When your callers are on hold, you have a captive audience. Lots of people sell a service to provide you profesionally mixed music (licensed) and marketing messages promoting your business. Just google for Music or Messages on hold, you will find lots of providers.
I think its a nice touch and projects a professional image.
For a Linux based toaster, check out Bill Shupp's Toaster which is based on Matt Simersons. The virtual domain support is indeed wicked cool, using Vpopmail.
Their newest client (the freely available version) IS locked to the jabber.com server, however that is only for the evaluation of the product. Keep in mind that they didnt sell you a server, and give you a client that is locked to jabber.com. You downloaded a demo of the server, and got a locked version of the client. The client is one of the benefits you get when you lic. the server, as it is very nice.
I work for a company that had puchased several compaq DL580's and evaluated a few different cluster/failover/HA solutions. The decision to to with LifeKeeper was made just before I joined the company.
It has been part of my job to get the system implememted with RH6.2, Apache, Informix and a shared mass storage device.
A bit of background on LifeKeeper first. Lifekeeper is a process monitoring tool that monitors a number of services and its dependencies, and manages the re-start and failover of these services to a group of defined servers.
If you can imagine a stacks of servers with, for example, a firewall, a web server, and a db server as a unit, you can implement failover in a N+N configuration.
Each layer has a virtual Ip that flips back and forth between primary and failover so that each layer knows how to talk up and down to the other layers blindly.
We found that we had to do a lot of custom work to get everything implemented the way we wanted it.
The Informix kit was a bit messy to failover, however apache and tomcat failed over very well. we had some issues with the NFS kit, as our Informix DB was mounted on the shared mass store.
We had and still have some issues with our firewalls. We are using gShield (ipchains) for our firewalls, and the gshieldconf tool allows for only one IP per box, and we had the real IP's plus a Virtual IP that floated between the firealls. (our production url resolves to this virtual IP). We loose connectivity to our primary firewall on its _real_ ip, and must access it from the VirtIP. It went on to cause us problems with routing mail up thru the stacks, with accessing customer sites from behind the firewalls, and a few other things. Bottom line, Lifekeeper doesnt work so well to fail firewalls over.
It is pretty neat to watch apache or informix or tomcat (or our firewalls for that matter) to flip over from the primary to failover box.
It ends up that all services that LifeKeeper Monitors need to be started by lifekeepr with some command such as: perfome_action -t apache -a restore, instead of apachecrl start.
we are putting ssl on the boxes right now and will see how Lifekeeper handles mod_ssl!
Neat product, would love to see it open.
Its also too bad, because the dl580's compaq sent us took about 3 weeks to get up and running, lots of wierd hardware problems with the pci bus.
I am in a company of 50 or so people, and we are a linux shop. Our prod (and staging and dev.) machines are linux. We are looking at making our developers us linux, because we deploy linux. My question is
"How can a company transition AWAY from exchange, to something Linux?"
We have exchange running, biz dev and mkting love it, IT hates it. Everyone is accustomed to using outlook, and the scheduling and calendars is critical (at least they think) to them. How does a company transition out of Exchange, so that they can provide most of the functionality of Exchange and transition smoothly (maybe even to the point where users can use outlook if they insist) to the new linux product.
A web-email, imap, pop, shared-calendar, tasks and contact mgt. applicaion that is integrated, robust, reliable and able to replace exchange must exist somewhere. Does anyone have any experience on trying to replace exchange with linux software?
At my company (web startup) we use WAP to send the sys admins updates on the status of the disk array, the load on the box, a 'w', and to send us alerts when something goes wrong where ever we are.
The school that i just graduated used Benedictine Monastaries for the names of all their UNIX boxes... Melk, Bingen, Ottmar, Ottoburen, dzog... A quick search will most likey yield lots of names.
The school newspaper (i was the admin) had the names of different burritos from the local Bravo Burrito... fiesta was one of them. I cant remmeber the rest, it was just an example that may spark your mind.
The school's network used the different ships from StarTrek.
Im working on naming my own server. It has to be something cool, i will never name my server wwwsrv01 or something like that!
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I work for a company that manufacturers On Hold equipment
When your callers are on hold, you have a captive audience. Lots of people sell a service to provide you profesionally mixed music (licensed) and marketing messages promoting your business. Just google for Music or Messages on hold, you will find lots of providers.
