JimDoesVoIP

Architect & Integrator  VP Server Engineering @CounterPath. Lecturer @Northeastern. Adjunct Professor @ Wentworth Institue of Technology

[jimdoesvoip]

[jimdoesvoip]

User-Edge Series Wrap-up

I finished up the third installment of the user-edge toolkit blog post series over on our CounterPath blog.  Check it out.  I hope that people get something valuable out of the information provided.  Insights can come from unexpected places and the power of the data behind the User-Edge tool kit is impressive.  

I’ll mention another item that in a way is quite related.  One area our operations teams have been focusing on is data visualization.  I think that terms like this get over-used, so let me clarify what I mean: We are collecting graphs of what we think are either key metrics or interesting statistics putting up graphs of these with items along with other related items.  Getting technical: We’re making pretty graphs and staring at them.  They are telling us things.  Perhaps many organizations are already here.  Good!  If you are not: Imagine if your organization had a dashboard that looked at the key metrics related to the quality of user experience.  Imagine the deep dives these dashboards would inspire related to a “strange pattern” and what this would reveal about the underlying user experiences.  

https://blog.counterpath.com/series-finale-real-data-and-real-lessons-from-the-user-edge

[jimdoesvoip]

Fun Memories of ~2004 and 2005 live demos of Fixed Mobile Convergence at Mobile World Congress.

[jimdoesvoip]

User-Edge Operations

As a follow-up to the talk I presented at SIPNOC 2018 in December, we're doing a series of CounterPath blog posts on User-Edge Operations.  We think the toolkit provides a differentiator that helps Operations teams level-up the insights they have into their user's service experience and perception of their network performance.  

If you are interested please check out the post on the CounterPath blog https://blog.counterpath.com/what-is-user-edge-operations-everything-you-need-to-know 

[jimdoesvoip]

Timestamps in linux history

This is not a long-form set of thoughts on how Linux has developed to be what it is today over time.  It is sharing a tidbit of configuration information on how to set up a Linux machine so that the history command will provide timestamps for when each command has been executed.  This little change can be wildly helpful when looking back at history for accounts that might be shared or for systems where you might want to repeat some tasks you performed a week or a month ago...

The output below is a typical default history output on most every flavor of Linux machine I’ve ever set up.

[user@server ~]# history | tail -5  743  ps -ef  744  ls  745  ls -la  746  crontab -e  747  history | tail -5 [user@server ~]#

With a quick change to a user’s setup, you can have an output that includes a timestamp for each command which  looks like this:

[user@server ~]# history | tail -5 1014  2018-11-15 20:23:31 ls -la 1015  2018-11-15 20:23:32 top 1016  2018-11-15 20:23:40 pwd 1017  2018-11-15 20:23:47 netstat -lnp 1018  2018-11-15 20:23:56 history | tail -5 [user@server ~]#

The steps to set this up are pretty straightforward.  

First, add a line like this one:

export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%Y-%m/%d %T "

to the bottom of your users .bash_profile file which is located in their home directory.  Second, setup is to source that file, or log out and log back in any existing sessions to pick up the new setting.  For the source option you can use this command:

source ~/.bash_profile

[jimdoesvoip]

[jimdoesvoip]

Initially I thought this stood for Boston Telephone Department but to my disappointment the manhole cover acronym is for Boston Transportation Department. Spotted near Northeastern

[jimdoesvoip]

Direct to consumer international long distance advertising. - September 1988 Condé Nast Traveler

[jimdoesvoip]

I posted this week on our corporate blog. Really proud of our team’s efforts and the work product. Stretto 2.0 brings our services to a whole new segment and provides a huge set of readily deployable services for our growing customer base.

[jimdoesvoip]

CounterPath on ClueCon Weekly

I was able to spend some time with the FreeSWITCH team and the ClueCon community talking about some operations and service assurance features we've built here at CounterPath. I really enjoyed the session and the questions and comments. Most of all I enjoy explaining the careful thinking and hard work that our team puts into our products and solutions for retail customers, SMBs, Enterprises and Carriers. We Covered Bria Push, Client Traces, User Experience Metrics and touched on Help Desk Assistant before we ran the clock out. You can check out a recording of the Cluecon Weekly session at the link below 

https://youtu.be/gIsEiddBbFo

For more information on our products and services check out these links

CounterPath

https://www.counterpath.com/

CounterPath Bria Clients

https://www.counterpath.com/softphone-clients/

CounterPath Stretto Platform

https://www.counterpath.com/stretto-platform/

Bria Push Blog Post : Push for the People!

https://blog.counterpath.com/push-for-the-people

[jimdoesvoip]

Next time you talk about cloud computing give Bob Ross some credit for pioneering Happy Little Clouds

[jimdoesvoip]

The team at CounterPath is excited to start offering Hosted Bria Push services to our Bria Stretto customers.  These are customers who subscribe to our bundle of a hosted Stretto instance and our Bria Stretto clients.  Their subscription includes the latest versions of everything we do, so it is rewarding to start offering these customers Bria Push to help them overcome battery life and backgrounding (mobile OS app killing) issues.  

You can read more on the CounterPath blog where I wrote about what we’ve done. 

https://blog.counterpath.com/bria-push-makes-bria-stretto-even-better/

[jimdoesvoip]

Yours for good service - Bell Telephone System Ad 1937

[jimdoesvoip]

I wrote another blog post for the CounterPath corporate blog.

Check it out here: https://blog.counterpath.com/2701/push-for-the-people

[jimdoesvoip]

RFC Compliance in SIP Land

In the SIP community we all sometimes enjoy discussions of SIP compliance mixed with interoperability and a healthy dose of troubleshooting and often a touch of call and message flow complexity. Some folks enjoy this {much} more than others. It is always an interesting barometer of someone’s style to see how they address questions of interoperability.

I want to take a moment to explore some of this. I wasn’t intending to do this at all. I initially wanted to talk about a interesting SIP interoperability problem our team ran into and solved without ever emailing, calling, or discussing with the other vendor. Why? Because it is the opposite of what we sometimes see happen. I’ll save that situation for my next post and launch into perhaps a more stormy area here…

—

It often seems that there is a missing social construct related to discussions of interoperability in this community. The missing piece of normal social interactions can be blunted in a number of ways. One perplexing issue is how people who work on communications products communicate.

Terse emails or messages of other forms between people who have never connected personally can be the norm; and are horrible. Assigning blame can be of the utmost priority. Laziness often inhibits the conversation and discovery of underlying issues and best solutions. A feeling of higher status or commercial relationship driven superiority often comes into play.

—

Many humans take the approach similar to “I just quickly read the part of a RFC that I think applies, it backs up my base assumption that I am right, here are 30 lines of quoted text without explanation or context, this must be your problem.”

Each time you observe this kind of conversation about to take place it takes some zen perspective or meditative thought on behalf of the receiver before taking the proverbial bait and jumping into the debate.

—

I think I would advise everyone to add a little context to the next conversation they have or the message they send.  I think what many people who try this will find is that when you put more into a conversation you get more out of a conversation.  

I’m no master in the area of what works well and what doesn’t work well in business communications, perhaps more of a very interested party.  Would love to hear some feedback on this one.

[jimdoesvoip]

Bell Telephone System advertisement from 1937 - focus on quality

[jimdoesvoip]

Implementing Battery-Saving Push Notifications in Bria

I wrote a post for CounterPath's blog this week.  I really enjoy the part of my role at CounterPath where I get to explain to customers partners and users the great solutions we’ve built or are actively working on.  This post is all about how our team builds great solutions to help customers communicate.

Check out the post here:

https://blog.counterpath.com/2621/push-notifications