A couple of months ago my Asterisk box bit the dust. What happened? As far as I can tell the motherboard gave up the ghost. Which is a new event for me, I've never had a motherboard die before!

So what does this mean?

It meant finding a box to put my Digium cards in. I tried the cheap- ass route of reusing another old computer in the house, only to discover that it too had problems. In the end I just forked out $399 for a new 1u box to install my digium cards (BTW don't plugin in FXO lines to FXS, turns out it burns out the ports....).

And for software?

Time to try out Trixbox!

Trixbox is the new version of Asterisk@Home. The Asterisk@Home project recently changed their name, which to me was a brilliant idea. While I do see some home users of their project, I find that there are more business users. Trixbox is built on CentOS and comes with both MySQL and SugarCRM.
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One of the projects I completed last week was the upgrade of the house phone system to the latest version of Trixbox (aka asterisk, aka defunct Asterisk@Home, more to come on that later).

I rarely answer my home phone line though. To even get to my extension you have to know what it is ahead of time, since the message you get when you dial my home phone line is "go away". If you know my extension though you can still get to me, which most likely means you will get my voicemail. All voicemail from the house line is sent to me as email, unlike my cell phone where it sits and rots.

If you can navigate my home phone system, I probably want to hear from you. With the upgrade I wanted my phone system to push data to me. To do this I wanted to integrate it into Laslow (and yes this is the next generation of Wolsal for those who remember it).

Laslow is an AIM bot that I run.

Why AIM? When my …

In my previous job at Sifira A/S, I developed the first version of chan_ss7.

Chan_ss7 is a module for Asterisk, which interfaces Asterisk to an SS7 network.

So what is SS7? It is the network that runs the worlds telephone network. Chances are that as soon as your phone call reaches the local central (analog/ISDN) or base station (cell phone), it is transported over SS7. SS7 is the domain of big telephone switches from Nokia, Ericsson, and others, and a lot of very expensive and proprietary equipment.

So how does that fit with the world of cheap IP-based telephony and Free software? As it turns out, not bad at all!

Since my …

Woke up this morning to discover a new guide to Asterisk@Home via Planet Asterisk. Reading through the guide has pretty much solidified my wish to move the house phone system to 2.6 when I get home. For those not playing along from home, I stumbled across Asterisk@Home less then a year ago, and have decided that my VOIP system is never going back to me hacking everything by hand.

The Asterisk@Home project releases a CD that installs not only a full PBX, but a working CRM system and database (ala MySQL). The setup is incredibly easy and most novices should be able to have it working in a couple of hours.

The project is still on the hobby'ist side of development but it is rapidly improving itself. I could easily see a small company …

The flight I am on is delayed and they have us sitting in the plane while they fix something on the plane.

So what do I do? Pop open the laptop, fire up DUN and start pulling down email. My phone just became my connection to the world.

Why does Cingular suck? Because they disable DUN on the Treo's they ship. My current email reading, web surfing lifestyle is all made possible by a warranty voiding approach that I found that allowed me to enable a feature they decided they didn't want their customers to have. If you buy a phone from Cingular you get a phone that they have hacked up to remove features that they don't want you to have.

And what would be the story if you bought your phone on your own and skipped buying it from Cingular?

You would get this feature built it.

Cingular sucks. I live for the day of the Wi-MAX revolution where we can see the death of the closed phone …

So this is the plan. Welcome to Dial-A-Monkey!

Do you need to give out a phone number from time to time? Would you like it so that the tele-marketer gets an earful when he dials?
Try giving out this: 360-226-7186

I actually have two numbers right now, the above, and a secret one. The secret one is being fed directly into my Asterisk server's blacklist. I am giving it out as my home number whenever I sign up for free stuff. This number, 360-226-7186, I am letting anyone use. I won't blacklist from people who call it, so feel free to play with it.

So how am I doing this for free? (ok, minus my time, a computer, some electricity, and the anger of those around me for not leaving the house on a Saturday).

Go to http://www.freeworlddialup.com/ and get a number.
Next go to sourceforge and install Asterisk@Home. For what I …

Just as a reminder, there is a MySQL Seattle Meetup on Monday at the Elysian. People show up at 7:00.

More Information is here:
http://mysql.meetup.com/31/events/4796298/

I believe I should have some O'Reilly books on hand to give out.

Topics have included: MySQL, MySQL, favorite science fiction shows, Asterisk, and the ever popular "how many channels of TV are you recording on your MyTH system"