wonk v3.0

For the past month or so (excluding the holidays) I have been getting stuck into Asterisk again. I have found the perl AGI interface to be particularly interesting and have been experimenting with some of the options. One of the things I would like to implement to gain some experience is a system to phone me up just before I finish work for the day and tell me what the freeway congestion is like. While I could easily look this up myself it is far more efficient to have a system look it up for me and then based on the level of congestion recommend either using the freeway or taking an alternate route. Although if the Victorian government was able to take care of the traffic problems it wouldn’t be necessary at all!

On another note I am thinking of selling my Cisco IP Phone 7910s due to their poor support under Asterisk. While they are a great phone when used with a Cisco CallManager the support in Asterisk is terrible resulting in all sorts of weird issues. I’d love to get a 7960, but they’re a bit out of my price range at the moment.

New phone technology is voice of tomorrow (The Age)

Freshtel, a Melbourne based VoIP provider, is planning to offer hardware VoIP phones in the Australian market this month. There are a number of VoIP providers in the US who do this, but AFAIK Freshtel will be the first to offer such a service to residential users in Australia. Being a bit of a geek I am already rolling my own Asterisk based VoIP setup for my home, but for the average consumer with broadband this would be a great service.

About a week ago I made reference to an Article written in PC Magazine about the open source PBX Asterisk. This morning while browsing through my web server logs I noticed the following visitors to my Asterisk post:

63.167.10.254 - - [15/Jun/2004:04:48:04 +1000] “GET /blog/2004/06/asterisk-article-in-pc-magazine.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 14133 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=asterisk+%22pc+magazine%22” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

63.167.10.254 - - [15/Jun/2004:07:06:57 +1000] “GET /blog/2004/06/asterisk-article-in-pc-magazine.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 14133 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=asterisk+pbx+%22pc+magazine%22” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”

63.167.10.254 resolves to mailny.ziffdavis.com, which would appear to be an external internet gateway in NY for Ziff Davis, the publishers of PC Magazine.

So hello to the good folks at PC Magazine! You may wish to note there are no huge advertising graphics in the middle of this text. I find the text much easier to read without them. Maybe you could try it too!

Asterisk: An Open-Source PBX Gateway (PC Magazine).

PC Magazine have thrown together a series of ads with some small text blocks around them related to Asterisk. If you’re interested in reading the article instead of just looking at ads I’d recommend viewing the print version instead.

My Cisco IP Phone 7910s have arrived and are up and running. With the exception of creating the .cnf files they request over TFTP at bootup the whole process of getting them working was surprisingly easy. Last night I was even able to call a local company over IP to enquire about some of the PC hardware they sell of connecting to the PSTN. Also, thanks to IAXtel I can dial USA 1800 numbers for free. How good is that!?

I have taken the plunge and purchased a couple of IP phones from eBay. They’re due to arrive this week, so in preparation I have been busy installing Asterisk. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to compile cleanly on FreeBSD, and the word on the mailing list was support for non-linux systems is fairly crippled anyway. As a result I’ve also set up a Gentoo box to run Asterisk on. The Gentoo setup took a while since there is no automated installer, but after I went through all the steps in the handbook everything seems to be working fine.

All I need now is the phones to arrive.