Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

As discussed a previous post about Home Plans, I mentioned about building the best network I possibly can (relative to our needs). To accomplish this, I had the builder of my house run 11 Cat6 cables throughout our house, all going back to the closet of the bedroom that I'm designating my office. I've chosen Ubiquiti Unifi for all of the network equipment. 

As I've mentioned in other posts, my wife and I are currently building a house. We've been talking about buying a house for 5 years, and have been saving specifically for the downpayment since 2018 (after paying off our car and taking care of some out-of-pocket medical stuff). It's currently still a plot of dirt with some boards laying out the foundation, but that hasn't stopped me from nerding-out with tech plans. After a lot of research and thinking, I've come up with some (reasonably) solid plans for the network, distributed audio, home theater and smart home functions.

If you're in IT then you've likely heard of DNS. Most of us aren't experts in it but perhaps you'd like to know more about it. I'll go over a quick intro to how DNS works at a very high level and then wrap up with a description of the different types of records, or types of information, that comprise DNS.

One of my current responsibilities at work is managing a system called InformaCast which is an IP paging system created and sold by Singlewire Software and ties into Cisco Unified Communications Manager. InformaCast is engineered with being the foundation of an Emergency Notification System or Mass Notification System. It uses Cisco IP Phones, IP speakers and Desktop computers as an endpoint to deliver text and/or audio messages to. It can also be used by schools or manufacturing plants to control bells and such.

Earlier last week, I was asked to setup a new phone for our IT Director. I've setup phones before so I figured it couldn't be too big of a task. I'm definitely not well-versed with Cisco's Unified Communications Manager (aka, UCM) but I knew enough to be dangerous. What I thought was going to be a simple swap turned into something more than I'd bargained for.