FOOD FOR THOUGHT New Install for Small Church

[golfnut]

Our church is outgrowing their current phone "system." They currently have five two line phones but they are simply 2 line phones. We recently added a second pastor and there have been some complaints about the ability to eaves drop on conversations and the inability to transfer a call to a different office. I've installed PIAF at several locations in the past and am comfortable handling this for my church (I handle all the other IT related stuff already) but do have a few hardware related questions that I hope the forum can answer.

It has been many years since i played around with FXS and FXO interfaces so I need a refresher. My two current setups in production use Vitelity for all calls! At church I'm going to have to use an existing POTS line to maintain our local (local telco that won't allow porting). I believe that both lines come in on a single RJ11 jack. I purchased a used Patton 4114 with 4 FXO ports. Will the Patton recognize both lines on a single port or will I need to split the single RJ11 connector into two separate connectors with a single pair for each port? Any special tricks I need to know about using the Patton?

I also pickup up a Grandstream HT702 ATA with two FXS ports. The church as two phone locations (kitchen and hallway) where I'd like to use the existing phones so that users don't feel intimidated the few times per year they actually get used.

My last question is hardware related. What is the current budget minded recommended hardware? Small atom box? I have kind of set my budget for this project at $500. I spent $140 on the FXO and FXS boxes and will probably pick up three Yealink T26p phones off eBay for about 50-60 bucks each. That leaves about $200 for hardware but I'm willing to spend a little more if it means a better product in the long run.

P.S....I wish I could justify an ESXi server for the church so I could just virtualize the system!

 

[islandtech]

Have you considered Remote Call Forwarding to Vitelity?

 

[golfnut]

If lived in an area where I could get a truly local number I would do that. Unforunately, our phone company/ISP is a locally owned cooperative (that provides excellent service) and all outgoing call would be long distance calls AND the majority of the calls that our church gets (and makes) are going to be local.

 

[Jake]

I've liked the Patton 4114. You will have to split the RJ-11 into separate pairs. Look at the Celeron NUC as it is a powerful, compact computer. If that isn't in the budget an Atom box should work just fine.

 

[briankelly63]

Couple of thoughts.... A small church with a few phones with no SIP avail might be better off with a second hand Merlin system that someone else might be getting rid of. The audio on the analog lines of a small telco after you interface it is not going to be that good (potential echo issues no matter what you do). You'll run into the issue of putting calls on hold also. They will complain a lot about parking a call and not being able to just pick up a line on another phone. Depends on who the people are using it (older folks).

Another idea on the SIP trunk is that many small telcos can't be ported to a Vitelity or Flowroute but they can be ported to the local cellular carrier OR cable company. You could then forward that to a SIP trunk. Most cell plans have unlimited calls which includes forwarding. You might also be able to do a second port later to a SIP provider..

The local telco has no interest in porting numbers so talk to the cell providers and cable co directly. Small telcos were told they'd be sued if they didn't port to them.

 

[john p]

Regarding hardware, given only 2 max simultaneous calls, I think a Reasperry Pi would be sufficient. I've been running PIAF on a Pi for a couple of years & found it as reliable as the x86 box I used before, with a tiny up front cost (~$50) as well as operating cost (5W v 50). I also have a spare Pi with the same HW, configured with a different name. If the hot Pi has a problem, the swap takes moments (plug it in & point the phones/ata to the new device). Of course, YMMV.

>My last question is hardware related. What is the current budget minded recommended hardware? Small atom box? I have kind of set my budget for this project at $500. I spent $140 on the FXO and FXS boxes and will probably pick up three Yealink T26p phones off eBay for about 50-60 bucks each. That leaves about $200 for hardware but I'm willing to spend a little more if it means a better product in the long run.

