Re: [asterisk-users] asterisk and fail2ban
On Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:20:23 -0400, vip killa vipki...@gmail.com wrote: Is anyone using asterisk with fail2ban? Sorry for hi-jacking the thread, but I was wondering if there were a lighter alternative that I could run on appliances? Python uses too much RAM, but I need to find a way to ban hackers from trying to connect to Asterisk from the Net. I had worked with the sshguard guys to add support for Asterisk; I believe they added basic support. I haven't gotten around to revisiting that issue just yet so I don't know for sure. http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2010-December/256928.html sshguard is *extremely* lightweight compared to most things; it's a very efficient compiled C application that doesn't have (m?)any dependencies. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. -- _ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs: http://www.asterisk.org/hello asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Asterisk SIP attacks and sshguard
On Thu, Dec 09, 2010 at 07:57:37AM -0600, Joe Greco wrote: Specifically looking for examples of (or how to generate) 1) .*No registration for peer '.*' (from HOST) 2) .*Host HOST failed MD5 authentication for '.*' (.*) 3) .*Failed to authenticate user .*@HOST.* If anyone who is more familiar with the attacks or how to generate these messages would give me some assistance, or chime in on the sshguard-users list, that'd be most appreciated. You could use SIPVicious to run attacks on your own servers: http://code.google.com/p/sipvicious/ Those tools don't seem to generate (or I can't figure out how to get them to generate) any of the above messages; I already have plenty of the Registration from 'foo' failed for 'host' - reason messages that sipvicious seems to generate. I'm not quite sure what to do to generate examples of the above messages, any suggestions are appreciated. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. -- _ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs: http://www.asterisk.org/hello asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
[asterisk-users] Asterisk SIP attacks and sshguard
Hello, We had been seeing SIP-guessing attacks on our Asterisk server here. While it wasn't that hard to write a once-a-minute cron job to spank the lusers, that runs once a minute and creates little spikes in the usage and I/O graphs, and is slower to respond than I'd really prefer. I felt that it'd be much cooler to get something more comprehensive put together. We don't use fail2ban because I don't like having to install python. sshguard is a high-performance compiled C application that can run off a log file or a pipe from syslogd to sshguard, meaning that it can respond a lot more quickly than once a minute, and works with very modest overhead on the host system. It also has features such as touchiness, so that it can get tougher on a miscreant as time goes on; my own shell script is naive in that once it passes a threshold, there's just a permanent rule generated. This worries me if I ever have a situation where a legitimate remote client gets messed up and tries the wrong password or something like that; sshguard does a much nicer job in this regard. In any case, my initial attempts to create rules for sshguard didn't work right, quite possibly because I don't often work in LEX/YACC. I submitted a request to the sshguard guys suggesting new rules. http://www.sshguard.net/support/submission/detail/49ce7182028d8b6f3e3d/ and on their mailing list, a little more: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=F4E10075-5D93-43B4-B73A-1FD217BE130D%40sshguard.netforum_name=sshguard-users In particular, they're looking for log examples of some of those messages, but I have no idea how to generate the conditions that would cause these messages. I'm also not sure if there's a way to disable color codes in the Asterisk log files; we log indirectly via BSD's logger # asterisk -vvv 21 | logger -t asterisk so it may be thinking that the console is color-capable. We use this method because this forces them through the syslog mechanism; we need that for centralized logging, and it's handy for things like sshguard too. Specifically looking for examples of (or how to generate) 1) .*No registration for peer '.*' (from HOST) 2) .*Host HOST failed MD5 authentication for '.*' (.*) 3) .*Failed to authenticate user .*@HOST.* If anyone who is more familiar with the attacks or how to generate these messages would give me some assistance, or chime in on the sshguard-users list, that'd be most appreciated. Thanks. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. -- _ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs: http://www.asterisk.org/hello asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] IAX2 - providers discontinuing support
What is wrong with IAX2 protocol? If IAX2 is so much better than SIP so why providers discontinuing support for IAX2 I was with provider callwithus but they discontinue IAX2 I switched to checkbox.cc but they discontinued it as well. What is wrong with IAX2? The same thing that's wrong with a lot of theoretically superior technologies: SIP is *more* universal, and therefore if it's a choice of supporting two technologies or just one, SIP has more bang for the buck. Almost every gadget or gizmo supports SIP. Few support IAX2. To support IAX2 for the relatively small number of people who know what it is and who are running Asterisk or IAX2-capable gear may be more trouble than it is worth. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. -- _ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs: http://www.asterisk.org/hello asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] DID number
Hi All, Anyone one info of where I can get a 'free' DID number ? I have setup my asterisk box (home) and want to learn more but I need a #. I highly suggest http://tinyurl.com/ya9vzsa ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. -- _ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs: http://www.asterisk.org/hello asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Looking at Asterisk for 8000sq/ft residential
Rick Huebner wrote: My brother-in-law is finishing up his McMansion and I've done all of the low voltage wiring and am starting the trimout. We are batting around what to do for a phone system and I'm torn between a Panasonic TAW824/TVA50 and using an Asterisk implementation. I'm very strong on the networking/linux/basic hacking(old school, not criminal) side. I've downloaded the Asterisk VM and have some implentation questions before we make a decision. Of course we are running out of time because I need to order either RJ-11 or RJ-45 keystones for the plates to finish the trim out. You can use the 8 position modular jacks regardless ( misnamed RJ-45 ) so that should not stop you from finishing the trim out. Replacing the jacks down the road is (yawn). Big deal if you need to. Pick whatever works for the current deployment. You WILL be running at least Cat5e to the jacks, every jack, right? That's the problematic bit for the future - not the jack itself. You don't want to plug RJ11 into RJ45 jacks, so plan to make it work out somehow. You can always make RJ11/45 cables so RJ45 is my preference. The Panasonic systems I have used over the last 20 years are rugged, hang on the wall, connect with proper protection and forget them for years on end. They all have had dual ports that will either use a POTS single line phone, or one of their multibutton phones without any rewiring, reprogramming, and many even support one of each per port. An ideal system for a large house. I will second that the Panasonic systems are nice. They're everything you would expect in a proprietary phone system and you are not likely to be disappointed in the system as long as it offers the features you want. That said, you are forever locked into that system. I can't say I've looked much into the Panasonics since we went Asterisk here, but at the time there was a definite feeling of it being last decade's technology, and that was the better part of a decade ago. Features will just work. But the features you don't have, you will never have, at least not without a lot of hacking. Asterisk is forward-looking. Expect things not to work without some programming and configuration. Consider something simple like VoIP. With Asterisk, easy to use VoIP on either or both sides. I wouldn't have guessed years ago that one day my cell phone would double as a SIP extension. Yet it happened and it works. And look at where telephony is going. It's going to be VoIP, sooner or later. All that copper's going away. Get network-centric now and maybe you won't get stuck with a dinosaur. It's a tradeoff. Asterisk can be more work. But you can do more too. Our Asterisk announces calls by name over the intercom and lights it up on the TV's as well. Easy to do with a programmable box. Although many will disagree, for most users Panasonic systems with normal requirements work well for long periods with no problems and have lots of features. For the geek who wants to play, drive the rest of the family nuts changing things, then consider Asterisk. There's nothing saying you have to change things constantly with Asterisk. Some of us have systems that are generally untouched for long periods of time. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] FW: hi Dan
Sorry, I can't resist. How do I join the Mail List Nazi Corp? Do I have to be invited, or can I just self appoint myself? Asking neophyte questions are objected to by some, top posting by those who blast others, etc. How about leaving member chastisement to the sponsor of the list? That's unlikely to happen in most cases. Some people have no one within 250 miles of where they are to learn from or learn better by working with code than reading inscrutable examples from different versions, and other inanimate pages of examples that have wrong variables, etc. Yes. Nearly everyone can be criticized for something, Asking dumb questions, top posting, bottom posting and leaving 3 pages of crap to scroll through, answering questions that were answered 5 posts down, because they didn't review the newer messages before posting, and more. Be charitable and kind. Have a nice day. There's absolutely something to be said for that. On the other hand, there is also something to be said for making people exhaust the available resources prior to solving their problems for them. You can even be charitable and kind while doing so... Back in the '90's, I knew a really bright guy who knew Windows and Novell inside and out. He was just learning UNIXy stuff (FreeBSD in particular) and he was discovering that there was a lot of application for the stuff. He would frequently approach me, desperately seeking an answer to some general problem of some sort. I would typically give relatively vague answers, ending up essentially with a figure it out yourself. This frustrated him to no end, but he would do so. Later, he would come to me, almost always with a workable solution, at which point we would often discuss the ins and outs of several different options. His solution wasn't always the *best*, but it would always serve as a foundation for the rest. Years later, he thanked me. At the time, he didn't really appreciate what I was doing and didn't see the bigger picture. Looking back on it, I think he saw that I had always tried to aim him in a sensible direction before shoving him off on his own to figure it out. He eventually grew confident enough and capable enough that he would no longer need to ask for help. I can fix your problems for you, or I can teach you to be self- sufficient... which one is doing you more of a favor? It may seem more charitable and kind to simply give someone answers, but I do not think it actually is, at least in this sort of situation. As for the original poster? It's my impression, reading in between the lines, that he probably hasn't tried that hard. Asterisk on Linux is pretty straightforward, and MOH is probably not that rough to get running. On FreeBSD? That's a different thing. Bleh. But it's still better to do it on-list rather than selecting someone at random to go and bother. I don't think anyone will prevent you from being charitable and kind by providing answers to the guy's questions on the list though. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] FW: hi Dan
What say you to the proposal that some approaches to seeking help are so ridiculous they should not be tolerated? Community standards neither conceive nor enforce themselves. This community standard is entirely self-enforcing. If everybody thinks the request for help is unwarranted and doesn't deserve an answer, then nobody answers. If it isn't so intolerable to fall victim to that, then someone may feel inclined to help out and answer. If the volume of such requests becomes sufficiently burdensome that it exhausts those answering the questions, then eventually the equilibrium resets; those answering the questions begin to pick out the ones that they feel are worthy of answers. Years ago, I got a bit of a panicky phone call from a sysadmin at an ISP that I was loosely familiar with from mailing lists. He was rather frazzled and puzzled because he had been struggling to solve a problem during a downtime; it was something I was familiar with and had been advocating on a mailing list. He was doing something completely reasonable-seeming, it's just that what he was doing didn't work, and had never worked that way. I walked him through a different method, from memory, solved his problem. I'm positive I could have charged him billable hours, but I didn't, because I felt somewhat responsible for having advocated something rather complex that was followed by a competent admin and it blew up in his face - precisely *because* the problem and fix were obscure. The Asterisk community is great at promoting itself, but quite frankly the documentation and solutions are sometimes not all that great. It can be challenging to find the right fix, or even *a* fix. Questions *must* be expected. The community has generally been fairly successful at coping with the questions; I view the beginning of this thread to be a sign of that. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Help with concurrent VoIP calls
By fast I mean the best Business DSL Bellsouth has to offer: Up to 6.0 Mbps downstream - Up to 512 Kbps upstream That almost sounds like an invitation to check out what business service your cableco offers. One thing to be aware of with DSL and cable modems is that there can be various ill effects as your line gets closer to its rated capacity; do not expect that you'll get a reliable 512Kbps upstream. VoIP is sensitive to loss, latency, and jitter. You may be able, for example, to only get 384Kbps reliably out of the link (before packet loss/jitter/etc wreck its suitability for VoIP). That's a good time to look seriously at a gateway package like pfSense that can prioritize certain classes of traffic while also limiting overall bandwidth. As an example, we noticed on the local business cable offering (2Mbps up) Shaped PL min avg max stddev 2.2M3 6.4 251 557 176 2.1M1 7.8 350 584 134 2.0M3 6.4 271 535 132 1.9M1 7 254 527 131 1.8M0 6 79 339 90 1.75M 0 5.9 14 92 11 1.7M0 5.4 13 77 10 1.65M 0 4.9 11 69 7 1.6M0 5.4 13 55 9 1.5M0 5.3 11 59 7 1.4M0 5 11 57 7 1.3M0 4.9 11 54 6 1.2M0 4.9 11 52 7 1.1M0 4.8 14 53 11 The max starts trending up after 1.6M (helps to graph it) and pretty much everything goes to hell after 1.75M. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Asterisk on a Beagleboard?
