Bend in the Weather (Entries tagged as asterisk)

Mobile Internet for the entire household and universal mobile phone chargers

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:27:00 +1100

Huawei, the Chinese company that ruffled a number of Cisco feathers have been pushing out a number of wireless 3G devices for wireless broadband for some years. You can find the Huawei devices like the E220 and E169 available from several Australian telcos for 'mobile Internet'.

I personally own a E169 on a Optus Pre-Paid Mobile broadband connection as a 'backup' for when my ADSL connection goes down.

This week at the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona Spain, Huawei has announced the release of i-Mo; a combined 3G wireless modem and Wifi router unit. This means one connection can now support multiple people.

Many people are already dropping a dedicated telephone line and the cost of ongoing line rental, such a device is certainly only going to grow this market more, as it can now move from a single user device to a household device.

However, the biggest news from the Mobile gathering is that we're likely to finally see a universal power adapter for mobile devices (so no need for a new charger whenever you upgrade that mobile phone). They are also suggesting up to 50% power savings when charging your phone. Don't hold your breathe, it won't become active until 2012. If only they could do the same with damn data connectivity cables!

Asterisk should come with a warning!

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:53:00 +1000

Asterisk needs to come with a warning.

Releasing software like this to the wild is bound to just create havoc!

It's quite irresponsible of Digium to just give this software away, and not at least have some form of warning before people download it.

Let me explain...

Proprietary PABX/PBX makers and Telcos will loose millions of dollars with it
People can finally do what they like with their phones
For a newbie the configuration files can be daunting
Once bitten with the Asterisk bug, you are always tweaking and adding features.
Asterisk Administrators are likely to find themselves shunned in public when they mumble about trunks, extensions and dialplans.

Having said that, I totally love it!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, that we purchased some Snom phones, a Linksys SPA-3102 connected to some Panasonic cordless phones as well as a fax/modem (that runs Hylafax).

We've now have all extensions working, Voicemail, Conference Rooms, group pickup, call parking and Music on Hold taken care of.
I've even set it up that when our DID numbers are called that all the phones ring until someone picks it up.
(A very big thanks to Paul Dwerryhouse for being patient over many hours and answering my silly questions!)

I'm looking at adding iaxmodem to my Hylafax setup so we can utilise T.38 faxing, and fallback to PSTN when only required.
We receive more faxes then ever send, so it's not a real big issue.

Next, I wonder if I can integrate Nagios into Asterisk so when I am remote I can issue commands by dialling into the Asterisk PBX. I've already got 2-way SMS message alerting working on Nagios (Which I promise I'll post up one day shortly) using a range of OSS tools. I would however like a little more control on just what I can do remotely from time to time. (Ever notice Nagios only alerts when you are away from a computer!? )

Now I'm a self-confessed Asterisk-Addict™ (aka AA),

I'd love to hear some of the other neat things people are doing. I think something using ZoneMinder (front door camera, rings IP video phone to indicate someone is there) would be pretty cool.

So post your funky ways you're using Asterisk, I'm all ears!

Asterisk, Snom-300 VOIP phone and Power Over Ethernet.

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:16:00 +1000

Well it's coming up to the end of financial year, and like many businesses we needed to make a few purchases. (That or pay more corporate tax -- hmmm let me think.. more toys or more tax? )
Generally we don't make many purchases throughout the year and then buy up large near the end of the financial year. (well unless something fails!)

As such we decided to get a decent VOIP phone. We currently use a LinkSys SPA3102 with our cordless phone, but wanted to get a phone with a decent headset so we could talk hands free easily.

Snom-300. An excellent VOIP phone, with fantastic voice quality and a solidly built professional phone.

We spoke to a few people, did the research and settled on a Snom VOIP phone. In particular, we elected the Snom-300 as the phone of choice for us. Whilst it claims it's the 'base phone', unless you're mega-boss or a telemarketing guru I doubt the snom-320 or snom-360 phones are really required. (They basically have a lot of additional buttons and few features added to the base functionality).

