A landline telephone has some benefits and you should not overlook them. You need to think about the benefits for the cost and weigh your alternatives. Some of the benefits include cheap long distance plans, unlimited local calling at any time, the ability to “conference” with several people/phones in your house, and 911 services (provided that you have them in your area). Another thing for some people to consider is a telephone for their children – the simplicity to have one number for the entire family and in the event of an emergency your kid being able to pickup the home phone and dialing 911.

My biggest obstacles were long distance and unlimited local calling (daytime minutes). My cell plan includes a good amount of daytime minutes for local calling and unlimited evenings and weekends after 6 pm – so I’m not too bad from that perspective. The long distance was the biggest hurdle; however, my solution actually solves both issues! I decided to venture into Voice over IP (VoIP). My cell plan also includes 6GB of data so I have quite a bit of VoIP time before I have to worry about data overages.

I decided to get a SkypeOut account. For $3 (CAD) per month it allows me to make unlimited North American calls at any time. That’s a pretty wicked deal. I can use it on any of my computers or on my iPhone 4 using WiFi (when available) or my 3G cellular data connection. Call quality in either scenario is great and most often people cannot tell when I’m calling via the cellular network or via Skype. In the interests of full disclosure, my home broadband connection is 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. SkypeOut even gives you the ability to link the callerID for your account to your cell number, so when I call people using Skype it still shows up on their phone as if it is me calling from my cell.

I have been using this combination for about three months now and have had virtually no issues… occasionally 1-800 numbers are a problem depending on which number SkypeOut chooses, but if you try it once or twice it’ll work. I highly recommend this setup to anyone who does not need a dedicated landline telephone! Given the prices I was paying here for my landline phone I am now saying approximately $20 per month!

I recently, for no apparent reason, was greeted by this message when trying to login to my WHS box via the desktop console. I have done some research on the issue and apparently it is caused by your computer being on a different domain than your WHS box. As to why it happened all of a sudden, I’m not sure. It worked fine for me for over a month.

Anyway, here is your fix… you have to add your WHS  box to your computer’s host file. In order to do this you need to first assign your WHS box a static IP address using your router. Since each router is different, I cannot explain how to do this, you’re on your own here. It should be in the documentation for your router.

Once you have setup a static IP on your router for your WHS box the next step is on the computer with which you are having connection issues. Navigate to this address in Explorer: “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc” and open the file hosts using Notepad.

Once you have the hosts file open you need to create a new entry between the lines “127.0.0.1 localhost” and “::1 localhost” for your WHS box in the following format: <whs static ip address> <whs box name>. As you can see in the picture below, the static IP for my WHS box is 192.168.1.106 and the name of my WHS box is grendel; obviously the IP and name of your WHS box will be different so fill it in appropriately.

Once you have the new entry made, save and close the hosts file. If you followed the steps correctly you should now be able to connect to your WHS box again!

Bonus points for anyone who can tell me what “Grendel” is.

Check out the screencast which I have created below. You can enlarge it to full screen mode by clicking the expand button below the play button.

Enjoy!