Out of curiosity, has someone managed to run Asterisk on a Beagleboard for home-use? www.beagleboard.org As an alternative to a PC, it can be powered from a USB hub, so that would make for a compact, fanless Asterisk server. Thank you. 128m of ram 256 m flash for the 'hard drive' is not much in either catagory. And ethernet is a USB addon, not on the board. It appears to support a SD/MMC card, meaning that it can support gigs of low power storage space. Or a USB HDD for higher power storage space. 128m of RAM isn't a lot, but some people are apparently running Asterisk on 32MB Linksys WRT54GS's (OpenWRT). If you were careful and cautious, it'd probably work. The Ethernet as an add-on kinda stinks and is probably the largest negative. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- AstriCon 2009 - October 13 - 15 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Compact, fanless appliance?
Hello For those SOHO customers (ie. at most, a couple of POTS/ISDN connections and simultaneous SIP calls) who'd rather not use a big, noisy PC to run Asterisk, I'd like to offer an alternative that has the following features: - not old hardware sold on eBay, ie. it must be up-to-date hardware sold by a company currently in business - compact, silent - has room for a 2.5 hard-disk, but if not, must provide a CompactFlash plug - ideally, room for a PCI card, possibly laid down with a riser to save space - total cost (shipping + VAT) 200 euro If it's cheaper and not much work, I don't mind buying the parts and putting the box together myself, but otherwise, I'd rather order a complete box, ready-to-use. What are my options to provide customers with that kind of solution? Thank you for any hint. Can you give us some clues as to why you have disqualified the fanless and/or embedded devices that are normally recommended on the list (Soekris, etc)? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Compact, fanless appliance?
On 23 Apr 2009, at 11:34, Vincent wrote: Hello, On Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:18:27 -0500 (CDT), Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: Can you give us some clues as to why you have disqualified the fanless and/or embedded devices that are normally recommended on the list (Soekris, etc)? I haven't: I'd like to know what the options are. I'm looking for an up-to-date list of commercially-available compact solutions to run Asterisk, including those from Soekris, Atcom, etc. http://tinyurl.com/df8qfm Oh, thanks for that. I would also suggest http://tinyurl.com/d5nr8n http://tinyurl.com/ckp4pd ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Special Information Tones
On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Stephen Davies wrote: Hi, Are you sure that Verizon amswers the call? They should play that message as 'early media' without answering, after which they cam clear the call with an appropriate cause code. Similar issue in the UK and yes, the carriers do answer the call - because from that second onward thy are taking revenue. BT offer a free voicemailbox on landlines too - for the same reason. Many carriers allow you to opt out of these sorts of misfeatures, though you may have to be somewhat insistent. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] USA BRI -- any hope at all?
You might want to look into Cisco hardware, their WIC-1B-U cards work =20 fine in the US, or they did 10 years ago when I last used them for =20 VoIP. No, you didn't. :-) You might have used a VIC-2BRI-S/T-TE or one of the other voice cards... but the WIC cards are WAN Interface Cards. If only it were that easy. Used the WIC-1B-U is going for under $50 on eBay. An old 1600 =20 or 1700 series router with an IOS that supports SIP wouldn't cost much =20 either. I can probably dig up such a setup here if anyone wants one, except it won't do VoIP. Help me connect the dots here. I indeed see WIC-1B-U cards and 1721 = routers. It looks like a pair could be purchased for probably $25. How = Yeah, that won't work... does that fit into an Asterisk system? I can see how it would be used = for 128K data, but how does Asterisk pick up and manipulate the data? = Call setup? Call answering? Does the 1721 deliver VoIP data that = Asterisk can process? Does Asterisk have a channel interface that can = accept and use this? Asterisk would deal with it just as it would any other SIP-based service adapter, I would imagine. Imagine it as a large Sipura 3000, or whatever the contemporary VOIP-to-POTS gateway of the modern era is. Have a look at the compatibility chart at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk652/tk653/technologies_tech_note09186a0080111b16.shtml This will give you an idea about combinations that ought to work, I believe. Unfortunately, I don't know if any of them are cheap. We've had BRI for over a decade. It rocks. It's incredibly flexible and is not susceptible to the radio stations that are broadcasting at 50 billion gigawatts half a mile from here (POTS goes to hell). I can do fun stuff like terminating calls into a USR I-Modem, giving me the ability to do 56k remote dialup access into our local network, etc. Unfortunately, getting it to work with Asterisk is a bit of a boggle. We had considered going the Cisco route. All things considered, that has a lot going for it, but the last time I evaluated that solution, it was expensive and the configuration looked somewhat complicated, and I wasn't confident I could manage it without assistance. The other workable solution that I'm aware of seems to involve the Eicon Diva Server boards, which I've heard work. We're currently using an Adtran Atlas 550 to convert the BRI to T1 or PRI or something that Asterisk *can* handle, and this works pretty well. There are some caveats, however, such as the fact that we can not get the Adtran to originate outgoing calls with the second DN on a BRI line (incoming is just fine, though). If anyone goes the Cisco route and is willing to share information on how that worked, and configuration snippets, let me know. I'm quite happy to share what we've done with anyone who is interested in our solution. As for the people who are claiming that BRI is dead, well, not quite. I had called SBC or Ameritech or whatever they were called that day several years ago for what appeared to be a loop problem, and had gotten the oh I know who you need to talk to runaround of about twelve departments. However, recently, our Adtran 550 had baked something in its configuration, and we lost one of the BRI's. Not suspecting a problem with the 550, having rebooted it and having eyeballed the config and logs, I dialed with dread the new customer service number for ATT (which is the number they hand out for POTS repair). I was dumbfounded to navigate the automated system and then to talk immediately to a gentleman who not only told me that the line was a BRI, but also that it appeared to be fine but that they weren't seeing a D channel. Thinking it might be a fried port on the Adtran, I reconfigured to a different port, and it worked. Doh! So then I cleared the configuration on the old port (verifying that it *also* looked correct) and re-entered it, and ... it worked. Double doh! So, if anything, the support situation for BRI's has improved, at least for us here. I expect that the number of new installs is not at an all-time high or anything. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] USA BRI -- any hope at all?
I'm quite happy to share what we've done with anyone who is interested in our solution. By the way, I'm also willing to work with any developers who want to do US BRI work. The Adtran ports can play as either NT or TE, so it is trivial to hook up a card to a spare port and pretend to be a CO for dev work, and we have real BRI's available for testing as well. E-mail me directly if interested. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] ISDN
With ISDN, the conversion is done in your phone Exactly. Or in the case of Asterisk, it is a 4 wire digital right into = the switch--no degradation. Even converting back and forth between = analog and digital multiple times compromises quality. Try doing a = dial-up modem across such a path. The best you will get is 20 - 30 K. A single D/A hop destroys the ability to do 56k. Successful 56k requires that there be a single A/D hop at the far end (the user's POTS interface) and then digital delivery of signal the remainder of the way to the terminating equipment. (modem - phone co A/D - digital to ISP modem bank). If you stick an extra D/A (maybe plus A/D) transformation in there, you will probably get fairly clean speeds in the upper ranges of 28.8-33.6, but that'll be it (modem - phone co A/D - digital network - phone co D/A - your buddy's modem). If you're unlucky enough to get some crummy phone co arrangement where they punt you back and forth from digital to analog and back to digital within their network, that's even worse. From an Asterisk point of view, it's interesting that you can get digital delivery of the signal, and route the signal around internally digitally, if you have ISDN. This means, for example, that our USR Courier I-Modem, which can terminate a 56K call *digitally*, results in my being able to make a 56K connection from most modern cities here in the US, without wasting an ILEC ISDN BRI line dedicated to that purpose, by having the PBX connect an extension to the I-Modem. I just dial into a general purpose number, and dial the appropriate extension, and voila, I'm on our network at high speed. This is clearly obvious to you, but I thought I'd expand for the others who might be reading along and didn't understand the implications of all- digital. IF you can get a PRI-line for the same price. Not to mention that the interfaces for PRI are about five times as = expensive. I'm not sure why. It doesn't seem like it ought to take a = lot of electronics to break down the bit stream. It may not take a lot of electronics. However, the sad truth of it all is that any electronic device produced at low volume tends to be expensive to produce. This is largely the result of costs such as retooling, and in most cases the significantly higher cost of small-run integrated circuits. For example, a PC board manufacturing house (I'll use the following shop, no affiliation, as an example, because they have transparent pricing) http://www.expresspcb.com/ExpressPCBHtm/Specs4LayerStandard.htm http://www.expresspcb.com/ExpressPCBHtm/Specs4LayerProduction.htm for a 30 sq in board. To produce 10 boards would cost $404, or $40/board. To produce 50 boards would cost $1109, or $22/board. To produce 1000 boards would cost $15516, or $15/board. Even 1000 isn't really a large run, though. You're paying premium board rates for small runs, because the shop has to stop and retool for your run. I haven't bothered to get a large-run quote, but I bet you can get that down to well under $10/board if you're ordering a hundred thousand at a time... You then have to add on assembly costs, which are typically higher than the PCB costs. It could very easily end up costing $50/board *just* for PCB and assembly, no parts included, for runs in the hundreds of cards range. The problem with telephony stuff, especially in this market, will be that the demand for a T1(/PRI/etc) interface is going to be very low. You would need to be a relatively big shop to be able to buy by the thousand, as even at one bulk buy per year, that translates to several cards departing inventory daily. I expect that some of the ISDN BRI interfaces are dirt cheap because they're popular over in Europe. I've been told that in many places, they're sold in lieu of a modem. Once you are moving product in high volumes, the pricing tends to come down. It stinks, yes. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] ISDN
were getting an operator intercept for one of them. A dozen phone calls later, and ten people who were various degrees of sure they knew where to refer me to, I still had not succeeded in finding the correct department to talk to. Ironically, it appears that the complaint I submitted through the automatic system MIGHT have been responsible for getting the problem resolved. Even in 1998, which was probably the height of the ISDN BRI here in the US, an installer who was installing lines noted that you could count the number of BRI-qualified installers in the county on a hand, and they were generally hicap people who simply got the BRI jobs when one came along. In any case, this is by no means a comprehensive history or analysis of the situation, but just a description of a variety of factors that have worked against BRI. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] ISDN
I'm in the process of setting up Asterisk in a SOHO environment using = ISDN for trunking. More specifically a BRI 2B+D circuit where one SPID = is used for the business and the other is used for personal. The = circuit already exists, but is presently being interfaced to POTS phones = via a TA. This configuration is not very common in the US, but we are fortunate = that our LEC offers it price competitively with equivalent POTS services = and it makes more sense, both in terms of voice quality (4 wire digital = to the PABX) and flexibility. Ideally it would allow any combination of two calls, identified by SPID. If anyone has done anything similar, or has any experience with BRI = ISDN, I would appreciate input and direction. If anyone knows where documentation exists on configuring ISDN, that = information would also be greatly appreciated. Asterisk has a bit of a = learning curve, and ISDN BRI isn't the most widely used or covered = aspect of it. BTW, I have a strong telecom background, so the theory = part of it will not be a problem, only the necessary documentation to = apply it to Asterisk. The one solution I've heard, on and off again, that works with Asterisk here in the US is the Eicon Diva cards. There are other solutions. Where I am, we're unreasonably close to a local radio conglomerate that has a number of high power antennas. We found early on that RF interference was a killer, which caused me to run a lot of our telecom and data wiring in conduit. Unfortunately, we discovered that POTS lines were a hell of a mess when connected to anything more complex than a phone or two. Lots of RF interference. Church radio music on Sundays, even. So, we brought our lines in on BRI, which we've used for data and voice elsewhere. Being eternally frustrated with the lack of ISDN support after maybe 2000 here in the US (we have a bunch of interesting ISDN gear from the 90's!), I set out to see what I could do to interface BRI to Asterisk. I *didn't* go the Eicon route, because at the time it was considered relatively unreliable. Instead, we picked up an Adtran Atlas 550, which can handle ISDN BRI, PRI, POTS, etc. We have been using the Atlas as a translator to convert BRI to T1, which works moderately well, but we've seen some issues, mostly in the capabilities of the Adtran (such as an inability to select the desired SPID/DN for outgoing calls). The Adtran has some other amazing capabilities, such as providing FXO/FXS ports, and even ISDN BRI ports for other devices we'd liked hooked into our PBX. Despite that, I'd love to see an ISDN BRI solution for the US. I might be willing to test the Eicon Diva Server card... hm. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Magnetic door locks
