Re: [gentoo-user] telephony

[Stroller]

On 23 Apr 2009, at 16:57, Simon wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 2:22 AM, Stroller
>> ...
>> I've actually got a really expensive (or it was when I bought it!)
>> Cisco
>> phone and an X100 POTS card sitting here, as I've been meaning to
>> get round
>> to implementing Asterisk for about 4 years now! Perhaps this thread
>> will
>> give me a little bit of a kick up the arse.
>

>  nice to see a friend in a similar situation as mine!  I'm sure that
> having the hardware already, you probably made a lot of tests in the
> past...  can you share some of your experience?  and also, i wonder,
> why did you let the project down? was it because of lack of motivation
> (ie other priorities) or because the difficulties you found

I've fixed your quoting. If someone replies at the bottom of your  
post, please do not then reply at the top.

No, I'm afraid I never made any tests or anything like that. I use  
vgetty here at present, and have been for 5 years - that is just a  
service that uses a conventional old voicemodem as an answerphone. It  
saves the recordings as wav-like files and can then (optionally) calls  
another program with /the/path/to/the/recording as a parameter, so I  
use a Bash script to convert the wav to an MP3 and email it to myself.

I have found an emailing-answerphone very useful, but at some point  
since I read about Asterisk and thought that a whole & complete VoIP  
"solution" was just much "cooler" and elegant & stuff. I think of  
redirecting callers to different answerphone messages based on CLID  
for instance ("I don't want your shitty double-glazing") or telling  
the phone not to ring before 9am if it's a business call. To be  
realistic, these aren't very good arguments - vgetty might be able to  
perform the first task I gave as an example (I don't know), and the  
latter case wouldn't really suit my lifestyle (sometimes I'm up at  
8:30 and want to answer the call; the list of exclusions for important  
customers would be complicated to manage; I'm better off rolling over  
in bed & ignoring unwanted calls as I do now ;). So we get back to the  
"cool" factor ("I can make free VoIP calls to the USA" even though I  
know no-one in the USA) and that at least Asterisk could look up phone  
numbers in an LDAP directory so I can ignore customers who call when  
their work is overdue. :P

So anyway, a while back, in a fit of enthusiasm when I had plenty of  
cash slushing about I grabbed the hardware from online vendors, but it  
has sat here idle ever since. :(
I've been meaning  for sometime to rebuild my server so that I'd have  
a system to run Asterisk on, but just lots of other stuff has gotten  
in the way. It would be a long & boring story to explain all the  
circumstances that have coincided against me, but suffice to say I'm  
not the best-organised person at the best of times.

If you want Asterisk to answer your conventional POTS phone line then  
you can use an X100P card which you can buy for c £17. AIUI this is  
basically a modem based on a certain chipset that Digium have written  
drivers for. At one time Digium sold this hardware at quite a premium,  
but people realised that other models would work just as well, and  
Asterisk (who are sponsored by / part of Digium) has been very fair  
about supporting these "clones" in the codebase. They're obviously not  
supported if you buy an official support package, and IIRC I have seen  
posters on the Asterisk mailing list being snobby and refusing to help  
posters using the clones because it's "not supporting the developers".  
I don't know how well the X100P works, or if there are any "gotyas" to  
look out for, but I'm pretty sure plenty of people are using them. A  
couple of friends of mine (who I considered going into IT consulting  
with) implemented Asterisk after I mentioned it to them and I'm sure  
they've used the X100P; I think those lads have deployed Asterisk for  
customers since.

As far as phones are concerned, the Cisco 7960G was the phone to have  
when I bought mine. I think the 7961 had just been released, or  
something, and the 7960 was old stock. I paid £200 for mine, but now I  
see you can pick up decent-looking ones on eBay for £40 or £50. :o  
This phone has handsfree and a big screen on which you can display  
several lines of information (caller ID, "line 2 on hold", phonebook  
listings) and buttons to the side of the screen so that you can put  
someone on hold & pick up another line and do all that sort of stuff.  
Although the 7960 is no longer a current model it seems to be  
supported with fairly recent firmware, and later phones in Cisco's  
79xx series seem very similar without appearing to add much (256  
shades of greyscale instead of plain B&W text, or colour / touch  
screens in the executive models).

If you use the X100P to answer your current landline then you're not  
limited to that. A PBX is intended for business use, and a business  
might want to have 8 or 30 lines coming in via ISDN but also some VoIP  
capacity to their other building down the street or over the internet.  
So within Asterisk (or, I imagine, Freeswitch) you can define the  
X100P as one line and subscribe to commercial VoIP services who can  
terminate additional calls for you (using a different number) or allow  
you to make outgoing calls; you might use that if their charges are  
cheaper than your landline telco, or if someone calls in on your  
landline you can conference-call someone else over VoIP. I believe  
that some enthusiasts who get free local calls allow you to connect to  
their VoIP server to utilise that; you would just add the appropriate  
lines to Asterisk's config file and it would work out from the area  
code that the server was suitable and route over the internet to it  
automagically.

I suspect, after spending so long writing this, that it doesn't tell  
you much you don't know already, but hopefully there is some little  
gem to be gleaned from my sparse knowledge.

Stroller.