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”.