One of the last secure facilities I worked in had a motion sensor that unlocked the door for people leaving from one door. The COO was pretty shocked when I took off my belt, easily pushed it through the gap in the glass doors near the top and triggered the motion sensor, immediately opening the door to the admin side of the building. The other side did not have motion sensor just an RFID and magnetic lock. Under challenge, I grabbed a chair, stood on it, lifted the drop ceiling and cut one of the wires to the magnet, click, it opened (would be a fire hazard if door did not unlock when power was removed). I think they spent big bucks on their false sense of security I also pointed out that the data room could be accessed via drop ceiling on one side and drywall (that's tough stuff!!) on two of the three walls. You have to remember that many secure facilities were not designed by security professionals, but are instead simply areas where a company decided that they wanted to be secure long after a building was built. They call a contractor, ask for a wall, and instant secure area. Then the security company comes in, company says we want restricted access, and voila, you get a nice doorstrike and an RFID reader. Security is never absolute. You had a situation that was likely to keep typical people out of the secured area. Fix those problems and then there are others. A good crowbar is effective against a *lot* of door hardware. What, you have a nice steel door? Did you know that you can often bend the door a bit and pop the latch? Oh, you've got a latch protector? Great, even more leverage for the crowbar... etc... And walls. Sure, a drywall wall is pretty flimsy stuff, but a sledgehammer can make pretty decent work out of a cinderblock wall... You pretty much have to figure out what level of security you actually want to obtain. Putting security system wires in conduit is better than just drilling around with a bellhanger, but would it necessarily have prevented you from finding a junction box and getting at the magnet wires? It helps to have a facility built from the ground up to be secure. And even many of those don't do many of the things that they could. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] US T1 Hangup Detection
On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 12:58:59PM -0700, Daniel Hazelbaker wrote:
Really? You have an RJ-21X block that contains both analog AND T1
wires? That's really uncommon. I hope they at least put the red
special service caps on the T1 wires.
Yup. I thought that pretty funny myself. 10 year old analog wires
running a digital T1. :) And they do have some caps on them, I think
it was red but not 100% sure.
No, that's not the unusual part. The unusual part is just that both
analog and digital services are on the same block. Maybe it's a
regional think...
That's really not unusual. It's not /preferred/, but that's an entirely
different can of worms.
In general, if copper is available into a building, the telco is going to
look very seriously at the possibility of using that. If the building is
already wired and the copper tests clean, the telco will want to use that.
In most existing situations, that will already be terminated in a can with
lightning suppression and will have been crossed over to RJ21X's that are
going to whatever suites are in the building.
Since the telco will have /no/ /problem/ running the T1 over their outside
plant and up to the can on what is approximately Category 3 wire, and the
T1 signal is going to have been running alongside those same analog wires
for probably a few miles, what happens next should be obvious.
Suite 214 wants a T1. There's already a 25-pair going up there from the
RJ21X. It's second story, so do you go and spend an {hour, afternoon,
etc} figuring out how to run fresh wire, or do you notice that only 6 pair
are in use on the RJ21X, and decide to feed up on the existing cable?
Now, if you're nasty and you don't separate it (typically I see the bottom
used for data) and you don't put redcaps on, yeah, then that is just
looking for eventual trouble. And who knows, the wire may be cruddy, so
maybe you still end up doing the separate run. But it probably works.
I've seen this often enough. Would I prefer to see new cable run? Sure.
But we've all done our copper sins. I've seen a lot of things that are
uglier than that. Here's one of them:
http://www.sol.net/hallofshame/
(I've always meant to expand that page, but it seems that I never get the
good photos of bad stuff)
Lack of space, lack of need, lack of having another RJ21X in the truck are
just a few other obvious reasons that this might be done.
... JG
--
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
___
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Re: [asterisk-users] MagicJack quality
I am puzzled by the quality of magicjack. I keep trying to figure out how they can the quality be that adequate. Since Skype also has an excellent quality, that leaves me to believe that software based calls (softphones) could have and advantage over hardphones, provided there is a parameter that those 2 companies are addressing. You are puzzled by the quality? http://www.laptopmag.com/review/voip/magicjack.aspx I don't know, but from the sounds of the comments, you'd get about just as much quality out of an actual cigarette lighter, and probably a good bit more usefulness. Nice EULA, by the way: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/04/14/magicjacks-eula-says.html VoIP over the Internet isn't /that/ hard. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Nufone problems
quote who=C F Why is their DNS failing? Looks like ns1 is down. Probably their master DNS server. ns2 is up, but looks like their zone expired, since it could not refresh from ns1, so it is no longer reporting authoritative for nufone.net. They should look into longer expiry times on their SOA record. Nufone seems to have a lot of DNS problems. Several years ago, when their domain expired with their registrar, I pointed out that GoDaddy was a bad choice of registrars to begin with, for a variety of reasons. They're great if you want some cheap domain name and hosting for your personal blog. However, for commercial enterprises, they're actually dangerous, as they have some anti-spam policies which allow GoDaddy to turn off your domain if you appear (note the specific word, appear) to be involved with spam. I suggested at that time that I had trouble accepting as serious a phone provider who could not take reasonable steps to guarantee ongoing Internet DNS visibility, since DNS resolvability is necessary for VoIP. I suggested at the time that they should become an OpenSRS reseller, and turn on auto-renew, renew for as many years as possible (10 in the case of .net), and they'd have much less to worry about on the unexpected- domain-expiration front. However, this is far from the only step that you need to take to ensure continued DNS resolution on the Internet. Increased values in the SOA are okay, but better yet is not using master/secondary configurations (which are, admittedly, incredibly convenient). Working out some SSH copy-and-restart magic is better. Monitoring logs for DNS system failures is better. Having more than two DNS servers, and having all of them be masters, that would be excellent. Things like DNS are part of what make up the electronic foundation for your Internet based business. It's easy to make mistakes, but there's good advice to be had on how to correct it. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Nufone problems
Joe Greco wrote: quote who=C F Why is their DNS failing? Looks like ns1 is down. Probably their master DNS server. ns2 is up, but looks like their zone expired, since it could not refresh from ns1, so it is no longer reporting authoritative for nufone.net. They should look into longer expiry times on their SOA record. Nufone seems to have a lot of DNS problems. Several years ago, when their domain expired with their registrar, I pointed out that GoDaddy was a bad choice of registrars to begin with, for a variety of reasons. They're great if you want some cheap domain name and hosting for your personal blog. However, for commercial enterprises, they're actually dangerous, as they have some anti-spam policies which allow GoDaddy to turn off your domain if you appear (note the specific word, appear) to be involved with spam. snip Anybody who understands the role of the registrar would disagree with your statement. Well, you apparently don't understand the role of the registrar. A registrar is someone who sits inbetween you and the registry (the organization ultimately responsible for operating a TLD, such as .com or .net). There is one registry per TLD, but lots of registrars that sell registration services within each TLD. Some registries service multiple TLD's, but that's not relevant for this discussion. The average registrar takes your approximately-ten-dollars, and tells the registry about your domain, and which nameservers to point it at. You get billed as needed, and you're provided with some tools to keep your contact data up to date, and that's the basic role most registrars perform. GoDaddy is unusual in that they've adopted an anti-spam stance (along with some other abuse policies). They will take down domains if they feel that there's been some abuse. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. ISP's do it, don't they? The problem is, GoDaddy often isn't in the data path, and they lack the technical means to actually verify that the company in question sent spam. They also appear to lack the intelligence to think clearly about it. For example, recently, GoDaddy suspended the well known security site seclists.org. MySpace experienced a password security breach, and a notice of this (including passwords) was posted to a web archive on the seclists.org web site. Now, any retard will know that mail copies of the message in question will have been already sent to thousands of users, and of course if it is being published in public, you can be damn sure that the bad guys already have copies of the data. Yet MySpace went to GoDaddy, and GoDaddy suspended the seclists.org domain for this breach when Fyodor did not respond within an hour to their takedown demands. Of course, what GoDaddy should have done instead would have been to tell MySpace to go pound sand (and suspend all those user accounts), since by the time it's made it to this stage, a mere archival copy of some hacked passwords on a security site's mailing list isn't a serious issue. You could argue that GoDaddy doesn't understand the role of the registrar if you'd like. I'll entertain that discussion. The free DNS provided by domain name registrars is usually not adequate for serious needs. It's fine for parking domains that you intend to use later for production needs. I don't think I suggested that, did I? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] North American voice BRI - Informal survey
The other thing that I was thinking is that I prefer PRI to analog so much that I even if it cost a hundred bucks more a month, it's still attractive to me. All that tends to support our contention that there should be a market for NA BRI support. You'd think many installations would benefit. Don't forget that BRI is quite different from PRI in various ways. For example, the handling of phone numbers is usually substantially different, you cannot generally set outbound Caller-ID as one example. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] North American voice BRI - Informal survey
Has anyone got a PBX with spare BRI ports in it? Maybe that's a cheap way to get started. We could just hook a box up to that and work out some of the early stage stuff. I know that people with Polycom (and other) video/teleconferencing equipment often have BRI cards in their Nortel PBX or Avaya gear. Well, I've got a PBX (Asterisk) with some spare BRI ports (the previously described Adtran 550). I have one port that is definitely free. I might have another that could be freed most of the time if the cause was sufficient. I have no BRI cards. I do have some other ISDN gadgets. I'm willing to consider placing a small server at the disposal of a developer or something like that, if it'll lead towards better support, but what card and who provides it is up in the air (I am probably not in sufficient need to justify footing the bill for a several hundred dollar card, though I'd be fine popping for a $50 card). If this was sufficiently useful and there was actually forward progress, I might be willing to do more, like provide additional BRI ports on the Adtran, or maybe even short term access to a real US BRI line, or even fund a card or two. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] North American voice BRI - Informal survey
Maybe, but it will probably mean writing another driver just to provide telco-side signalling -- or is it the same on each end? No, I'm reasonably positive that there's a well defined user and network side. What's the deal with PRI cards? Can you run those back-to-back? Yes, usually. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] North American voice BRI - Informal survey
