Frontier Communications Files for Bankruptcy

[harshness]

The older they get...the more they fail

My experience doesn't support your claim. Solid state has been pretty solid for me.

Devices that are subject to the vagaries of having to share networks with computers and other bad influences aren't likely to be more reliable.

Then there's the whole idea of trying to get a broadband Service Level Agreement (SLA) versus a phone SLA. At my address, the broadband providers laughed in my face when I mentioned SLAs. If your provider isn't willing to back their service, it probably isn't as good as the service that is guaranteed.

 

[Juan]

My experience doesn't support your claim. Solid state has been pretty solid for me.

Devices that are subject to the vagaries of having to share networks with computers and other bad influences aren't likely to be more reliable.

Then there's the whole idea of trying to get a broadband Service Level Agreement (SLA) versus a phone SLA. At my address, the broadband providers laughed in my face when I mentioned SLAs. If your provider isn't willing to back their service, it probably isn't as good as the service that is guaranteed.

Thats nice..equipment just wears out eventually

 

[harshness]

Thats nice..equipment just wears out eventually

Spoken like a peddler of cheap iron.

Sure, everything will eventually be taken out by something but the older equipment was a generally more robust. The new stuff generally isn't all that sturdy.

 

[Juan]

Spoken like a peddler of cheap iron.

Sure, everything will eventually be taken out by something but the older equipment was a generally more robust. The new stuff generally isn't all that sturdy.

I guess you never really work much with telecom equipment..it just gets impossible to find replacement parts..usually on purpose...now go back home and play with your atari 1600 ( lol)

 

[EarDemon]

Just dont try to get any support when it breaks

My organizations PBX is not obsolete for us.

Voicemail to email still works, forwarding/twinning works, it's easy to add/remove users from hunt groups, making modifications to the auto attendant takes seconds. That's all we need.

The guy that does our internal phone wiring is a one man shop and Avaya dealer. He has a stock pile of old equipment. We had two control units fail, and he replaced them the following day. When he pulls old equipment out when doing upgrades he saves the older gear. While our control unit hasn't been manufactured in a decade or longer, last time I checked our guy has about 15 used ones at his disposal. Same goes for the switches and handsets. I'm not worried about support, until our guy says I think you should look at upgrading, we will not even consider it and the upgrade will be to another on-prem PBX that will last another 15 - 20 years.

 

[Juan]

My organizations PBX is not obsolete for us.

Voicemail to email still works, forwarding/twinning works, it's easy to add/remove users from hunt groups, making modifications to the auto attendant takes seconds. That's all we need.

The guy that does our internal phone wiring is a one man shop and Avaya dealer. He has a stock pile of old equipment. We had two control units fail, and he replaced them the following day. When he pulls old equipment out when doing upgrades he saves the older gear. While our control unit hasn't been manufactured in a decade or longer, last time I checked our guy has about 15 used ones at his disposal. Same goes for the switches and handsets. I'm not worried about support, until our guy says I think you should look at upgrading, we will not even consider it and the upgrade will be to another on-prem PBX that will last another 15 - 20 years.

True for today but not tomorrow

 

[harshness]

True for today but not tomorrow

There will still be components available for the foreseeable future. Sometimes they even offer new cards that do the same things the older cards did with fewer failure points.

You're certainly not making a compelling case for your position.

 

[Juan]

There will still be components available for the foreseeable future. Sometimes they even offer new cards that do the same things the older cards did with fewer failure points.

You're certainly not making a compelling case for your position.

I don't have to...time is on my side...they still need to connect to the POTS network..and that is going away

 

[EarDemon]

I don't have to...time is on my side...they still need to connect to the POTS network..and that is going away

No they don't!

My Avaya control unit is connected via ethernet to a rack mounted Cisco PRI voice gateway provided by Charter, which is connected to our ADVA fiber media converter, we have no POTS service.

 

[Juan]

No they don't!

My Avaya control unit is connected via ethernet to a rack mounted Cisco PRI voice gateway provided by Charter, which is connected to our ADVA fiber media converter, we have no POTS service.

True... I thought you gad ancient equipment my bad

 

[EarDemon]

It is. It was installed sometime inbetween 2006 - 2008. It's a v1 Avaya, and the 'server' is an HP Compaq workstation running Windows Server 2003 R2.

The outfit that sold us a this, sold us second computer identical computer for whatever reason and it's never been actively used. If the live computer fails, I can load an Acronis image no older than a week old and load a config file no more than 24 hours old and be up and running. Also have a P2V of it so it can be virtualized if need be.

 

[ncted]

It is. It was installed sometime inbetween 2006 - 2008. It's a v1 Avaya, and the 'server' is an HP Compaq workstation running Windows Server 2003 R2.

The outfit that sold us a this, sold us second computer identical computer for whatever reason and it's never been actively used. If the live computer fails, I can load an Acronis image no older than a week old and load a config file no more than 24 hours old and be up and running. Also have a P2V of it so it can be virtualized if need be.

I hope you have a good firewall in front of it. Windows 2003!

 

[navychop]

That was one of the last servers I cared for!

 

[EarDemon]

I hope you have a good firewall in front of it. Windows 2003!

Just like a P2V of an archived server running 2008 R2 and a physical server running 2008, there are access rules in place blocking inbound and outbound WAN access. LAN and VPN access is allowed.

 

[harshness]

I hope you have a good firewall in front of it. Windows 2003!

Windows computers that aren't manned are much less prone to vermin than those that have nuts behind the keyboard. There are the LAN-based attacks but most of them depend on file sharing that doesn't need to be part of a phone system.

The disadvantage of computer-based systems is that they are much more likely to soil themselves if you don't keep the power clean and they can take quite a while to cold start. I can't say I was disappointed to trade an old MS DOS-based voice mail system for one that used flash memory.

 

[ncted]

Whenever I was working on pen testing, one of the easiest things to look for, once you got a toe-hold, was XP and earlier systems which have a ton of un-patched zero-days that were discovered after MS stopped issuing security updates. A single malicious ad or successful phish, and that is the computer I'd be searching out.

If I had to run it, I'd only let through the absolute minimum number of TCP ports, and probably run an IPS with definitions for older Windows systems in front of it, assuming it cannot be air-gapped anyway. Not so much because it is particularly important function-wise, but because it would be a particularly useful place to explore from. But, I am probably still a bit paranoid from my days running high-profile, public-facing news media sites.

 

[harshness]

But, I am probably still a bit paranoid from my days running high-profile, public-facing news media sites.

I'm not sure how anyone with a public-facing Windows machine sleeps at night but there are more than a few of them out there.

 

[ncted]

I'm not sure how anyone with a public-facing Windows machine sleeps at night but there are more than a few of them out there.

Yeah. We never put any Windows on the public-facing infrastructure. We did do pen testing and red team assessments to see what the vulnerabilities are. We found that the web-hosting infrastructure was really secure even though we had feeds coming in via FTP and ran interpreted code, but there were tons of holes in corporate enterprise systems that had been secured using "best practices." That was the vector we needed to secure, and Windows, AD, and users were our biggest concerns. Best practices are usually at least a few years out of date, which is why we never bothered with them on the web infrastructure. We adapted a lot of what we developed for the public systems to the enterprise, even though it didn't follow PCI, etc. best practices. Our subsequent red team assessments took weeks to get in instead of the hours it took the first time.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Got this postcard for SatelliteGuys yesterday which I find interesting.

If I could host the site from my house we could save a ton of money.

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

 

[Juan]

I think you would need a gig atleast