Lync Trunk Configuration also applies to analog devices

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This one took me a little by surprise recently.

I was working with a HP SBA/SBM for Lync, equipped with FXS and FXO ports.

I’d setup the Trunk Configuration for outgoing FXO calls to strip the Country Code and insert a 0 (as is pretty standard in Oz), and once that was working OK I turned to the FXS. Despite my best efforts, I found I couldn’t get a call to ring the phone. Every call I sent to the gateway (whether intended for the PSTN or the FXS ports) was being spat out the FXO ports!

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Lync Call Admission Control (CAC) traps #2 – “bandwidth policy override” only works 1-way!!

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Here’s a good one.

I was on-site with a customer recently and we decided to implement CAC in an effort to resolve some voice quality issues between the remote Branch and the Central Site.

Before starting work I edited all of the Voice Policies and checked the bandwidth policy override…

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A customisable web interface for C-Bus

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UPDATED 16th MAY 2011 – download the source from this post.

UPDATED 13th MAY 2012 – have a look at the update to C-ChangePHP in this post.

I was an early adopter of Clipsal’s C-Bus building automation system, adding a small installation to our cosy circa-1917 semi back in 1999.

Initially we had a grand total of 4 or 5 devices on the bus. We ripped it out and took it with us when we moved into our current home, and we now have more than 30 units on the network, with lots of dimmers, relays, auxiliary inputs, analog outputs (for 0-10V dimming control of LEDs) and even a DMX output.

With so many individual channels at our control, the number of outputs eventually exceeded the number of switches, so an alternate means to control everything was required – and so the web interface was born.

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Pine Nut Brittle

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IMG_1978-600x400

Originally called “Caramel Nut Crunch”, I’ve appropriated this and taken it a little upmarket with its new name “Pine Nut Brittle”. The original recipe came from the Australian Women’s Weekly, “Quick-Mix Biscuits and Slices”, p.28. I inherited this book from my paternal grandmother before she died, and always called her with a thank-you whenever I made anything using her books or kitchen tools.

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Telephone Intercom

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Telephone Intercom Front 1

I’ve long enjoyed tinkering with electronics, although it’s something I don’t do a lot of these days. I find that I simply no longer have the time to invest in designing, prototyping & debugging, then the PCB design, layout, artwork and production.

Home is littered with all sorts of home-brew projects, including the old stereo matrix switcher (with an Elektor input board and my own output stages and PIC control); a discarded poker machine turned into a piggy bank (PIC); a PIC-based driver board for the chimes from an old pinball machine; and the list goes on.

One project I’m particularly proud of is my Telephone Intercom. This was one of the few circuits I had published in Silicon Chip magazine back in the 90s. You can still buy a copy of the article from their website (refer May 1992) if you want to read more about it and Bob Barnes at RCS Radio still has the circuit boards for you to build your own.

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Lync E911 Location Information Service

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Whilst it’s great to see Lync now supports E911, it’s not actually relevant to us here in Australia. There is no current requirement for such a means to report your physical location to the emergency operator, although ACMA is aware of and currently seeking comment on this and other related issues.

Australia’s current system relies on you being able to tell the emergency operator your address, or the hope that you’re calling from the address of the service as registered in the Integrated Public Number Database (IPND) database.

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Trawling Exchange’s Application Event Logs using Powershell

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I have a particular dislike of blog sites blatantly re-posting others’ content as their own. I’m happy to re-post, with all the credit going to the original poster.

Thanks to mickjf for this post on the auTechHeads site, which I recently stumbled across whilst cursing some strange behaviour of Exchange 2010 UM.

This commandlet will trawl the machine’s Application Event Log and retrieve all of the entries that pertain to the same call.

All you have to do is find some or all of the CallId in a message and paste it into the below. You don’t need to pipe it to a file of course, but I found that an obvious omission from the original.

Get-EventLog -logname "Application" | select TimeWritten,EventID,Message | where-object{$_.Message  -like "*29853-1a6920110124163550031*"} | fl > c:\log-extract.txt

– G.