Hi Phi

Since Alcatel released their Reflex Handsets for The OmniPCX Office, OmniPCX Enterprise and 4400 Communication servers (Telephone systems), they have been a great hit because they looked modern, are reliable and some of the range we quite cheap. These are know being completely phased out in favour of the new 9 Series handsets (which look great).

Unfortunately there is not a direct replacement for the cheapest handset in the range (the First), which was 30 quid and digital! They were not great feature-wise, but they did the job of not having to install a analogue board for POT phones.

Maybe Alcatel-Lucent will give us a direct replacement sometime. (Hmmm).

Probably No. There are many resources available on the internet to get information you require, but getting straight answers on the internet regarding prices from IT and Comms equipment providers websites is difficult. Before we created our Telephone System online quotation tool we had a look around to see what was available.

In an industry based on communication there was very little to give us an idea on how we should pitch this tool. Most sites pitched online quotations, but in reality they just collected information and produced a quote offline. These days people have no patience and what it now. Others provided a one size fits all quotation, which did not correctly meet the requested requirements.

We have developed our phone system quote tool so that it is as accurate as possible. It is a little restricted, but at least it is fit for purpose. Our experiences over that last year or so shows that it can be open to abuse, so we have had to restrict competitors from using it or at least make them declare themselves and you get people using it but unwilling to engage in dialogue (as BT said, its good to talk). Good news is we are creating a new enhanced quotation tool for a VoIP PBX, which is not as restricted.

If you need a new telephone system get a quote here and maybe elsewhere!

We have an online quotation tool on our website for producing on the fly quotations for telephone systems and IP PBX’s. To generate these quotations we use a combination of PHP and FPDF to create PDF’s. I decided to add a header to each page which looked great, but when you import pages from another PDF these are not always convenient and sometimes creates a mess at the top of the pages. The header is created each time you addpage() and there seem to be no way to switch them on or off when needed.

So I decided to go hacking around FPDF to add a switch in the addpage() script. Anyway I am not a great coder, got scared and decided on trying to work out a KISS solution to my problem. After 10 minutes of thought this is what I came up with and it seems to work.

$headerswitch = ‘Y’;

class PDF extends FPDI
{
//Page header
function Header()
{
global $company;
global $headerswitch;

if($headerswitch == ‘Y’){
$this->SetXY(0,0);
$this->SetLeftMargin(0);
$this->SetFont(’Arial’,’B’,16);
$this->SetFillColor(197,148,148);
$this->Cell(210,3,”,0,1,C,1);
$this->SetFillColor(174,30,35);
$this->SetTextColor(255,255,255);
$this->Cell(210,8,’Online Proposal for ‘.$company,0,1,C,1);
$this->SetFillColor(160,160,160);
$this->Cell(210,3,”,0,1,C,1);
$this->Ln(20);
$this->SetLeftMargin(10);}
else
{}

}

}

$pdf=new pdf();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->Cell(189,10,’Hello World with Header’,0,1);

$headerswitch = ‘N’;
$pdf->addPage();
$pdf->Cell(189,10,’Hello World No Header’,0,1);

I thought I would just let you guys know, who are not great at working these things out, as Google did not answer my question

I prefer to do things as cheaply as possible, but not at the expense of the thing not working at all. I have a customer who uses windows backup as thier primary backup solution. This works great using the normal tape type method. The customer has a lot of documents, which are updated and changed on a daily basis.

What happens if a month down the road after working on a document they go to work on it again to find that previous information has gone. The backup tapes will not help as they will have only have changes from 2 weeks ago. What the customer really wanted was to backup different versions of the files daily and they did not want to use the windows backup to extricate the file * .bks. So I thought I would knock up a script to run robocopy to copy these file to another location.

Not quite! The customer also has a lot of pst files for each project and robocopy can’t copy these as they may be open. Time to think of something else.

Now some of these files can be quite big (100mb or more) and saving these to a different location on the server will use up precious space. So l decided to get a NAS/SAN box. They had a free Netgear on kicking around, but getting the thing to work was a nightmare (problems with driver software), So we built one. We used an old Dell PC (not that old) installed a cheap sata disk controller (£13) and istalled 3 500MB disk.

The OS/Software we used to set the whole thing up is OpenFiler , which created a RAID 5 volume and create an iSCSI drive for the main SBS2003 server to connect to using the iSCSI Software Initiator to create a logical drive. 1TB NAS/SAN server on the cheap.

Though I still had a problem backing up pst files. Hobocopy to the rescue. Hobocopy uses the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) to “snapshot” the disk before copying. It then copies from the snapshot rather than the “live” disk. Perfect just need to work out how to save versions of files.

Once I saved a full backup and created a ’statefile’ to read from, I just used hobocopy to do an incremental copy of a folder to another folder prepended with the date (ie 20080103.data.) on the NAS server and this folder would only have the directory structure and files which have changed, Although you will have to get rid of the ‘thumbs.db’ as well or you end up with loads of empty folders.

Using the following in a batch file (run daily) with some VB scripts to clean up the directories and blat to email the daily results to the customer and myself, all seems to be working well.

REM: Set Backup Date
SET yyyymmdd=%DATE:~6,4%%DATE:~3,2%%DATE:~0,2%

“C:\hobocopy\hobocopy.exe” /statefile=generaldata.xml /incremental /verbosity=2 /skipdenied /y /r “D:\Data” “O:\%yyyymmdd%.Data” >> hobolog.txt 2>&1

Cheap as chips. You tight arse