I think its a nice touch and projects a professional image.
Oh yes there is. Medicine. Never ending need for doctors, and even greater need for Nurses. Click Here
For a Linux based toaster, check out Bill Shupp's Toaster which is based on Matt Simersons. The virtual domain support is indeed wicked cool, using Vpopmail.
This will fill you in a bit on the differences between .org and .com server http://www.jabber.org/admin/serverlist.php
and yup, gotta call em for price.
Their newest client (the freely available version) IS locked to the jabber.com server, however that is only for the evaluation of the product. Keep in mind that they didnt sell you a server, and give you a client that is locked to jabber.com. You downloaded a demo of the server, and got a locked version of the client. The client is one of the benefits you get when you lic. the server, as it is very nice.
An apparently growing archive of Dot Bomb's... http://ebituaries.whirlycott.com/
I work for a company that had puchased several compaq DL580's and evaluated a few different cluster/failover/HA solutions. The decision to to with LifeKeeper was made just before I joined the company.
It has been part of my job to get the system implememted with RH6.2, Apache, Informix and a shared mass storage device.
A bit of background on LifeKeeper first. Lifekeeper is a process monitoring tool that monitors a number of services and its dependencies, and manages the re-start and failover of these services to a group of defined servers.
If you can imagine a stacks of servers with, for example, a firewall, a web server, and a db server as a unit, you can implement failover in a N+N configuration.
primary.......backup
firewall......firewall
apache........apache
informix......informix
Each layer has a virtual Ip that flips back and forth between primary and failover so that each layer knows how to talk up and down to the other layers blindly.
We found that we had to do a lot of custom work to get everything implemented the way we wanted it.
The Informix kit was a bit messy to failover, however apache and tomcat failed over very well. we had some issues with the NFS kit, as our Informix DB was mounted on the shared mass store.
We had and still have some issues with our firewalls. We are using gShield (ipchains) for our firewalls, and the gshieldconf tool allows for only one IP per box, and we had the real IP's plus a Virtual IP that floated between the firealls. (our production url resolves to this virtual IP). We loose connectivity to our primary firewall on its _real_ ip, and must access it from the VirtIP. It went on to cause us problems with routing mail up thru the stacks, with accessing customer sites from behind the firewalls, and a few other things. Bottom line, Lifekeeper doesnt work so well to fail firewalls over.
It is pretty neat to watch apache or informix or tomcat (or our firewalls for that matter) to flip over from the primary to failover box.
It ends up that all services that LifeKeeper Monitors need to be started by lifekeepr with some command such as: perfome_action -t apache -a restore, instead of apachecrl start.
we are putting ssl on the boxes right now and will see how Lifekeeper handles mod_ssl!
Neat product, would love to see it open.
Its also too bad, because the dl580's compaq sent us took about 3 weeks to get up and running, lots of wierd hardware problems with the pci bus.
I am in a company of 50 or so people, and we are a linux shop. Our prod (and staging and dev.) machines are linux. We are looking at making our developers us linux, because we deploy linux. My question is "How can a company transition AWAY from exchange, to something Linux?" We have exchange running, biz dev and mkting love it, IT hates it. Everyone is accustomed to using outlook, and the scheduling and calendars is critical (at least they think) to them. How does a company transition out of Exchange, so that they can provide most of the functionality of Exchange and transition smoothly (maybe even to the point where users can use outlook if they insist) to the new linux product. A web-email, imap, pop, shared-calendar, tasks and contact mgt. applicaion that is integrated, robust, reliable and able to replace exchange must exist somewhere. Does anyone have any experience on trying to replace exchange with linux software?
At my company (web startup) we use WAP to send the sys admins updates on the status of the disk array, the load on the box, a 'w', and to send us alerts when something goes wrong where ever we are.
Very Handy.
The school that i just graduated used Benedictine Monastaries for the names of all their UNIX boxes... Melk, Bingen, Ottmar, Ottoburen, dzog... A quick search will most likey yield lots of names.
The school newspaper (i was the admin) had the names of different burritos from the local Bravo Burrito... fiesta was one of them. I cant remmeber the rest, it was just an example that may spark your mind.
The school's network used the different ships from StarTrek.
Im working on naming my own server. It has to be something cool, i will never name my server wwwsrv01 or something like that!