SAN and NAS functionality. Turn any old PC with good amounts of drive space, and turn it into a NAS, SAN, or both. It supports iSCSI (both as a target and an initiator), NFS, CIFS, etc.  All of this is managed via a web interface.  Good Stuff!!

I also have tried FreeNAS which is BSD based, and like it too.

That's it for now!

For those of you that are really interested in this stuff...

I'm a self-described Linux Geek, as well as a few other things. My work collegues say that if an unused PC sits around for more than a few days, chances are I will install some version of the Linux operating system on it. While there is only a small grain of truth to that rumor, there are a few boxes that I have installed various floavors of Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, PC-BSD, Solaris, and a few others you've never heard of... Hey, ya gotta learn somewhere, right?

My home network has Windows PC's, and a few Linux variants. My main server runs Fedora Core 6. It's a 2.4 gHz box with an 80 gig main and a 250 secondary drive (just upgraded). It hosts this web site, my e-mail, a few "internal" web sites, and currently, my music library. At times, thisbox has also functioned as my MythTV back-end, and as my local ShoutCast music server. Both have been removed from this box. I have a dedicated Myth backend now, and don't use Shoutcast any longer.

I also run my own internal phone system (PBX) on Linux. The PBX is running something called Trixbox, which runs the CentOS (a Linux variant).  Basically, Trixbox takes the best from a number of different telephony projects, and rolls them all into one. It's based entirely on ASTERISK , with some other cool stuff like FreePBX, HUD, etc. and gives me all the features of a full-fledged PBX (not that I really need it), but it gives it to me for FREE. I also have some free VoIP phone numbers and some other neat stuff running on it.

Some of my other boxes run Ubuntu 6.06, Xubuntu (on a really old PC), and Red Hat 9.  I also have an IBM NetVista Thin client that get's it boot image from the main server.

-OK - you can call me a geek...
-Mike