Jacken’s Blog

So I’ve been busy for the last five days setting up my own Asterisk PBX. I’ve connected two different voIP lines to it. I have the X-Lite VoIP softphones installed on all the computers and a FSX device so I can use my normal wireless phone. And it’s really fun learning something new. First my wife though that I was crazy, “Who needs a telephone switchboard at home!?” But I think she’s coming around. Now she can sit at here computer using a headset and talk to her friends without holding the line. And it’s easy to transfer calls between all the phones in the apartment. It’s also nice to have a digital answering machine and get the messages mailed to you. The added benefit of multiple lines on the same phone number and that it doesn’t cost anything to dial a phone in Sweden is an added bonus.

The last two days I have worked on a Perl AGI module for Asterisk. When someone calls, the script looks up the name of the person or company calling on the internet and shows it on the phone display. It works now, but I’m about to start to add a database function to it so It saves the name/phone number in MySQL to minimize the load on the net and to get faster lookups. You can write the AGI in PHP, C or Perl so I decided that this was an excellent opportunity to learn Perl. It’s an amazing language for doing data mining. I will probably start using it now that I’m getting the hang of it.

It’s nice to see that there’s companies like Rix TeleCom. It’s one of my VoIP providers. And talk about great service. And they let their customers connect using an Asterisk server, they even have a forum for asterisk users on their web page. And a couple of their employees regularly answer technical questions on the forum. It’s nice to see a company that is “hacker” friendly. They’ll get my recommendation.