,|) Phones!
|'
|.
`|) Soooo,... I've been having a bit of fun with asterisk again
lately. For a long time I've been wanting to hook up the
payphone, among other things, up to a hand-configured
asterisk server. My first attempt was with a raspberry-pi
based setup, with a hat that provides 2 phone ports. Alas,
the drivers for that bit of kit, were not well maintained,
and the whole thing only really worked if you used the
pi image that came with the hardware, which ran some
butchered version of FreePBX. I don't like it when web-based
UI's overwrite my hand-written config files, so this was
less than ideal.
When I eventually gave up on that, I used an off-the-shelf
cisco voip thingy for a while, because it was less headache
than trying to get the pi-based franken-pbx thing to work.
But now, I have finally achieved the setup that I wanted
from the get-go. I ordered some telephony cards and set up
a machine to put them in, and installed and configured
asterisk on that. Now I can have proper phone menu's, and
patch in the various upstream voip providers in a nice clean
way.
I never signed back up to tilde.tel after cat stopped
running it, mainly because I never got around to setting up
my phone stuff the way I liked it. And now that I finally
have, I submitted another account request. I also got a few
extra DID numbers from voip.ms and I also patched in my
sdf voip subscription into this system. So in the end I
should have a bunch of local phones, and 3 upstream voip
providers, all patched into the same system. FINALLY.
>> FEELS GOOD. <<
I've been pretty happy with voip.ms -- They have a huge
bunch of numbers to pick from, in many geographical
locations. They also have a search function, so obviously,
I had to pick up a few that end in -1337, you know, for
extra cheeeze, hahaha. I also picked up a number in Belgium
so family can call me without having to be charged with
outrageous fees. For that one, I set up a queue in asterisk
that rings all my phones simultaneously, including my cell.
I updated my main gopher landing page and got rid of the
fancy ansi color version. It was a bit of a pain to maintain
and I plan on finishing my BBS and put all the fun ANSI art
on there, which is a more suitable platform for that anyway.
And cat's new (well, I guess not-so-new anymore) baud.baby
design is so awesome now, it serves as a much better demo of
what can be done with gopher.
I also picked up another -3117 number that's intended to be
the modem number for the BBS. For now I've been doing some
testing by dialing out to BBS'es just to see what baud rates
I can get using this system... voip is always kinda... tricky
with modems. I can get it to negotiate 9600 baud, but there
are many random lags and drops. I'm not sure what else I can
do to make this better. I'm also not sure if the problem is
with my end, or the places I'm calling, as I imagine most of
them are using voip these days as well, so that just makes
things even more flakey.
I'm using iax2 to connect w/ voip.ms (not sip) and I've got it
set up to force the ULAW codec, which i *think?* should be
alright for modem use? I also set up a jitter buffer, but yeah
... obviously it's still not as smooth as it would be over a
copper pots line. If anyone knows other things that can be
done, let me know!
