Asterisk-Pbx

I’ve been hard at work on my IAX client software the last couple of days. I also have re-written a lot of the code. I decided early on that I wanted to have classical VU-meters to display the in and output volume. But I don’t want them to take to much CPU time. So I made a lot of optimizations on that code. So after the rewrite I managed to lower the CPU utilisation by half. And it’s fun to do programming in Cocoa, but the framework is hard to learn by the volume of it. But slowly I’m getting more comfortable.

The IAX client I’m writing is coming along nicely. It’s now in a state that makes the program usable. And today I made changes so I could compile a universal binary. And the program works on my PPC mac, but I use some libraries I needed to change the makefiles for, so I don’t know if they work on a Intel Mac. It would be cool if I could get the first release to support universal binaries, so hopefully I can find someone who has a developer machine, or a pc with a hacked Mac OS X for Intel on it.

With the latest beta firmware in the Grandstream GXP-2000 VoIP phone, the have added support for BLF. This means that you can use the quick dial LEDs for status of extensions. You can monitor all extensions on your phone. If a extension is busy, the led for that extension is lit. You can also dial directly to the extension by pressing the dial button. Very handy. ...

I now have a working IAX soft phone up and running. Answering and dialing works. The sound quality is good. And the amount of cpu usage is around three percent. But as soon as I add all the animating graphics, like sound input/output meters and stuff, that figure will go up substantially. But one of the goals is to try to avoid letting the program becoming a resource hog. I decided to really try to stay focused on the basic stuff to really iron out the bugs/memory leaks before continuing to the fun stuff like user interface. But thanks to Project Builder, it’s easy to make a usable interface immediately. ...

I’ve been looking for a softphone for Macintosh that uses IAX, but I haven’t been able to find a good one. The EyeBeam and X-lite uses sip and has stability problems so they are not an option either. So I started to write my own softphone. It’s nice to be programming in Cocoa again. But I’m becoming old, so I have to read up on programming in Cocoa again. I have a working softphone up and running already. Well, sort of. It receives calls and you can answer and talk. But I’ve only been writing on it for two days, and most of the time has been spent on installing a Subversion system on my server. As soon as I get a polished version, I’ll put up a beta program. I’m thinking of calling the program “Breaker-Breaker!” in the old CB-radio spirit. And yes, it will have the old style analog VU indicators for bandwidth and voice volume. ...

As soon as you mention the word VoIP, everyone responds with “Skype?” This immediately gets me into an discussion why people should not use Skype. The fact that your computer is used as a link to route traffic, much like BitTorrent. That it is based on a proprietary protocol, only known by Skype, so no other manufacturers can make compatible equipment without permisson (and probably a big fat wad of cash) to Skype Corporation. All this means that there’s no connection between Skype and regular SIP phones that is emerging as the standard for VoIP calls. But all hope is not lost. ...

I helped my friend Micke to set up an Asterisk@Home PBX server today. But when setting up Free World Dialup FWD, we had some problems. First I forgot to enable IAX in the account setup. After that, dialing out worked, but we could not dial in to his FWD number. To connect we use an IAX trunk. We searched for an hour trying to find the problem, and after searching Google we finally found the answer. In the trunk settings for FWD, the incoming user context has to be named iaxfwd. Irritating to say the least. After changing the name everything worked fine.

Asterisk: The Future of Telephony online from O’Reilly Media. They have released it under the Creative Commons license. This means that you can download the book here for free. But it also means that you should buy the book here. Now you have the downloaded pdf version for quick searching, and the nice feel of a paper copy for browsing.

After setting up my Asterisk@Home server and do all the configuring to get all lines and extensions up and running, it was time for recording the Digital Receptionist messages. My first stab at it wasn’t that great, let’s face it, I’m no voice-over announcer. I wanted a little more professionally sounding recording. So I started to search the net for a way to do it, and I think I found a pretty good solution. ...

I got my first real Voip phone, the Grandstream GXP-2000 a week ago. I have two ATA boxes to connect my old wireless phones, but I wanted to try out a real IP-phone. It’s a nice enough phone, feels a bit cheap (which it is), but I guess you can’t get everything for $100. Connecting it to my Asterisk server was a no-brainer. It has a web interface for setup, but you can do basic setup like ip-numbers from the phonepad. It’s great to have an message-waiting led on the phone. Then you just press the MSG button to listen to your voice-box messages. To enable this function, just put *97 in the field “Voice Mail UserID” in the Account page of the web setup. There’s support for up to 11 line indicators (with an additional key-module) but I think I’ll do fine with four. The only thing I haven’t got working is the Conference button, but it’s easy to just transfer the calls to a conference number. You also have 7 quick dial buttons. To configure them, just go to the web setup for the phone and enter the name and number. The sound quality is excellent. Much better than both the Linksys PAP2 and the i3 micro Vood VRG-121 box I have for my old analog phones. The speaker phone works, but isn’t fantastic. I normally just use the speaker phone while waiting for the call to go through, so for me that’s not a problem. There’s a new firmware I’ve just installed that’s supposed to make the speaker phone part work better, but I haven’t had time to test it fully. So would I recommend this phone? Yes, if you need a cheap voip phone that uses SIP I can really recommend this one. ...