Asterisk PBX Backgrounders

Just a quick reference to a series of outstanding Asterisk backgrounders at VoIPPlanet. Once you read this one, go to the bottom to the backrounder index, and you'll see a slew of articles discussing various permutations of Asterisk and Trixbox. Recommended.

Tricks with Trixbox

Trixbox is a pre-configured Asterisk PBX which allows you to create a comprehensive home or business phone system which multiple extensions, and multiple lines. The single TrixBox installation CD creates a Linux server with a web server, database backend, the Asterisk PBX, the Sugar CRM server application, and a set of web-based management tools to manage everything. While all the bits and pieces are available separately, Trixbox automates much of the setup.

Currently, my setup includes two IP phones that look like conventional desk phones. These plug into my local area network. Each has an IP assigned to it. Each is a small web server in itself, as they can be configured using a web browser. I've assigned extension 200 to my phone, and 201 to the second desk in the office (John).

When the two IP phones connect to the network and register with the Trixbox, they behave much like regular phone extensions in a corporate office. I can call from one to the other by dialing the three-digit extension. I can put a caller on hold, or I can "park" a call. I can set up a conference call.

Both extensions have voice mail. If an extension receives voice mail, then it flashes its lights to show that there is a message waiting. You can also have the Trixbox automatically forward voice mail to eMail, with the voice message as an attachment. After leaving myself a message from the 201 extension, I received the following message in my Outlook Inbox:


Dear Larry:

Just wanted to let you know you were just left a 0:09 long message (number 1) in mailbox 200 from John, on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 at 06:12:07 PM so you might want to check it when you get a chance. Thanks!

--Asterisk


The voice message was attached as a .WAV file. The names of Larry and John are automatically taken from the assigned names within the Asterisk configuration. I'm assuming you can customize this further...by digging into the configuration.

My outbound telephone connection provider Voicepulse provides a service which completes calls from my PBX to virtually any phone number in the world. Voicepulse accepts calls via the internet and then transfers them to the regular phone system. (see diagram). Voicepulse provides capacity for up to four simultaneous calls. Additional capacity can be added by buying additional "trunks", which then would allow you to make higher numbers of simultaneous calls. What's interesting about this is how scalable it is...you don't need to run wires, or wait for the phone company to come to install additional lines.

Of course, I'm running this with very low volume; since I have a two phones, I can have a maximum of two simultaneous calls. Eventually there will be issues as far as internet bandwidth, and processor capacity. Right now I'm running my Trixbox on an old Dell Optiplex, with a 450Mhz processor.

Chron This Week

In the November 23rd edition of the Chronicle of Philanthropy

Fundraising

Big discussion about the how aggressive fund-raising techniques are alienating donors. Some donors get hacked off after being contacted by telephne on a monthly basis. Well, who wouldn't?

Grants and Research

The MacArthur Foundation will spend 50 million dollars over five years to fund research into the effect of digital media and the internet on the education and social development of children.

Conferences

Recent non-profit tech conferences:

March 22-24 2006 in Seattle - Non-Profit Technology Conference

March 25 2006 in Seattle - Penguin Day, potential and challenges of using open source software

Effect of the election results

Nonprofit groups should expect no change in the efforts of the Seanate Finance Committee to tighten laws and regulations affecting nonprofit accountability and political involvment, since the views of the possible new Democratic chairman, Montana's Sen. Max Baucus, seem to be similar to those of the outgoing one, Iowa's Sen. Charles Grassley.

Unsticking a print job in Windows XP

I never understood why it takes so long to delete a print job that is stuck in a Windows XP print queue. Anyway over at Gizmo Grabowski's web log, there is a multi-step process to recovering from a stuck print job.

1. On the taskbar, click Start, and then click Run.

2. Enter the following:

net stop spooler (and hit enter)

3. Delete all files in the following folder:

C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers

4. Once the spool files are deleted, start the spooler again:

net start spooler

Keeping our Youth in our State

Our local newspaper, the Gannett-owned Burlington Free Press ran an article today entitled Trying to Keep Them Down on the Farm. (Don't know how long the link will last). There has been a lot of discussion lately about demographics of our state, and how we seem to be loosing our kids, and what will it take to keep them here. I wrote back:

The public hand-wringing about keeping our youth (Monday Nov 27th) seems to miss a couple of points.

I grew up in Montpelier from the age of 2, and attended the Montpelier public schools. By the time I graduated from high school, the last thing I wanted to do was to join the 50% of my college-bound classmates to attend UVM. I was desperate to get out of Dodge. After seeing some of the rest of the country and the world, I was happy to return to Vermont where I've now been for almost twenty years.