Has anyone else seen a working hardware solution that didn't cost an arm and a leg? It seems to me that a BRI card should cost less than $100. I think I remember a German friend telling me that they go for around $40 dollars. I believe that there's no electrical difference. I know that I can get a BRI with voice service out of Bell. I think they have to provide it because of the CRTC tariffs. The thing that has stopped me from trying it in the past is the uncertainty around hardware. Do I understand correctly that NA (North American?) BRI is different from the European version and that European hardware won't work? The European hardware is supposed to be just fine. Unfortunately, it is the European software that is a stumbling point. US signalling formats are different, and so your software (drivers) need to be aware of how to deal with US BRI. There's supposedly some extremely expensive US BRI ISDN card that works with Asterisk, but it is pretty damn expensive, and the few situations where I've heard it has been used were reported to be fairly unstable. Eicon Diva? I'm running late or I'd look it up. Haven't heard of anyone trying it recently. YMMV. If I could get a card for a few hundred bucks then I'd be willing to give this a shot. Unfortunately, I can't afford a few grand for the Adtran setup described, although it does sound cool and the BRI-PRI conversion approach is a clever way of overcoming the hardware scarcity. For the number of times that I see people trying to get digital style features out of analog lines, and banging their head against the wall, I'd love to get a BRI working and be able to tell you all how it worked out. That was why we ended up spending an arm and a leg, and still didn't end up perfectly happy. Really, if you find a solution, post it. And feel free to mail me about it too. I'd love a highly flexible solution that was well-integrated with Asterisk. What we have now works, mostly, but is a botch. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] North American voice BRI - Informal survey
Sorry I'm a little late to the thread but this question has puzzled me as well. My key thing for me is hardware. In the UK but ... Cheap BRI card... To use it in the US, you need it to support US signalling. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] North American voice BRI - Informal survey
Voice BRI is scarcely advertised. In these parts, Telus does indeed offer it. (I had to know what I was looking for, though.) BRI is a service the telcos would like to forget about here in the US. We ordered it at the house because we're sufficiently near a radio station that we tend to get POTS interference, and I wanted the flexibility to do virtually anything with the lines, including X2 dialup inbound (remember X2? ;-) ). That was around the peak of the BRI craze here in the US. I did some inquiries about monthly fees. Here's what I was quoted for 2B+D voice service (all these prices are in Canadian dollars; 1 USD buys 1.05 CAD): 1 Year Contract $91.75 3 Years Contract $82.50 5 Years Contract $79.85 They are not keen on month-to-month, but I squeezed a price out of them. It was something like $110 a month (it was not in the formal quote ;) ). We're at something around $50 on M2M, but there was a fairly steep install (maybe $250?). It ends up being around $115/mo for the 2 BRI lines (4 channels total). The calling features are packaged as one (for both channels). You can't mix and match. If I only want caller ID, I'm stuck with everything else, too. 1 Year contract $27.90 3 Years contract $27.30 5 Years contract $25.75 I think the month-to-month for this was $29.90. Ick. Around here, SBC/Ameritech/ATT prefers you to order by package code. You can order a-la-carte but it is damn expensive. The package we selected included Caller-ID. Cheaper packages were also available, but did not include Caller-ID, or only included 1B, or only data service, or whatever. So, say we take a 1 year contract, with calling features: $119.65, before taxes (we'll ignore the installation fees for the sake of this analysis). Now, comparing this with our current arrangement for two lines, forward on busy on one and caller ID on both, it comes to $114.17 before taxes. If one were to go head with the 1 year contract, it's hardly worth the difference to do analog. Right, but you also have to ask yourself, do I like to punish myself? Do you want to be on the wrong end of the support equation when the line fails? You can't just call SBC repair. They'll say that you don't have SBC service. You then have to make sure you keep track of the ISDN group's number, and call them, and be prepared to wait an hour a shot to talk to someone. Do you want to be stuck with a service where you can't just plug in a normal test set to check for dialtone? Do you want to have to figure out what combination of service adapters is needed to make it all work? Do you want to deal with oddities and irregularities in how the service works and interfaces to your PBX? These are just *some* of the questions that pop to mind. You *do* get a gorgeous crisp clean signal like nothing you've ever heard before. But it is a lot of work. Thoughts? Who here has used BRI in North America? And when you did, what interface hardware did you use? Well, at the time, there was pretty much nothing that was considered to be reliably supported by Asterisk for NA BRI. I picked up an Adtran Atlas 550 with a 4BRI-U interface and an octal FXS, and I use the unit's built-in T1 network port to connect to an Asterisk box. This works nicely, except for the things for which it doesn't work nicely. The box is fundamentally being used as a BRI-PRI translator, but gives me some neat extras. The BRI ports can be configured to work as user or network, so I've got some of my legacy ISDN devices (Courier I-Modem, and some other various stuff) that I can have switched through the Asterisk box and have them work - all digital signal path :-) The Adtran, however, has some limitations. The nastiest has to do with the way it handles DN's. It always grabs the first DN on a BRI for the outbound caller-ID. Adtran says no plans to fix. There are also problems getting it to register correctly to handle more than one call per DN; I have had it working in the past, but now it is pretty reliably broken. It's really too damn bad because the Adtran seems to have so many nice capabilities. We don't use special calling features (aside from Caller-ID, which I do not really consider to be a calling feature) so no idea about any of the other stuff like 3way, etc. We do that on the Asterisk box. I wouldn't buy the Adtran solution again. It cost about $2500 total to get up and running, IIRC, with used eBay equipment, but the idea behind it is extremely attractive. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list
Re: [asterisk-users] North American voice BRI - Informal survey
Thanks for the response, Joe. n/p. I figure I'm probably one of a small number of people with such a taste for suffering at the hands of the telco. Yeah -- as I mentioned, it's not like the Canadian telcos are announcing it from the rooftops, either. We had some CLEC's offering it for a while. McLeod, I believe. Stopped. Wait, I think TDS still sells them. For business, at least. Competition. Ain't it grand. We're at something around $50 on M2M, but there was a fairly steep install (maybe $250?). It ends up being around $115/mo for the 2 BRI lines (4 channels total). Wow, that's cheap. No wonder you don't get any customer service. No, everyone else has problems with customer service too. The regulators periodically fine Ameritech for poor service, and then everything's fine for a little bit. Lather, rinse, repeat. I couldn't even get analog lines for that price. Heh. Ick. Around here, SBC/Ameritech/ATT prefers you to order by package code. You can order a-la-carte but it is damn expensive. The package we selected included Caller-ID. Cheaper packages were also available, but did not include Caller-ID, or only included 1B, or only data service, or whatever. Sorry -- I think I was wrong there. I think caller ID is always included Not here. -- but we need forward on busy, which is a calling feature, so it means we need the features package. On the regular analog lines, the caller ID is extra (nine bucks! crooks!). Right, that'd make it substantially more expensive here. I don't believe it doubles the cost, but something at least 50% higher, if my recollection serves. One of the secondary reasons for the BRI was that the cost of two phone lines worked out to be about the cost of the one BRI on this plan, until you noticed that the two phone lines still needed CID added on to them, making them a fair bit more expensive. I suspect it's very difficult to configure this equipment, so they just throw the whole thing at you. That's one of the problems with ISDN. So, say we take a 1 year contract, with calling features: $119.65, before taxes (we'll ignore the installation fees for the sake of this analysis). Now, comparing this with our current arrangement for two lines, forward on busy on one and caller ID on both, it comes to $114.17 before taxes. If one were to go head with the 1 year contract, it's hardly worth the difference to do analog. Right, but you also have to ask yourself, do I like to punish myself? Do you want to be on the wrong end of the support equation when the line fails? You can't just call SBC repair. They'll say that you don't have SBC service. You then have to make sure you keep track of the ISDN group's number, and call them, and be prepared to wait an hour a shot to talk to someone. I know what you mean. This is the kind of headache you get on fibre connections with Telus. However, the PRI and BRI are handled by the same advanced business services group here. I have no personal experience with BRI, but judging by the ubiquity of PRI, it shouldn't suck too horribly. Of course, that could just be my youthful optimism talking. How often have your lines failed? I think only once in well more than half a decade. Well, we've had times when the CO was unhappy and we needed to unplug the equipment for 10 minutes to get it back to a usable state. Three or four times. But only had to call once, I think. I should probably check. The problem is that when you need to make any changes, they want those run through the special services group too. So you want a PIC line freeze, eh, well, rot in phone hold hell. I think they stopped doing that. You *do* get a gorgeous crisp clean signal like nothing you've ever heard before. But it is a lot of work. This is what is so tantalizing about it. I also like the call progress information. Absolutely. There's no doubt that it has some great aspects. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Microsoft's Move Into IP PBX Market
I'm sure everyone loves the idea of patch Tuesday for their phone system. Phones were too boring before, this will make them nice and exciting again... You forgot: +-Windows Security+ | Office Communicator needs your permission to dial this number | | The user at extension 1234 has dialed 911 | | [Allow][Cancel]| | If you do not trust this extension, do not allow this operation.| | Making phone calls can potentially cost you money. | +-+ laugh/cry ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] OT ? Number portability, land line to Cell
Having had various issues with local vendor (begins with V). am looking to move to all wireless. Anyone know if current vendor can refuse to port the current land line numbers to a wireless provider? From what I've read, the Fed's seem to say no, they cannot refuse, or impede this. Your local Vendor can certainly refuse to port the number, regardless of whether or not they're actually supposed to allow portability. They're the phone company, they don't have to care. Excuses can range fom we don't support that to the equipment's too old to my dog ate my homework. They know that 99.9% of all consumers are stupid and/or will not argue the point. Most people do not choose to engage big businesses over things like this. That's unfortunate, of course, because it enables companies to get away with blowoffs like this successfully and makes it harder for the rest of us to fight. You might find it interesting and/or useful to see if you can get them to port it to their own wireless division, assuming that they have one. If you decide to press the point, which you're encouraged to do, then the following resource ought to be helpful. http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/numbport.html ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] voip-info.org status update
Hard to expect the business community to take Asterisk seriously when this sort of stuff happens IMHO. I can't understand how 3 of 4 hard drives could just suddenly fail simultaneously. There must be more too it. No UPS? Someone spilled their coffee into it? Something! Sure, there always is. For example, from our own little cache of stories: Bad component in the power supply blows, momentarily spiking voltages throughout the server. Colo cooling failed and temps rose ten degrees, baking the drives a bit. Someone let slip with a cart and banged into the rack. Drives were spinning continuously for several years, and then power went out. Two of four don't spin back up. Anyone who's been in the industry for any length of time will have stories. Some of them even interesting. I remember a few years ago when the roof/wall of an ATT data center was destroyed during a storm. Either way, it's amateur hour! If I can't be confident enough in an important source of information like this then I can't be confident enough to provide an Asterisk solution to businesses. That's the way I see it. Yea, it's a wiki but it's the best source of info out there. If you're not smart enough to have a local snapshot of anything that is critical to what you're providing to customers, then, well, you're right, it *is* amateur hour. As for voip-info.org, I cannot comprehend why you would attack a very nice public service in this manner. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I thought that it was a general VOIP resource, not specific to Asterisk. While I have found it a very convenient interface to Asterisk information, you seem to be suggesting that it is the only source of information. It is not. We ought to all be thanking the fine folks at voip-info.org for their fantastic store of information. Hopefully, if there is any need for assistance to cover additional backup hosting, cash to cover the expense of new drives, or whatever they happen to need, they'll post here and let us all know. We're happy to make a no-strings-attached contribution of some sort, because the resource has been quite useful over the years. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] voip-info.org status update
A percentage of all my profits go back to the community. What about you? I think we've been contributing various resources to various online Internet communities for about two decades, more if you go back into the BBS era. We're still dedicating more than a quarter of a gigabit of bandwidth to the free exchange of Usenet news, something we've been doing since the '80's. Challenging people on this list about what they've contributed to the community over the years is going to be a losing proposition. I guarantee it. Don't do it, you make yourself look silly. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Open CallerID Database?