 

[golfnut]

Thanks for the recommendations! I ordered an Intel NUC on Amazon a few days ago and it should be here in time to play with over the weekend. Regarding porting, forwarding, and call quality......I'm not worried about the call quality/small telco problem. Yes, our telco is small, but they are not out of date. All our services are provided via fiber. I get along well with them and don't want to rock the boat too much and push the porting or forwarding at this point......I'm kind of in a situation where they tell people certain things can't be done (networking and wireless) and then I go out and prove them wrong but we all get along. I sometimes think they say it can't be done because their techs can't or don't want to do it.......the call hold/park/transfer thing won't really be a learning curve problem because they can't do it now anyways.

 

[rjaiswal]

To help with parking calls, you could try to configure "valet" parking. Take a look at this thread:

http://pbxinaflash.com/community/th...parking-slots-valet-parking.14606/#post-93959

 

[golfnut]

It's been a while since I worked on this project. I essentially configured everything and then put it in a box in a corner and forgot about it. I'm a farmer and part time tech guy and farming has taken priority recently but we got rain today so I had some time. I got everything installed and tweaked a few configs and everything is working. I don't have any voip trunks set up yet as Vitelity is dragging their feet getting a local-ish DID set up for me but once that gets approved I'll set that up for outbound calling. I've got the Intel NUC running Incredible 12, a Patton 4114 terminating two PSTN lines, 3 Yealink t26p office phones, and a Grandstream FXO handling a phone in the kitchen and one in the hallway. I wanted to keep it simple in the kitchen and hallway for random people who might make a call. I also setup a time condition to limit ringing phones in the pastor's offices when the secretary is at work (she works part time). The phones are powered by a Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch.

The users are looking forward to being able to call each other instead of walking down the hallways and also having private voicemails.

 

[GomezAddams]

1. You can probably run ESX on the NUC (I haven't tried, but I assume the NUC has an Intel NIC, and ESX generally knows how to talk to them. You may have to drop back to version 5.1, but even 5.1 is still awesome.

2. My understanding is that phone numbers (including land lines) are portable, except in very limited specific cases. You may want to poke around on the FCC's web sites and see if you can pry your number loose.

 

[wardmundy]

ESXi 6.0 works like a champ on the NUC. We use it daily. Nerd Vittles tutorial here.

 

[jerrm]

ESXi 6.0 works like a champ on the NUC. We use it daily. Nerd Vittles tutorial here.

It depends on the model. Some NUCs run vanilla VMware, others need some VMWare customizations and/or BIOS updates, others are head banging futility.

Current 6th gen i-series models(NUC6i...) should be OK with latest VMware builds. The current Pentium/Celeron NUCs have (or at least had) serious vmware issues. I think 5th gen (NUC5...) should be OK with the latest vmware 5.5/6 updates, but at one point needed driver customizations.

Bottom line - if VMware is the target OS for your NUC, make sure you have return privileges.

 

[henry]

It depends on the model...

I use BRIX's from Gigabyte.
Practically same hardware but has a power adapter that works in Europe (220V), NUC's doesn't...

Some entry level Celerons (N2807 for example) won't allow ESXi install (does not pass initial hardware eligibility scan).
The solution in this case is to install Hyper-V. Free and runs just fine. Learning curve is minimal if you worked with ESXi...

 

[GomezAddams]

I think some (most? all?) Celerons don't have the virtualization support that ESX 5.5 and later require. You can run ESX 5.1 on these. There isn't likely to be any ESX feature you'd need that isn't in 5.1

I may be mistaken, but I think Hyper-V (at least the Server 2012 version) requires those same CPU extensions. The difference is that Hyper-V will install just fine, and let you create a virtual machine. It just won't let you power it up.

And, as I've mentioned before, getting Hyper-V free going in a non-domain environment is non-trivial. There is a script out there to hide much of the ugliness (search my other posts for details).

 

[henry]

ESXi 5.1 will not install on N2807 either. Hyper-V 2012 will. And run 2 Linux VMs without issues...

Most (all?) Celerons support VT-x. None support VT-d and it is hardly needed...

IIRC, there are two services that have to be manually edited (parameters changed) to make non-domain setups of Hyper-V run easy...

 

[GomezAddams]

Another advantage of Hyper-V is that Veem's free backup tool works with it. For ESX, you are limited to GhettoVCB (or something similar).