Stroller wrote:
I've been doing this for about a year & a half now - it's very convenient.
:-) It wouldn't be hard to be more convenient than my dodgey "Audioline" digital answerphone!
understand that [vm]gety is a very low-level approach (which sounds a fair bit of work) and of Asterisk (which sounds as if it supports lots of functionality I don't need - as well as not explicitly stating that it can use my existing (voice/fax/modem hardware).
I've been using vgetty - the version in Portage is pretty good, and once I actually sat down to configure it I had it mostly up & running over the course of an evening - I think it sounds much more complicated than it is. Many modems are more or less supported, but I don't remember the details - searching & reading the archives of the mgetty mailing list will see you right. If you decide to go this route I have scripts to mail the messages as .mp3 attachments that I can let you have; it does them as proper MIME, and they even play from the IMAP client on my new Windows CE mobile phone. :D
I'm migrating to Asterisk Real Soon Now (tm), but it certainly won't support any of your current hardware - it's more appropriate if you want to do VoIP, probably involving routing all your telephone calls through it. If you have to ask, you probably don't want to use Asterisk yet.
Several people have been adament that I should use Asterisk - but I remained rather unconvinced... as all the documents I see surrounding Asterisk are interested in VOIP devices - whereas I want a solution for a more ancient technology.
Some scripts to munge vgetty interactions into emailed mp3 files sounds extremely useful (any chance of an emailed tgz - or putting them on an ftp site somewhere?) I was hesitating on vgetty not particularly because I was worried that I could manage to set up that sort of a system - but rather that I didn't want to divise a solution which wouldn't benefit from ongoing developments and that I'd want to change i a few months.
I don't have much use for VOIP per se at the moment - though I do like the idea of being contactable via "free" Skype and tieing that into my overall solution. I might want to "phone" my answerphone from my mobile if I'm expecting a call at home and I'm cut off from the internet... but that (beyond a customised voice mail system) is all I really need.
Steve -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
