Last Friday the renovation work on my Mom’s kitchen began. Which means I have been assisting with that project. I went shopping with Mom on Saturday for a new over the range microwave and dishwasher. Several hours and 4 stores later we settled on a Kenmore dishwasher and GE microwave from Sears. Overall, it is a pretty large project. The kitchen is being gutted with the wall between the kitchen and dining room being removed. The sink and dishwasher will now be in an island. New cabinets along with a pantry and broom closet will be installed. The carpet in the dining room is going and the hardwood floor beneath will be resurfaced. All in all it should be an excellent change for her.

My latest project has been the configuration of an AsteriskNOW server. I’m hosting the Asterisk server inside a VMware Server virtual machine. The server is configured to use SIP and I currently have 5 extensions configured for myself and a few friends. I’m using a Cisco 7970, my roommate a Cisco 7960, and another friend is using the X-Lite soft phone. The project has presented a couple of challenges. One is configuring phones outside of my local network to work properly with NAT. Secondly, the configuration for a 7970 is different than that of a 7960. The 7970s now use XML files for all of its configuration. Nonetheless the 5 extensions work and can call each other. The next phase of this project is to integrate the Asterisk box with my VoicePulse account. This will allow us to make calls on the PSTN and also receive calls from the PSTN. I’ll provide another update as to how that goes.

Sorry for the long post, I needed to bring you all up to speed on what I’ve been up to.