What I’m working on…

• Creating an SNPP gateway for sending pager messages via SMTP. SNPP allows for longer messages than SMTP/SMS, and delivery is much faster. I’d love to find a sendmail mailer that used SNPP and a lookup table, but I’m settling for using a local mailhost, procmail, and formail to bounce mail sent to a specific email address to that script. The ultimate solution is to use WCTP, a web/XML-based protocol that uses secure login and SSL - with much longer message lengths.

  Why not just use a Blackberry like everyone else? I like using a regular cell phone, and I’m stuck on a personal plan until this time next year. Two-way pagers are cheap compared to Blackberries - anywhere from free to $40 for the units and $19/month for service. The Motorola T900 has a nice keyboard, is much smaller than the Blackberry, and lasts for weeks on a AA battery.

  I also like making the most of retro tech - pagers are bulletproof, the technology is proven, and they’re simpler to deal with than a Blackberry.

• Moving 40+ gigabytes of mail from an Exchange 5.5 organization to Exchange 2003, adding fax services, intelligent mail filter, new anti-virus, new Blackberry server…
• Building a web site with Debian Linux using Apache 2.0 and SSL, a PUT script to allow uploads, HTTP Authentication, and Samba on the back end. Talk about deja vu! I’ve providing doing similar solutions for years - they’re simple, but they work. This one’s way overpowered for the application it’s intended for, so I’m using it as an SMTP smarthost as well.
• Building a VOIP telephone network. In our care center, we use VOIP telephones pointing to another phone system across the WAN for failover. Next fiscal year, we’re planning to use VOIP for intranetwork calling, roaming employees and voicemail integration.
• Fleshing out a Windows 2003 Active Directory installation. Now that we have AD, we can implement group policies and tweaks we couldn’t do with an NT domain.
• Building a workflow application with Footprints, a helpdesk application. With my application, all interdepartmental requests are assigned to the appropriate party, tracked, escalated based on agreed-upon timeframes, and all work is documented within the application. Internal customers and agents can run reporting, search for information, and create just-in-time documentation through a knowledge base. Very cool. The company is small-ish, has some of the best tech support and sales support I’ve seen, and has accomodated every need I’ve had in going from prototyping to migrating to a production server to going live. Highly recommended.

..And trying to make sure a wonderful team of desktop and network people get what they need to get their jobs done with a minimum of hassle during the holiday rush.

That’s a great thing. You must keep doing the good work.