Secondly, most businesses in Vermont are small, and small businesses can be attractive to young people who want to make a difference in their work life. However, when a small business wants to hire, and is expected to provide health insurance for employees, that can be a $12,000-$15,000 up-front cost for an employee with a family. Uncoupling of health insurance from employment would be the single most effective job creation strategy for our state.

Thirdly, young people like to work in growing industries, in a creative environment. Much of the rest of the country, and progressive countries in Europe and Asia have decided that broadband internet and wireless are essential business infrastructure and that environmental technology and mitigation of global warming are areas of growth. Sadly, led by the Free Press editorial board, and our governor, public opinion in Vermont has written off renewable power, and our state and leaders continue to be obsessed with multi-million dollar traffic projects (Circ highway, Bennington bypass) which will be obsolete within fifty years. And broadband expansion? We've left that to Verizon, who is attempting to sell its holdings in rural New England, and to bankrupt out-of-state cable companies.

To put this in a little more context:

1. Verizon is running around Albany New York installing fiber cable to homes. The cost for a triple play (cable, telephone, and internet access) will be equivalent to what I'm paying for cable broadband alone. (no TV....mind you, just broadband). At the same time they have publicly stated that they are minimizing their investment in New England, and indeed they are attempting to sell their landline telephone lines in Maine, New Hamshire and Vermont. Almost anyone in VT who can get broadband can get it only from a single provider. Forget broadband wireless.

2. Anything other than highways in Vermont gets short shrift. The "Circ", a ring road around the city of Burlington was proposed 30 years ago.

3. Wind projects, which are suitable on a maximum of 5% of the ridgeline in Vermont, and which could provide between 10% and 20% of our electricity have been discouraged by the local media and our governor. Land preservation has also been discouraged by the governor, even though the wilderness areas are a tiny fraction of the land area in Vermont. At the moment we actually get over 50% of our energy from renewables; hydropower from Quebec, and biomass (wood chips). The balance comes from a nuclear energy plant in the southern part of the state and from gas-fired turbines and out-of-state power. The Quebec hydro contracts are due to expire in 2012, and the projected 30-year life of the nuclear plant is due to expire shortly thereafter.

Trixbox/Asterisk PBX

After hours and hours and hours of troubleshooting. I have finally managed to get my Trixbox software PBX to use the Voicepulse service for outbound calling. Kudos to the Voicepulse tech support folks who patiently called back each day for five days. A test call to my mother-in-law sounded fine...better than calls made through the hardware interface to my second land-line.

The problem appears to be the router, a DLink DI-604 router which is admittedly a low cost router, and frankly, one that has worked well for videoconferencing, which is, arguably even more complex than routing voice over IP. But, when I finally eliminated it from the chain of boxes on the way to my cable modem, indeed I was able to connect. So, now, I'm running on an older Linksys BEFSX41. I have the Trixbox in the DMZ of the Linksys router.

So, reviewing: My problem had nothing to do with Comcast. It had nothing to do with the change from Adelphia to Comcast last week. It had nothing to do with Trixbox. It was the router.

Now, there are a couple other outstanding issues. Currently, the hardware connection to the landline doesn't work any more since my latest reinstall. I think this is a configuration problem. I'm also trying to get inbound service from Voicepulse, but they don't provide phone numbers in my local calling area.

As part of my troubleshooting, I installed a scratch Asterisk install on a Ubuntu Linux box. Ubuntu is the up and coming distribution these days, and I like it a lot. It is available in various flavors, including a server, LAMP server, Desktop, Educational Desktop version, Education Server version as a terminal server, and several others. Configuring Ubuntu is a snap when the GUI front end is installed, less so when you are mucking about on the command line.

Trixbox uses Cent-Os which is a derivative of Red Hat.

With both distrubutions it helps to be able to use a remote login via SSH. With Ubuntu, I had to install a server to allow this...Cent-Os includes it as part of the base installation. I also installed Webmin, which is a web-based management package, again which allows you to perform the most common system server maintenance from a web browser.

The PBX is nowhere near production yet. I've got bits and pieces that work sometimes, but not others, and getting everything to work together seems to be a ways off. I need to set this aside for a few days, and go back to my "day job".

Enthusiasm Score as of November 20th

Well, it is close to the day of Thanksgiving, and I suppose I should be grateful for all of the wonderful Microsoft software and hardware that I've been using for the past year or so. An update on things written about lately, with scores from 1-10, where 10 is the greatest.