TP'n to follow flow just like DNS, the 'root servers' would still see the high request hits, prior to passing off to local caching app. and *someone* must have this expense/headache to maintain them. No, the root servers wouldn't. Please take a few moments to learn how the domain name system works prior to spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Any decent DNS server is extremely good at caching lookup responses, and as such, once it looks up the NS records for a domain, the roots and parents will not see a significant increase in requests. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Junk faxes
Hey everybody, I wanted to know what other may be doing to stem the flood of inbound junk faxes? We currently using Asterisk/iaxmodem/Hylafax for fax services and get a number of junk faxes daily. Most (If not all) of them have caller-id blocked and have a TSI of . I was hoping that, since we are using a PRI, there would be other information coming across that I could use to identify these spammers. Any suggestion would be appreciated. Take a good look at the resources on the Internet for dealing with junk fax. The TCPA of 1991 made them essentially illegal. The 2005 update broadened the scope a bit, but there are still a bunch of rules you need to follow or you're subject to penalties. You can also do a much better job of getting caller-id by subscribing to an 800# service that puts ANI information in the caller-id field before delivering it to you; this assumes you're willing to pick up the tab for incoming calls. See http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/unwantedfaxes.html for more info. The biggest reason we still have junk faxes is that so few people make use of the available remedies. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] Zip code, city and area codes
If you need something more than that, it will be difficult. A zip code can serve multiple NPA-NXX's and an NPA-NXX can be in multiple zip codes. Don't forget that number portability significantly muddied the waters, and VoIP has created an environment where there's no longer any need for a physical relationship. For example, ipKall offers Washington state phone numbers for free. Probably unusual to find your average end user having such a number, but some people on this list will. Number portability probably means that you either need a bit of fuzzy logic to determine if the ZIP and the NPA-NXX are in the same region, or you need to be clever about the implementation and how you handle negative matches. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [asterisk-users] FW: $3,000 server
You sent us to Greg And We paid WHERE GREG TOLD US TO PAY. So that's no Excuse So if he sent you to Greg, and Greg screwed you over, you do have an issue with Greg. Not NuFone. That's the way the law tends to work. You are, however, probably doing a good job of alienating a potential ally in the event that there is some basis for action against Greg. And quite frankly, I don't think anyone on asterisk-users wants to see this stuff; it has nothing to do with Asterisk. So - please take it to private e-mail, or hire an attorney and let the billable hours start rolling. That's what the rest of us do. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] PSTN Incoming call on real line disrupts VoIP
Replying to my own post (and my most recent follow-up). I have now confirmed 100% that the DSL modem gets a _new_ IP address every time his real phone gets answered, or hung up! This (of course) disrupts the audio coming from to him, since the sending machine (Asterisk in my case), no longer has the correct IP address to send to him. I lowered his registration from the default 1 hour to 1 minute, so after we're disconnected, I can see that he's re-registering with a new IP address, each and every time :-(. I told him to call Bellsouth and ask about a Static IP address, but I don't know if they offer it, or how much they charge. While this one isn't solved, it's at least explained. Thanks to everyone who responded! No, a static IP address isn't likely to solve the real problem. What's probably happening is that the transitions on the line are causing havoc with the DSL, and the DSL modem is restarting the session. This is not supposed to happen, but sometimes does. Have him call Bellsouth and tell them his Internet stops working when he picks up or hangs up the phone. They'll most likely get it fixed. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] 7960G SIP Issue
Hello all, Just got hold of a CISCO 7960G. Updated the Firmware to the latest 8.2. As you all know it has 6 lines which is why i bought it. Just would like to know from you experts if this piece will connect to 6 different providers over the internet or will it only work as 6 extns with 1 provider. Im not able to get connected to more than one provider. I believe the phone is supposed to be able to do it, but I haven't figured out just how. I've got a few in remote locations where we had picked up a local number for line six = direct to the phone use, and I ended up proxying them through the PBX here instead, which is not really that great. So you're not crazy... I suspect it's just a little specific config magic that isn't quite set to what the phone wants as it stands. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk BRI in the USA
Hi Joe, In your mail you wrote that I've heard a few stories that reported partial success with an Eicon Diva Server card, but always with the caveat that it doesn't work quite right or something along those lines. I can ensure you that this is not the case. We are implementing a Diva Server card in our call centre with Asterisk - so it works perfectly on both BRI and PRI lines. You need to follow the instructions here though. http://www.eicon.com/support/helpweb/slnxen/asterisk.asp Happy to hear it... it's just depressing how poorly BRI is supported in general here in the States though. I know a number of folks who do (or did) BRI for telephony going back a number of years (mid '90's at least) and I've yet to hear of one who succeeded in hooking one up to Asterisk without issue, though there are a few, as I mentioned, who reported partial success with the Eicon. BRI is becoming more poorly supported as time goes on by CPE mfrs, and while there was at one time a loose race to implement features such as Caller-ID delivery to POTS ports on ISDN CPE, now there doesn't appear to be much even happening in the way of development of new CPE. This pretty much matches the way it is being supported by the telcos, who do not want to offer any of the powerful capabilities that could be possible over BRI. By offering only packages that implement basic functionality, and requiring that you buy services a-la-carte if you want to do anything odd like (shudder) get an extra DN or ten, and pricing a-la-carte services sky-high, they've guaranteed that it isn't competitive with PRI - but also guaranteed that it isn't all that useful to anyone, either. It's insane that the only solution that seems to work for people is a $1K-range card. It's good that it works perfectly for you; I've yet to meet anyone else who has made that claim, as the reports I've seen are all of partial success. For a long time, I thought I was going to have to go get a Cisco gateway with a VIC-2BRI or something like that, but that scared me too. :-) So I still like my (very pricey) solution with the Adtran. It's nice and it works so far (caveat, haven't got it working with * yet). More interestingly, it can act as either network or user, meaning I can hook up existing devices such as the USR I-Modem to it, and direct only a single B channel over there... now I've just got to find out what happens when I configure up its PRI and hook it up to *. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk BRI in the USA
I dunno if it's THAT bad. I had a BRI line in the (relatively) podunk town of Kalamazoo, Michigan back in 1998. Sure, it took the phone company a couple of weeks to provision the service, but it takes the phone company a couple of weeks to do most anything in my experience. The price was something like $45/mo for two channels and the same per-call/per-minute pricing scheme as POTS (no per-minute fee for incoming and local calls, regular LD pricing for LD, and 800 local outgoing calls included after which it was something like 6 cents per call). The switch on ILEC's end was a DMS-100 implementing National ISDN-1. I really put the ISDN line through its paces too -- voice, data, bonded data, automatic bonding and de-bonding to allow for voice calls -- and everything always worked flawlessly. I don't know what today's pricing is like for ISDN BRI what with all of the various mergers (at the time, I had service from Ameritech), but unless it has gone up significantly, BRI seems like the perfect type of trunk for an Asterisk system too small for a T1/PRI to be an affordable option. It's still similar. Out here, we get a lot of RF interference, and it turns out that BRI is actually cheaper than equivalent POTS lines with Caller-ID (a feature I require), and you can do neat stuff like having 56K dial-in with a USR I-Modem. However, CPE has always been very limited here in the States, and there was no good way to hook up direct to Asterisk. I've heard a few stories that reported partial success with an Eicon Diva Server card, but always with the caveat that it doesn't work quite right or something along those lines. CPE like the USR I-Modem won't deliver Caller-ID to the POTS port. Other CPE like the Motorola BitSurfr Pro is sensitive to RF noise. We were using Netgear RT338's for a number of years, but they are all burnt out now and impossible to replace (actually most CPE is virtually irreplaceable, as so few mfr's make ISDN gear anymore). And while most CPE was OK with our old POTS based phone system, almost none of it worked reliably with POTS-VOIP gateways, such as the Sipura SPA-3000. Further, BRI has two channels, and the U interface pretty much dictates that you feed both of them to the same place. Putting them into an Asterisk box, I would lose the ability to use the USR I-Modem, for example... Despairing, I thought I might have to abandon the beautiful digital delivery of ISDN, which is stupid when you have a digital (VoIP) phone system. But: After talking with a friend up in Minneapolis, I bought an Adtran Atlas 550 off of eBay, which is a versatile Swiss Army Knife for telecom needs. With a quad port ISDN BRI and an octal FXS, it's the killer CPE device, but the best part is that it also does T1/PRI, so you can /convert/ BRI to PRI, etc. I've not actually done that just yet, though I do have a Digium T1 card around here somewhere and want to try it out one of these days. So, I can't actually say it /works/, but it's supposed to. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk in FreeBSD
Hello everybody I have a FreeBSD 6.1 box and i would like if exists know issues in asterisk to run in this unix operative sytem I want to know it :) Best regards and thanks in advance I guess that depends what you're doing with it. I've had no problem with FreeBSD and Asterisk in a purely VoIP environment. I know drivers for some Digium cards are being ported over to FreeBSD, but it isn't certain that that's going to be as stable. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Multiple Subscriptions to SIP accounts at Same
register = username1:password1:[EMAIL PROTECTED] register = username2:password2:[EMAIL PROTECTED] etc and then I created a peer and a user for the sip.gossiptel.com domain, but I now find that any calls that come in to any of these registered accounts all ring the 's' extension within the default context. change the context within sip.conf to from-sip-provider or something like that. Thats fine as far as it goes but I need to be able to handle each SIP account in its own context. use extensions.conf for this purpose (we did). in sip.conf you have: register = username1:password1:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ext1 register = username2:password2:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ext2 then in extensions.conf you have [from-sip-provider] exten = ext1,1,Goto(context-for-ext1,s,1) exten = ext2,1,Goto(context-for-ext2,s,1) As a half way house, in the course of testing this I did play with creating extensions for each sip account and directing them thus: so you were halfway there and this works fine as well - inbound calls end up activating the assigned extensions within extensions.conf but the problem remains that these extensions themselves have to be within a single context (in my case the default context). that's the dialplan's problem - to sort it all out. :-) note that we're doing this with dozens of numbers with no problem. as a possibly helpful hint, it is nice to include the phone number as part of the extension, such as ext4148441414 or did4148441414 rather than ext1. there may be some downsides to using just the number by itself; it's been a while and i don't recall for sure. it seems like there should be a way to make this work within sip.conf itself, but the interactions between the registrations and definitions has always seemed to be loose at best and i've never been able to get them to work the way i would expect, so beware that other more correct solutions may exist. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] One SIP dead, all SIP dead -- sipmedia gone?
