July 27th, 2010

As one of the first steps to going public from being a Private Ltd company, we wanted a good BOD. Our MD Mr.Vivek Kedia had requested Prof Janat Shah, IIM Ahmedabad, to join our BOD. He is presently a professor at IIM Bangalore. He has also been the joint Managing Director at Jaydeep Engineering Ltd and the Production Planning Manager at Gujarat Steel Tubes Ltd. He has written a few papers (and co-written a few) which have been accepted for publication in IIMB Management Review, and International Journal of Production Economics amongst others.

Needless to say, we were skeptical about how we would explain the vast scope of our work
when we were told that Prof. Janat would come to our Kolkata office on June 09th to understand
Grmtech’s work, the different departments, and its people and culture. The different department
heads, with a few team members, explained their departments, their working, and their
aspirations to him. We were pleasantly surprised that so learned and experienced a man was so
down to earth, and asked questions whenever he did not understand anything that we explained.

Though he had come directly from the airport after seeing our Rajarhat site, and it being a long
day of discussions, he took a lively interest in understanding the working of Grmtech. Our work
was new to him, as he had never been associated with this industry before. We were not sure if
he would ultimately decide to be part of our BOD.

It is an achievement and honour for Grmtech that Prof Janat decided to be a part of Grmtech, from July 11th. As our MD rightly pointed out, Grmtech now has double the confidence to take on more challenges, as we have knowledge and approachability combined with a keen interest backing us now.

Thank you Sir for deciding to be a part of us.

July 27th, 2010

Grmtech has introduced to give away the ‘Star Performer Award’ to its employees who have excelled in their field in this particular quarter. This time 5 of the employees from different fields have been felicitated with this award and a cash prize of Rs.1000

Name : Madhurima Ghosh Purkayasta Team : Content Writing She was declared as the Best performer in Content Development Team not only for the quality content articles which she wrote for good bloggers, but for helping her TL in training new joinees too.(See Certificate)
Name : Bikash Barman Team : Technical He was chosen for developing useful applications and guiding new joinees. (See Certificate)
Name : Rajeshree Das Team : Internet Marketing She got the best performer for achieving the highest GTR (678.95) in this quarter among her fellow 30 IMAs.(See Certificate)
Name : Varun Sarda Team : Financial Coach He was declared as the best performer in his team for achieving highest OCV($812151) in Q2 of 2010 among his 17 members team.(See Certificate)
Name : Vikram Gupta Team : Client Relationship He was felicitated with this award for collecting highest fees($46344.78) in this quarter.(See Certificate)

October 8th, 2009

Introducing…

The new monitoring system in the Sys Admin Department. Four consecutive monitors with the advance monitoring tools are fully loaded to provide the best monitoring service to the tech team. The monitoring system includes-

1. Smokeping Network Analyzer tool that monitors the VOIP Phones, Workstations, Network Switches and the Internet Sharing Servers and represent the analysis graph.

2. Realtime monitoring graph that reflects the internet connectivity and consumption of all the ISS.

3. Realtime Call Monitor that shows the number of incoming live calls along with the Agent as well as Group Statistics and

4.  Finally the Zabbix Monitor that keeps an eye at the whole galaxy of servers and websites of our company all the time and informs the current status of the clients connected to it.

September 3rd, 2009

Generally we configure asterisk to auto run on system start up. There may be situations when we may be required to run asterisk manually like when asterisk is overloaded or when asterisk is down for some maintenance.

If so happens, always start asterisk from asterisk user:-


#su asterisk
#asterisk

We should not use any custom user and of course not “root” user. If we start asterisk as any non-asterisk user, various functionalities may be affected like our custom applications may not get permissions to execute asteisk cli commands.

For ex. If we run asterisk as root, then php apps running via apache, when execute asterisk cli commands, get following error:-
Unable to connect to remote asterisk (does /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl exist?)

Run this command
#ls -l /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl
srwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Aug 3 04:55 /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl

As shown in the above result, non root users have no write permission.

Hence stop the asterisk using following command:-
#asterisk -rx "stop gracefully"
When asterisk will stop, use above mentioned process of starting asterisk as asterisk user.

July 1st, 2009

I have 150 extensions in my asterisk-freepbx setup, which are broadly divided into following two classes :-

1. Record Incoming Call On Demand. Record Outgoing Call On Demand
   Extensions in this class:  8001, 8002, 8003, 8004, 8005 (total 5 in number)
2. Record All Incoming Call. Record All Outgoing Call
   Extensions in this class:  9001, 9002, … , 9145 (total 145 in number)

To avoid manual configuration of each extension, I had taken following steps:-

1. Execute following queries on asterisk database (mysql):
   UPDATE asterisk.users SET recording='out=Adhoc|in=Adhoc' WHERE extension IN (8001, 8002, 8003, 8004, 8005)
UPDATE asterisk.users SET recording='out=Always|in=Always' WHERE extension >= 9001 AND extension <= 9145

   The above queries updates the recording setting for extensions in database. The effect for extension 8001 may be seen at http://Your-Asterisk-Freepbx-Server-Domain-Name/admin/config.php?type=setup&display=extensions&extdisplay=8001

2. Open each extension page and press the submit button. Finally click “Apply Configuration Changes” so that the changes may be propagated in running asterisk server

May 19th, 2009

We celebrated our 7th Foundation day today. We played some fun games and it was a real eventful evening.

Cake	7th Foundation Day Canvas

March 21st, 2009

At the datacenter the “IP KVM Virtual USB drive” wire was black and so were the power cables going into each of the servers.

We replaced the black wire with a red wire.

Now when we call remote hands to put the red wire labeled “IP KVM Virtual USB drive” to the USB port on one of the servers it would be so much easier,

March 2nd, 2009

The cables have been organized using “Velcro tie wrap” to avoid tampering of the cables accidentally.

February 22nd, 2009

On this server the operating system is installed on the 8GB compact flash card. So that the 10 hard drives of 1 TB each can be dedicated just to store the data in Raid1 and LVM on top of it.

Some of the things we are doing to install the OS on the flash card:
1. /var will be on the hard disk.
2. noatime for each of the partitions mounted on the flash card.

This article helped us quite a lot in optimizing our OS installation for the flash card:
http://deepgeek.us/running-linux-of-compact-flash