Microsoft Office 2007
The components of this comprise the the usual suspects:

• OutLook 2007
  
• Word 2007
  
• Excel 2007
  
• Access 2007
  
• OneNote 2007
  

After using Word 2007, OutLook 2007 and OneNote 2007 for several months now, through the beta 2 Technical Refresh, I can say for sure that the winner is OneNote. OutLook remains a bloated pig, and in Word, the interface changes are radical enough that the more attractive page output does not necessarily justify the so-called ribbon interface. I've tried....really, I've tried to like the ribbon, but frankly there is a substantial learning curve there, which is going to be difficult to get people over. Score overall Office 2007 [5], Individual apps: OneNote [10], Outlook [3], Word [5]. I'm reserving judgement on Access...since there is no Access runtime available. I'm looking forward to improvements in the Access security model, which is seriously screwed up with workgroup security in version 2003.

Desktop Search: X1 [10]. A superb product with great support. Microsoft Desktop Search, by comparison, appears to be a typical version 1 from Microsoft. I had to remove it because it would periodically take over my machine and render it useless. It would be nice if OutLook didn't have a permanent band under the toolbar that reminds me that I need to install MDS.

Desktop Video Conferencing: SightSpeed [10] No serious Microsoft alternative. Microsoft keeps talking about how they are now going to play in the unified messaging space...but they'll be late to the party. Maybe in two years, when they have version 3?

Operating System: Windows Vista Enterprise [4]. I used the first betas of these but when trying to install the RTM version, I managed to clobber my boot record, and crashed my workstation. I know...they say don't beta test on a production machine, but how are you supposed to know how a new product integrates with your lifestyle if you don't use it in context with your daily work? I didn't mind Vista, and of course new machines will have it pre-installed, but I don't think it is worth worrying about upgrades. In contrast, people should consider upgrades to Windows XP Service Pack 2, the latest and greatest Windows XP. It appears to be relatively stable, and secure.

The main hope with Vista is that finally you'll be able to run more software without administrator rights on the desktop. And, I hope, be able to permanently disallow any changes to services. The idea that a spammer can download a worm or Trojan and actually run this on your machine without your knowledge is ridiculous...and it needs to be stopped by the operating system...Sorry Symantec and Trend.

Internet Explorer 7 [3] Finally they have tabs! I prefer Firefox. [10]

Development Tools:
All over the map. I like the Visual Studio 2005 Express editions. [10] I just wish I had more time to play with them. For database work in a Microsoft world, Access is ascendant...with SQL-Server on the back end. Access can't compare to Visual FoxPro, but with third party support for VFP fading fast, and a commitment by Microsoft for only a final set of libraries to integrate VFP with the .NET technologies of Visual Studio, VFP is a tough call for any new development.

For web development, I'm still using Dreamweaver and the Macromedia Studio 8 suite. [7] I've got two applications in production that use ColdFusion as the middleware. [5] And I think Contribute, at about $75.00 a pop...is the best thing for people who need to update an existing web site on a regular basis. [8] It will be interesting to see how Adobe integrates the Macromedia applications...right now they have a confusing conglomeration with a lot of overlap.

On the Linux side, there are interesting things to look forward to: Eclipse, a newly open sourced Java, Ruby, Rails, PHP, and the solid mySQL and PostgresSQL back end databases.

I wish Microsoft would get back to writing software. What's with MSNBC? What's with the XBox? Why do they feel that they have to have a finger in every pie? They should focus on the office suite, a decent set of operating systems, and development tools.

Heads-up re RSS aggregator

Goggle offered an upgrade to their blog software, and like an idiot I did it. Everything broke. It seems to have broken the RSS feeds, the graphics location, the archives, and the home button which goes back to the top of the main blog.

The feed problem is fixed by resetting your RSS feed reader, ie. deleting the feed in your RSS feeder in reimporting it from the main blog. Archives work now. And I'm about this far from going to WordPress.

Now that feeds can include ads, I'm wondering how long it will be before even RSS feeds will look like the dog's breakfast, as do many blogs. The latest innovation I have noticed is two columns of AdSense ads. There is almost no more room for copy. And is anyone actually making any money on these stupid ads?

"Free" GoConference is $9.99 per month.

Ok....help me out here. Here is what appears to be a useful service, web conferencing. You can apparently do an audio conference for free. (really free). But, forgive my cognitive dissonance filter, what's with the web conferencing thing?

Tech Friday: Asterisk/Trixbox Update

Tech Friday is our occasional Friday afternoon dweeb-fest, where if we are going to publish actual programming code (rarely), or get technical, it tends to happen on Friday.

Since installing Trixbox, the pre-configured version of Asterisk I've been playing with all the features. I've got it connected to a single phone line, with a simple automated attendant, "press 1 for Larry, press 2 for Bob" kind of thing and that part seems to work fine. I've got two Grandstream Budgettone 101 phones working fine. They have message ready lights, tell the date and time and will show the caller-id on their LCD read-out.