Currently (and since yesterday evening), sipmedia.com/myphonecompany.com is completely off the radar. No DNS entry found -- not even a name-server. They've had this sort of massive failure before, but this is one of the longest for all I can tell. While that's a major problem, it also meant that until I commented out the register = sip.sipmedia.com statements, my entire phonesystem was unavailable. [...] 2. Is anyone else experiencing the same sipmedia outtage, and/or has information on when they'll be back? Tech support seems affected, and other direct numbers I have go into voicemail. Never heard of them. The IP block which their NS1.SIPMEDIA.COM is in is NetRange: 66.128.0.0 - 66.128.15.255 CIDR: 66.128.0.0/20 NetName:VITCOM-BLK NetHandle: NET-66-128-0-0-1 Parent: NET-66-0-0-0-0 NetType:Direct Allocation NameServer: NS1.XCHANGETELE.COM NameServer: NS3.XCHANGETELE.COM Comment:ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE RegDate:2001-06-05 Updated:2005-03-11 and this appears to be off the air. We have no route listed for this at this time. The IP block for NS3.SIPMEDIA.COM does have a route but traceroutes to deadness. 10 POS7-0.GW12.NYC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.29.197) 11 band-x-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.2.218) 12 * * * 13 * * * NetRange: 69.1.236.0 - 69.1.237.255 CIDR: 69.1.236.0/23 NetName:XCHANGETELE NetHandle: NET-69-1-236-0-1 Parent: NET-69-1-224-0-1 NetType:Reassigned NameServer: NS1.XCHANGETELE.COM NameServer: NS3.XCHANGETELE.COM NameServer: NS4.XCHANGETELE.COM NameServer: NS5.XCHANGETELE.COM Comment: RegDate:2004-02-24 Updated:2004-02-24 The parent block containing this one is advertised in BGP right now, but I see a whole bunch of /24's covering this block as well, and that route is not covered by a /24 or /23 announcement. This looks like they are fully withdrawn at this time. I see a slew of withdrawls for that route around 10/21 23:42. FixedOrbit sees them as singlehomed to Savvis, which isn't having any problems that I'm aware of, other than this humorous bit: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/357856p-304797c.html :-) I do notice that there seems to be no web site for www.xchangetele.com, which suggests that possibly they tanked. If your sipmedia.com was reselling their services, then it is reasonable to think that they went along for that ride. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] One SIP dead, all SIP dead -- sipmedia gone?
Thanks for the wealth of information. I knew they were off-air DNS-wise, and this happened before a couple of times. It's just bad juju to have all your IPs in one block. Actually, they didn't have all their DNS servers in one block. It's also a fallacy that having DNS servers in a single block (or, worse, sequentially numbered) isnecessarily a bad thing. For a long while, we ran with sequentially numbered servers that were in completely different cities, thanks to the magic of OSPF and not using Ethernet IP addresses as service addresses. There are arguments for and against certain kinds of diversity, of course, all of which have to do with the available failure modes. However, in this case, both their networks are dead, and with only two name servers, that's zero for two, and of course that /will/ be a bad thing. I don't think they were reselling, and I actually thought I had a pretty good report with them -- just have been unable to get anyone on the phone today. Other than that, had several DIDs with them at $5/month, and really haven't seen major issues other than DTMF not working -- but then, they are SIP-only. But between pricing and availability, they've been the best provider out of all I tried (Vonage, Broadvoice, voicepulse, iax.cc, ... ) Best price is occasionally a bad sign. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Complete NPA-NXX list for USA/Canada npanxx,
On a related note, I wanted our phones to display city, st for the caller-ID name in the event that none was provided. Interesting code. What sort of memory does * take up when you load up all those CLID values? I am a little late to this thread, but the answer is WAY TO MUCH. With 150,000 pattern match extensions * takes a very long time to reload, during which time calls do not proceed. pbx*CLI !date Thu Sep 22 00:33:50 CDT 2005 pbx*CLI reload [snip lots of junk] pbx*CLI !date Thu Sep 22 00:33:54 CDT 2005 Ohhhkay, then, the entire four seconds it took this ancient Pentium Pro 200 to reload is... _maybe_ ... a second longer than it did before, and that's really giving it the benefit of the doubt. If you use Realtime MySQL it pulls in ALL patter match extensions in the context on every call (150,000 rows per query). Using pattern matching would be a bit retarded. Databases work so much better when you give them a key and they only need to do a single lookup. I'm not sure what better key you could have than the npa-nxx itself, so that's what I used... There are two ways to fix this; The one we did, use the application command realtime() to pull the record from a database based on napnxx and then use gotoif to route to the lowest cost provider in that records (realtime must be used on a unique index so ONLY 1 row is retruned). We are testing upgrading this to mysql 5 where a view could be used to eliminate the gotoif. With the gotoif and 2 carriers per npa nxx it is fast. Realtime() can only do simple queries as of right now, so views would be a huge plus. The other option I know others are using is to get the route via an agi script. Bottom line, YOU CAN NOT load all 150,000 NPA/NXX pattern matches in asterisk via text file or realtime and expect acceptable performance, YOU MUST use a database query solution to get only info you need to * Then perhaps you should inspect the code that we were discussing, eh. It's a quick, simple hack, to be sure, but it certainly seems to offer acceptable performance using the built-in database (and Berkeley DB v1 ain't the most wonderful thing around, but it definitely *works*). ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Complete NPA-NXX list for USA/Canada npanxx,
- Original Message -
Since we are all trading secrets, check this site out
http://members.dandy.net/~czg/lca_index.php
You can get this Perl scripts that extract NPA-NXX directly from
dandy.net...
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=ScopServ%20LCA%20Map
On a related note, I wanted our phones to display city, st for the
caller-ID name in the event that none was provided.
% cat jg-npanxx-loader.sh
#! /bin/sh -
#
# NPA-NXX data is at http://www.nanpa.com/reports/reports_cocodes_assign.html
# specifically http://www.nanpa.com/nanp1/allutlzd.zip
#
# It would be nice if our phones could show NPA-NXX in the event CallerID
# Name was empty.
#
(awk -F'' '{print $2, $5, $1}' allutlzd.txt | tail +2 | sed
's:^\([0-9]*\)-\([0-9]*\):\1\2:;s:^\([0-9]*\) :\1 UNKNOWN:;s: * \(..\) $:,
\1:g; s:^\([0-9]*\) \(.*\):database put znpanxx \1 \2:' )| (
while read line; do
/pbx/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx ${line}
done
)
That'll load up the database with entries like
/znpanxx/201863 : UNION CITY, NJ
/znpanxx/201864 : UNION CITY, NJ
/znpanxx/201865 : UNION CITY, NJ
/znpanxx/201866 : UNION CITY, NJ
/znpanxx/201867 : UNION CITY, NJ
/znpanxx/201868 : UNION CITY, NJ
/znpanxx/201869 : UNION CITY, NJ
Then you merely have something like
% cat extensions.conf
[...]
[macro-set-cidn-npanxx]
exten=s,1,SetVar(npanxxsearch=unknown)
exten=s,2,GotoIf($[${LEN(${ARG1})} = 10]?3:5)
exten=s,3,SetVar(npanxxsearch=${ARG1:0:5})
exten=s,4,Goto(7)
exten=s,5,GotoIf($[${LEN(${ARG1})} = 11]?6:7)
exten=s,6,SetVar(npanxxsearch=${ARG1:1:6})
exten=s,7,GotoIf($[${LEN(${CALLERIDNAME})} = 0]?10:8)
exten=s,8,DBget(npanxx=znpanxx/${npanxxsearch}) ; Get NPA-NXX. If none, go to
109.
exten=s,9,SetCIDName(${npanxx})
exten=s,10,NoOp(CALLERID=${CALLERID} LEN ARG1 = ${LEN(${ARG1})})
exten=s,109,SetVar(npanxx=Unknown ${ARG1});
exten=s,110,Goto(9)
[...]
[an-incoming-context]
[...]
exten = s,4,Macro(set-cidn-npanxx, ${CALLERIDNUM}) ; Set NPANXX CID
exten = s,5,LookupCIDName ; Look up Caller-ID name in database
[...]
so that LookupCIDName will still override this.
Yeah, it bloats the built-in database by quite a bit, but it was cheap and
easy, and seems to work for the small number of cases where we don't have
a caller's name in the cidname database. It is not particularly rigorous
and there are obviously other ways to do it.
It is also worth noting that some of the city names show up as other stuff,
like this:
/znpanxx/414973 : MILWAUKZN4, WI
/znpanxx/414974 : MILWAUKZN3, WI
/znpanxx/414975 : MILWAUKZN1, WI
/znpanxx/414976 : MILWAUKZN5, WI
which is mildly confusing to non-telephony folks, but still better than
not getting anything at all, IMHO.
