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.