I read the O'Reilly book about Asterisk, which serves as the Asterisk user manual, and it was very helpful in figuring out the intricacies of trunks, routes, and extensions, and how these all fit into a dial plan. But now I've hit the wall, and am trying to figure out two show-stoppers:

Hanging up the line

Sometimes the hardware phone line doesn't "hang up" after a call. Example: Somebody calls through the landline, leaves a voice mail and then hangs up. There are times when the hardware card doesn't hangup. Searching through through the archives, I found several mentions of this, so far with no good solutions. It applies to both the X100T Digium cards, and apparently the T4xxxx cards as well. Supposedly the Sagamore cards are more reliable. But, I'm hesitant to shell out another couple hundred bucks for more cards.

Configuring software "trunks"

As an alternative to hardware trunks, (destinations for calls placed outside your own organization), you can configure either free or (usually) paid-for internet destinations where your call is sent and then connected to other subscribers or to landliness. Ultimately, of course, this is indeed what you want to do...any phone system is useless if you can't connect to other phones. I first tried Free World Dial-Up a free service that was one of the first available termination services. My box seemed to register with this without problems, but any calls sent out to the destination were unanswered.

So then, I subscribed to VoicePulse using their plan for Asterisk. VP will provision your Asterisk service with four trunks, two for the IAX2 protocol, native to Asterisk, and two SIP trunks. The SIP trunks appear to register, but the IAX2 trunks do not. According to the VoicePulse tech support, I may have problems with closed ports at my router.

You need to have port 5060 open for SIP and/or 4569 UDP open to use IAX2. Using my D-Link DI-604 router I tried several different configurations; I put the Asterisk machine in the DMZ, which means that is should be exposed to anything coming to the router, and I forwarded specific ports to the Asterisk box. No cigar.

I then checked the availability of the ports using Steve Gibson's Shields-Up. These show both ports as "closed". Uh oh. It may be related to the router or possibly something else. However, if they have been closed by Comcast (our new owner who has taken over from Adelphia Cable) then I may be SOL.

Tech Friday: Working with Bar Codes

I’m working with an ID Automation SC5USB bar-code scanner which a client has asked to use for an inventory program. I found ID Automation on the web, and ordered their plain vanilla bar code scanner for about $150.00. They sell everything necessary for bar coding, including the printers, the software and the scanners.

To a computer, the bar-code scanner "looks" like a keyboard. I plugged it into my laptop, and it was instantly recognized, with no software required.

I opened up Notepad on the computer, and scanned the bar code on a CD jewel case that I had lying around, and shazzam! the equivalent set of numbers for the bar code were “typed” into NotePad. A highly gratifying out-of-the-box experience.

The scanner can be further “programmed” by scanning a series of bar codes contained in the instruction manual. I think my next step is going to be to create some bar code labels from my database program, and see if those can be accurately scanned.
It doesn’t matter which direction you allow the reader to read the bar code, it can read up or down.

There is a nice introduction to bar codes on wikepedia.

Here is another barcode faq.

Grantsmanship Seminar in Laconia New Hampshire

Just got word that tgc is coming to our neck of the woods (Northern New England).
I took the seminar years ago and found it was outstanding.

---

The Grantsmanship Center’s signature Grantsmanship Training Program is coming to Laconia, New Hampshire, December 4-8, 2006. The program will be hosted by The Teen Center of the Lakes Region.

The Grantsmanship Training Program covers all aspects of researching grants, writing grant proposals and negotiating with funding sources. More than 100,000 nonprofit and government personnel have attended this comprehensive 5-day workshop, which now includes a full year of valuable membership services.

During the workshop, participants learn The Grantsmanship Center’s proposal writing format, the most widely used in the world. In addition to practicing the most advanced techniques for pursuing government, foundation, and corporate grants, they develop real grant proposals for their own agencies.

Upon completion of the training, participants receive free follow-up, including professional proposal review, access to The Grantsmanship Center’s exclusive online funding databases, and an array of other benefits.

Tuition for the Grantsmanship Training Program is $825 ($775 for each additional registrant from the same organization).

To ensure personalized attention, class size is limited to 30 participants. To register online, to learn about scholarship opportunities for qualifying organizations, or for more information, visit http://tgci.com/gtptraining.shtml. Or call The Grantsmanship Center’s Registrar at (800) 421-9512.

The Grantsmanship Center
PO Box 17220
1125 West 6th Street, 5th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90017
(213) 482-9860
FAX (213) 482-9863
www.tgci.com