... JG
--
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
___
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Re: [Asterisk-Users] Complete NPA-NXX list for USA/Canada npanxx,
On a related note, I wanted our phones to display city, st for the caller-ID name in the event that none was provided. Interesting code. What sort of memory does * take up when you load up all those CLID values? I would think they'd be stored in the database, not in memory. However, it isn't exactly a huge amount of data. It amounted to maybe ~10MB of space in the database. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] CallerID Name in dialplan
If what you are asking is that the phone you are calling from displays 'Voice Mail' when ext 1000 is dialed then that is a function of the phone NOT of asterisk. That is incorrect. This feature is quite common on business phone systems such as the Meridian. On the calling phone, dialing an extension or number for which there is an internal directory entry in the PBX will result in the related name being displayed on the phone initiating the call. This is very handy because if you dial 3264 instead of 3624, you get instant visual feedback that you've called the wrong extension and you can terminate the call or whatever. Due to the size of most larger deployments, expecting the phone's built-in directory to handle this is probably ... unreasonable. I believe someone mentioned that there was some work to define this sort of functionality for SIP in the RFC's, but I don't recall for sure. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Dell Servers
Supermicro's can be nice. Problem is that Supermicro's aren't sold in Canada and as per our specification is it needs to be a tower based server. Is there another Canada we don't know about? I went over to DirectDial.com (merely the first Canadian computer retailer I could think of, not an endorsement or anything) and punched in Supermicro and came up with a ton of stuff. Supermicro is a major vendor, and if you don't have Supermicro stuff in Canada, it would only be because you don't have any computers up there (which I kinda doubt). Oh, and Q: How do you make a 3U or 4U rack mount server into a tower? A: Put it on its side. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] DID + 800 Providers
I'm looking for US DID and US50/CA 800# Providers. I found voiceconduits.com 8 month ago, there interface looks good, but there are still not live, I believe they won't be any time soon. I found sixtel, but order take eternities, they probably won't get my orders right any soon. So i'm looking for a good provider for DIDs and 800# from the US and CA, who offer online signup and ordering. The provisioning should be less than 12 hours, preferably instantly. If anybody knows or even uses such a provider, please leave me a note. I recommend www.clearpath1.com for 800 numbers. I've used them for a year and they've been absolutely reliable. www.kall8.com will do 800 numbers. Pricing isn't as great as some of the SIP-only providers, but they do a whole bunch of stuff. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Buy IP address
Hi: I have my Asterisk server behind a nat and I want to buy a static IP. Is there a company that sell IP and forward it to IAX file as in the DID service. Any reference or recommendations please? Only your ISP can sell you an IP. Please contact your ISP. Not /quite/ true. You can also purchase VPN service, which could be used to tunnel through a NAT device and provide a full visibility IP on the inside network. That's probably not the best route to go for a VoIP solution, but then again, if the networks are well connected, it could be just fine. I'll also note that while your answer is almost certainly on-target for what the user asked, it is generally a bit misleading. First off, no one can sell you an IP. IP space is delegated, and you never actually own IP space. It's a little bit like a domain name. Also, any regional numbering authority (for example, ARIN for North America) can delegate you IP space directly, though you certainly need the cooperation of your ISP (or a tunnel provider) in getting that to you. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: Best DB
I believe the driving factors for this are the ability to commercially license Mysql for product integration over PostgreSQL's BSD license, This is a ridiculous FUD statement. Are you actually trying to suggest that one cannot commercially license PostgreSQL? That's simply FALSE. The primary difference is that you are likely to have to *pay* for a commercial MySQL license, and you don't need to *pay* for one for PostgreSQL. So let's not be completely stupid. You can pay for your database if you prefer. Some of us prefer free software. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Cisco 7960 Protocol Invalid when Upgrading to 7.3
Cisco 7960 Upgrading from 6.x to 7.3 get Protocol Invalid. I'm sure this has been discussed but has anyone figured this out. See the Wiki. It's all there for ya. Don't recall the exact page name. Try searching on 7960 and brick. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] DID in the U.S.
Hello! There is something I really don't get: As I ordered a PRI ISDN line in Germany with DID, I had not to pay anything for a DID number block, now I'm trying to get a PRI ISDN in the U.S. (CA) and SBC wants to charge more than 200 USD/month for numbers. I mean, this has nothing to do with DID, where everything that comes after the base number will be transmitted to the PBX anyway. Wasn't DID invented to get rid of number blocks? Please enlighten me. Thanks. You're burning up numbers that could be allocated to other customers. There's an incentive for LEC's to discourage this by charging you for the extra numbers. The NANPA is getting tight on numbers, and at the point where we have to move to 11-digit or 12-digit dialing instead of 10, there will be an immense amount of agony. So usually you don't see providers just handing out blocks of numbers for free. Perhaps this isn't the case in Germany. DID wasn't invented to get rid of number blocks. DID was invented to *allow* number blocks, by passing off the last digits of the dialled number to a PBX. Without that, a PBX (or attendant) has to answer the line and ask you for the extension you want. That situation has the virtue of only burning a single number, but is viewed as uglier. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Im a noob
Hello Ty, VGhhdCBpcyB0cnVlIC0gSSd2ZSBydW4gaW50byBpdCBvbiBzb21lIG9mIG15IHBvbHljb21zLiAg QWZ0ZXIgdHdlYWtpbmcgdGhlIHBob25lJ3MgYnVpbHQtaW4gZWNobyBjYW5jZWxsYXRpb24gSSB3 YXMgDQphYmxlIHRvIGVsaW1pbmF0ZSBpdCB0aG91Z2guDQoNCg0KVHkNCi0tLS0tT3JpZ2luYWwg TWVzc2FnZS0tLS0tDQpGcm9tOiBEZW5uaXMgV2ViYiBbbWFpbHRvOmR3ZWJiQGRlbHRhLWV4cHJl c3MuY2NdDQpTZW50OiBNb25kYXksIE1hcmNoIDA3LCAyMDA1IDExOjI1IEFNDQpUbzogQXN0ZXJp c2sgVXNlcnMgTWFpbGluZyBMaXN0IC0gTm9uLUNvbW1lcmNpYWwgRGlzY3Vzc2lvbg0KU3ViamVj dDogUkU6IFtBc3Rlcmlzay1Vc2Vyc10gSW0gYSBub29iDQoNCg0KQSBjb21tb24gaXNzdWUgeW91 IHdpbGwgaGF2ZSB3aXRoIEZYTy9QU1ROIGxpbmVzIHdpdGggc2lwIGlzIGVjaG8uICBUZXN0IHRo b3JvdWdobHkgYmVmb3JlIHlvdSBnbyBsaXZlIGFuZCBoYXZlIDIwIHBlb3BsZSB5ZWxsaW5nLCAi SSBjYW4gaGVhciBteXNlbGYgdGFsayIuDQoNCk9uIEZyaSwgMjAwNS0wMy0wNCBhdCAxNTozOSwg VHkgUHVyY2VsbCB3cm90ZTogDQpZZXMgaXQgZG9lcyBzdXBwb3J0IGEgYmFzaWMgYW5hbG9nIGxp bmUgKG9yIG1hbnkgbWFueSBsaW5lcy4uLikuICBJdCBhbHNvDQpzdXBwb3J0cyBUMSdzLCBJU0RO LCBldGMuICBGWE8gd291bGQgcHJvdmlkZSBhbiBhbmFsb2cgY29ubmVjdGlvbiB0byB0aGUgcGhv bmUgY29tcGFueSAoeW91ciB3YWxsIGphY2spDQpGWFMgd291bGQgYWxsb3cgeW91IHRvIHBsdWcg YW5hbG9nIHBob25lcyBpbnRvIEFzdGVyaXNrLg0KDQpQaG9uZSA8LS0tPihGWFMpPC0tLT5Bc3Rl cmlzazwtLS0tPihGWE8pPC0tLS0+UGhvbmUgQ29tcGFueQ0KDQpZb3UgY291bGQgZWxpbWluYXRl IHRoZSBGWFMgbmVlZCBpZiB5b3UgcnVuIFNJUCBvciBJQVggSVAgaGFuZHNldHMuICBUaGVuIHRo ZXkgd291bGQganVzdCBjb25uZWN0IHRvIA0KeW91ciBuZXR3b3JrLiAgDQoNCg0KVHkNCg0KDQot LS0tLU9yaWdpbmFsIE1lc3NhZ2UtLS0tLQ0KRnJvbTogZGJha2tlckBhcnJheWFzb2x1dGlvbnMu Y29tIFttYWlsdG86ZGJha2tlckBhcnJheWFzb2x1dGlvbnMuY29tXQ0KU2VudDogRnJpZGF5LCBN YXJjaCAwNCwgMjAwNSAzOjM0IFBNDQpUbzogYXN0ZXJpc2stdXNlcnNAbGlzdHMuZGlnaXVtLmNv bQ0KU3ViamVjdDogW0FzdGVyaXNrLVVzZXJzXSBJbSBhIG5vb2INCg0KDQpJbSBjb21wbGV0bHkg bmV3IHRvIHRoZSB3aG9sZSBQQlggdGhpbmcuIEkgaGF2ZSBhIHRvc2hpYmEgdW5pdCBub3cgYW5k IHdlJ3JlIG1vdmluZyBvdXIgb2ZmaWNlIGluIHRoZSBuZXh0IGZldyBtb250aHMuIEkgd2FudCB0 byB1c2UgYXN0ZXJpc2sgYnV0IHdvdWxkIGxpa2UgdG8gdGVzdCBpdCBvdXQgZmlyc3QuIERvZXMg aXQgc3VwcG9ydCBhIGJhc2ljIGFuYWxvZyBwaG9uZSBsaW5lIGxpa2UgdGhlIG9uZSBpbiBteSBo b3VzZT8gSXMgdGhhdCBGWFM/IEFyZSB0aGVyZSBhbnkgRkFRcyBJIHNob3VsZCByZWFkIHRvIGxl YXJuIG1vcmU/IFRoYW5rcyBmb3IgdGhlIHJlcGx5IQ0KX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19f X19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX18NCkFzdGVyaXNrLVVzZXJzIG1haWxpbmcgbGlzdA0KQXN0 ZXJpc2stVXNlcnNAbGlzdHMuZGlnaXVtLmNvbQ0KaHR0cDovL2xpc3RzLmRpZ2l1bS5jb20vbWFp bG1hbi9saXN0aW5mby9hc3Rlcmlzay11c2Vycw0KVG8gVU5TVUJTQ1JJQkUgb3IgdXBkYXRlIG9w dGlvbnMgdmlzaXQ6DQogICBodHRwOi8vbGlzdHMuZGlnaXVtLmNvbS9tYWlsbWFuL2xpc3RpbmZv L2FzdGVyaXNrLXVzZXJzDQo= That's very interesting. It's probably not what you /meant/ to say. Please remember that when mailing to mailing lists, HTML and other forms of encoded mail are generally frowned upon. Regards, ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Cisco 7960
i am new to this list and i dot not know, if anybody had already the same problem. I have two cisco 7960 which i want to upgrade to sip. Has somebody already taken the upgrade-process for special hints and suggestions? I have already visited the cisco-page and i have read the proposal for the migration. Is there a special order of firmware-upgrades? [correct quoting order restored... damn top-posting] The definitive guide of what versions can be upgraded to what is at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps4967/products_upgrade_guides09186a008022a968.html In particular, look at tables 2 and 3. Horrible answer. Better: 1) Take ANY Cisco documentation with a ton of salt. I've seen numerous examples of it being broken, silly, and just plain wrong. And that's just the useful and relevant bits. 2) Run, don't walk, run over to the Wiki and stare at the numerous notes available on upgrading the firmware on these. Probably a good idea to look at related pages too. Some of us have put up information to make it easier for you to get the dirty work of upgrading one of these phones done. It may not be neat, it may require some reading and effort, it may require a little trial and error, but it ought to be all there. Cisco makes some great phones, but their documentation and their upgrade processes are crappy. Don't give up, though, and don't let any consultants talk you in to paying them to do it for you. obDisclosure: we do consulting work here. But we believe in end-user empowerment and we're not interested in upgrading your phones. That's why I contributed a few missing bits to the Wiki, which definitely can get you through the whole process, now (I hope)! Now back to lurking, ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Cisco 7960
Hi, Whilst I agree with Joe, has anybody actually been able to sucessfuly get the Cisco 7940's/7960's to register into *? We have just about tried everything that was suggested to us without luck. Um, well, really, that's never been a problem here. I've had more problems trying to get them to register directly with VoIP providers than I care to think about, though. You need to make sure you've dotted your i's and crossed your t's with these phones, but then they work really well. from the SIPmac.cnf: line2_name: 2002 line2_authname: 2002 line2_password: khafusulhff line2_shortname: DisplayedLineName proxy2_address: some.ip.addr.ess sip.conf: [2002] type=friend ; This device takes and makes calls secret=khafusulhff ; Password for device auth=md5 host=dynamic; This host is not on the same IP addr every time username=2002 ; Username programmed into Cisco phone context=from-7960 ; Inbound calls from this phone go to this context nat=no ; nat=yes if this phone is behind a NAT box or firewall ;callgroup=2; the group to which this phone belongs for *8 phone rin ging pickup ;pickupgroup=2 ; the pickup group allowed from this phone when *8 is di aled mailbox=2902; Activate the MW light if this VMB has messages in it Obviously not a complete configuration. Note in particular that you probably need certain items out of SIPDefaults. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] LiveVoIP Problems?