You can configure the phone via the LCD menu system, or use the built in web based configuration. The web-based configuration is very well laid out and easy to navigate and locate what you need.

Upgrading the phones firmware is extremely easy and quite painless. You can watch the progress of the phone being flashed, and it's quite novel to see items like chroot, mount appear on your phones LCD.

Chroot, mount you say?! Yup, at the heart of every Snom is a Linux kernel. Whilst this wasn't the sole reason for buying the device, it's handy to know that with a bit of time I could in theory hack the phone.

The Snom-300 HS-MM3 headset is both comfortable and functional. Sound is clear and crisp through it.

I unfortunately get stuck is long boring teleconferences far too often, so I wanted to ensure I also had a phone that was able to plugin in a headset. Not all IP VOIP phones we looked at seemed to have that feature.

The Snom phones do, however they use an RJ-11 headset connection instead of a 2.5mm or 3.5mm jack that people are most familar with. (Many cordless phones also use the 2.5/3.5mm jacks).

As such, we decided to purchase them. They don't come cheap but are worth it. It's a much better solution than getting 'neck cramp' attempting to hold the phone under your chin, or even speaker phone (which seems to pickup more background noise), which can annoy anyone else within earshot.

With the headset, I'm able to easily keep working on my computer; punching away on the keyboard, and those on the other end are none the wiser! (Well besides being too distracted to really keep up with the conversation; dang! I think I just let my secret out....and to think -- people just thought I was vague on the phone!)

Our current setup has me registering both the ATA and the Snoms devices registering directly to our VOIP provider. This works fine, and allows multiple out going calls at the same time, but means only our ATA rings for incoming calls (we have two DIDs).

It makes sense, as the ATA picks up the incoming request and responds... well before the Snoms do. How to resolve?

Easily -- Asterisk to the rescue!

I can setup Asterisk as our local PBX (or PABX for those in Australia!), and have all devices register to it. Then the Asterisk server registers with our Voice Provider.

A bit of Asterisk config and I should be able to get all the phones to ring. In addition, it will allow me to use T.38, add MOH, and voice mail. I also like the ability to have local extensions so we can forward calls between various devices. Currently both Pauline and I share an office, but in our new house we'll be up other ends of the house. So call transfers make sense. I think it would be great to also create an IVR application that puts telemarketers into a loop of endless questions. (randomly generated of course -- so they aren't aware!) Though I think Paul Dwerryhouse's idea is probably the solution.

I'm a newbie to Asterisk (though I've been aware of it for a while -- I just haven't had a need for it)... so I imagine it might take me some time to configure it all up as we desire.

Once done, the only thing Telstra will be getting out of us will be the cheapest line rental we can pay. (They overcharge for that as well!) Though, there is not much getting around it whilst stuck on an ADSL1 connection.

Another purchase we made for the upcoming house was a nice 48-port managed Gigabit switch that contains 12 POE (Power over Ethernet) ports. These will be used to power our phones in the future, saving the need for the current power-pack.

The switch we went for is a D-Link DGS-3100-48P. Like most large switches it's full of fans and sounds like a DC-7 taking off. As a result, it's safely packed back in it's box and will be used after the house move!

We also purchased to UPSes (the old ones had dead batteries) -- strangely it's cheaper buying new UPSes than batteries.
So we ended up with 1 x 1500VA UPS and a 1 x 2200VA UPS.
It appears we'll probably need one more 1500VA.
I went with Powerware UPSes as their is reasonably good local support (and hopefully battery replacements!), and nut seems to work well.

All in all it's been a good month for hardware toys to play with.
Shame a fair bit of this new gear is a few months off until we get into the new house!

Now if only those Intel 8-core Xeons were out.... (my desired replacement server that will consolidate everything down!) If you wish to view a demo of what's coming.. take a look at the Intel demonstration.