No, I dont mind paying more for something if I know its going to be reliable. Well, now, that's kind of the problem here, isn't it? If VoIP pricing isn't more attractive than LEC line pricing, the slam dunk choice is to go with the traditional LEC service. It's reliable, it's cheap, and it's reliable. Most folks are really not going to want to pay more for VoIP service than what they pay to Ma Bell. This means that you have a small number of choices when pricing out VoIP services. It can be cheap, or it can be cheap, or you can be out of business. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] VoipJet issues?
Whats up to VoipJet.com? Their DNS servers are not reachable. Looks like their provider is maybe having problems. AS3728, onr.com, Onramp. Both primary and secondary are on the same subnet - weird setup. While that might be true, it also might not be. 206.55.64.64 and 206.55.64.65 are not on the same network or even the same city, for example (they used to actually be in different states). We use OSPF internally and those addresses are not on any Ethernet network. They're loopback interfaces. They can be moved around. In the case you're talking about, it's *likely* they're on the same network, and that's not good, of course. Those pesky rules about diversity of nameservers exist for a reason. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] FIX YOUR AUTO-RESPONDERS!!!
Why don't you setup a filter rule like... That's not the point. He isn't the only one getting them, so why should EVERYONE add filters to cover all possible auto reply messages? Just have the SENDER fix their end once for everyone. The problem is that this is frequently an implementation error in the mail server software, and a mere employee of a company doesn't get to force a company to change their software just to fix one little problem. This programming problem largely steps from incompetence at vendors of commercial mail server software (I believe that Exchange and Notes are generally recognized as the most heinous offenders) because they don't have a clue about what they're doing. Error messages ought to be sent back to the envelope sender of a message, which mailing list software would set as being the list management address. If I send a message to the Asterisk list, and the Asterisk list then sends a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], I have *not* sent a message to JQL, and should not receive a vacation notification. This was designed into the protocol to avoid just this sort of thing. Mail server software that doesn't understand the difference between the body sender and the envelope sender is just incompetently programmed. It isn't just the mailing list case which breaks. Verbatim message forwarding, where a recipient of my mail forwards it on to a third party, also breaks. We also have a less formal standard for denoting various sorts of bulk mail, which is the Precedence: header. One should *never* reply with an automated message to a message containing a Precedence: list, junk, or bulk header, unless you *really* *really* know what you're doing... and probably not even then. The problem is that while some of us out here know how to write robust mail systems, the people coding things like Exchange and Notes ... don't. I will not include my normal rant about programmers who reach the point of it ran once successfully, it must be correct, let's release the product. Sadly, there are more idiotic senders than there are clueful recipients. It is a lost battle, at least many of us old-timers think so. It doesn't stop me from occasionally getting into a bout with a particularly nasty mail server. procmail rules. :-) Regards, ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] BRI in the US?
OK, I asked this about a week back and met with no repsonse at all. But perhaps its worth trying again. Does anyone on-list have * running BRI to their local telco? I'm considering this as an alternative to my TDM400p card. No, and I've been looking for this for a while now. I'm seriously considering running them into a Cisco 26XX with a ISDN VIC BRI card and seeing if that works. This one bit of the puzzle is the big thing stopping us from going to a VoIP solution, which I'd really like to do. I've even tried things like hooking up a Sipura 3000 to the POTS ports on a Netgear RT338, but that doesn't work reliably, since the Sipura seems to have some trouble detecting line state properly (probably the Netgear's *fault*, but it works fine with our analog phones). ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Re: load balancing 20 asterisk servers
Backhoe's are pretty indiscriminatethey'll cut copper just as easily as fiber. Not really. They tend to do a lot more damage to copper, because there are usually a ton of conductors in the copper cable, and the bundle may be strong enough to be pulled out of the ground. This causes all sorts of interesting damage to copper, and the telco is generally reluctant to replace the entire section unless it's completely ripped. Fiber is usually a smaller bundle and tends to snap when met with a lot force. Backhoes definitely *find* copper just as easily as fiber, but the effects from a strike are generally quite different. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Re: load balancing 20 asterisk servers
I'm trying to stay away from a software based load balancer cause what happens if that server fails? Its far less likely for a piece of dedicated hardware to fail than an actual computer. You really ought to open up one of those pieces of dedicated hardware sometime and see what's inside. Yep, it's software based. Heck, many of the so-called pieces of dedicated hardware are in fact nothing more than a fancy rack mount PC. Open up something like a CacheFlow server and you find an Intel server motherboard, some propietary software, and that is about it. Heck, go on eBay and pick yourself up some of those nice F5 BigIP ... rack mount PC's. Some of the newer stuff is software based with some ASIC assistance for SSL/compression. I know that F5 has made an effort to not look like a PC anymore, for example, and has integrated some switchlike capabilities in their product. Still, when it comes right down to it, the traffic direction logic in these things is software based. Incidentally: one of the /down/sides to these devices, aside from being hellishly expensive, is that when it blows at 5:01PM on a Thursday evening when Friday is Christmas, even if you have the best service contract, it can be a trying experience to get service. PC's have the distinct advantage that you can actually plan to have spare parts available, and on top of it, you can actually build high quality redundant equipment fairly inexpensively. AIC RMC2N-XP Chassis$150 EMACS R2G-6350P Power $300 SuperMicro P4SC8$300 Intel P4-3.0 Prescott $175 Memory as desired CF Adapter $ 20 1GB CompactFlash Boot $ 60 $1005 Toss in a monster passive heatsink and you have a system that isn't particularly susceptible to the loss of any single moving part. Of course, you have to be able to sysadmin your way out of a cardboard box, so it's not like it's cost-free, but here's the thing: If my hypothetical load balancer fails at 5:01PM on Xmas eve, I can: 1) Grab the cold spare I built because it's cheaper to do two of these than a single expensive HW based solution 2) Configure the hot spare I built into production (again because it's cheaper). 3) Grab a desktop PC and stick a few Intel GigE NIC's in it and go to town. 4) At least have a reasonable chance of figuring out some other way to fix things temporarily. So. What's really interesting is that even some networking hardware is actually just computing gear on steroids. I recently saw a SMC 8624T 24-port gigE switch, and it appears to be a bunch of Broadcom GigE chips with a CPU that runs some (can't recall which) embedded OS. VxWorks? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] E911 Testing !
Ok, So maybe too much information for you. 911 is a mystery to most people and regardless if you are a carrier or not this is how it works. Yes, but it's about as useful as telling the guy who is calling in to the cable company to order HBO that the signal arrives through the cable company's Satellite Integrated Receiver-Descrambler prior to being fed in to the Sub-Band Extended Agile Signal Processor, which then feeds to ... well, you get the idea. Yes, there's a backside to the technology, but for the most part, people doing installs don't care or even want to know. In short, you better make sure it works. Not just because you may be liable (if something happens, everyone gets sued, right?) but because it's the right thing to do(tm). You *want* 911 to work. Really. Of course. Now some areas are perfectly happy with you just casually dialing 911 and making sure it works. Sure they want it to work too. But this is **highly** dependent on what area you are in. Everyone has their own policy. I personally would never start out by trying to call 911 and seeing how they react. I don't think anyone suggested that. As an incidental note: I once ran into an installer (for the City of Milwaukee, no less) who was working in a building I'm familiar with. One night, he apparently hooked up his buttset to a non-Centrex line and for some reason he was trying to dial something that started with 11, but thought he was on a Centrex (dial 9 first) line. I am still unclear as to what that would have been, so don't ask. He hung up on the 911 operator. The police came. Rumor is actually that he somehow did this *twice* in a row, but I don't know - either way, the moral of the story is that if you do dial 911, be damn sure to talk to them. Especially if it is /not/ an emergency. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] E911 Testing !
I believe the 911 is a serious issue if one does an asterisk installation in an office. How do you test 911? Won't they arrest you or something for dialing 911 for no reason and talking to one of their agents who could have taken a more important call? That depends. Call and ask them - if you don't know where to call, check with your local police department on their non-emergency number. If you're in one of the cities where it takes them fifteen minutes to answer 911, I suspect they won't want the additional volume. I haven't needed to do it in a while, but around here, you used to be able to call 911 and say something along the lines of This is a test. This is not an emergency call. Could you please verify that your system has identified this as NNN- at $address and they'd very cheerfully verify it for you. On the other hand what an emergency comes up (like someone got seriously injured) and on top of that asterisk crashed all of a sudden bringing the whole office PBX down. Since it would be not be possible to place a call and emergency matter becomes more serious, who would be held responsible? The person who installed the PBX for not implementing a redundant and reliable system? I can sue you for being ugly, and I've never even seen you. If you've taken reasonable care, it's probably fine. Check with a lawyer if you're paranoid. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] E911 Testing !
911 Testing is a very complicated issue. For a clec it typically involves scheduling with them so they will expect your call. Also we frequently use false addresses (that are MSAG resolvable) and some very sophisticated PSAPs even have fake addresses that MSAG resolve to a testing ESN. Translated in english: 1. I put in a special address mapped to a phone number into the 911 location database. This is in the ALI database. The primary source of data that the 911 centers map phone number to address. 2. MSAG (The master street address guide) maps actual street addresses to ESNs an ESN is an Emergency Service Number (or something like that, feel free to correct me). It is basically a specific collection of Police, Fire and EMS. For example, Your house might use Police A, Fire B and EMS B, but the people on the other side of the street might use Police C, Fire B, EMS B (maybe it's jurisdictionally a different town). The PSAPs make up a fake address like 1234 Network Testing Blvd and they make it resolve to ESN 555 which will route to a testing center (joe) who only recieves test calls. Ok.. so too much information.. right? Definitely. Unless you happen to be doing a CLEC's office, none of it has any bearing on the original question. :-) here's the short answer. Please don't call 911 unless you have an emergency. False. Local policies vary widely. Our 911 service here in Milwaukee is the preferred method for reporting debris on the freeway to the Sheriff's Department, for example - a dispatcher once scolded me for *not* calling 911, though admittedly this was only a few years after a truck dropped some debris on I-94 that ultimately punctured the gas tank of a minivan containing a large family and lots of people died, so people have been more sensitive to debris on the highway. In fact, around here, it's fairly common for installers to test 911 service, because there's a danger in 911 *not* working as advertised under ordinary conditions (someone forgot this or that, not too hard on a PRI). Find out who your local PSAP is and call the administative number for it and talk to them. Sometimes it is hard to find this number, but it's out there. Look for Emergency services in ACME town or ACME Town 911 Dispatch etc,etc. Some very small towns actually have their administrative lines forward to the 911 centers for those areas. Call the police department's non-emergency number and they can help track down who to contact, if all else fails. Also be aware that if you are a carrier, you are required by law to have a signed contract with the 911 agency. This is typically so they can collect on the federally mandated 911 end user line fees. Most offices aren't phone carriers. Even most offices for carriers won't have an installer putting in phones that knows anything about some contract locked up half a dozen states away in the Legal Department vault at LEC Headquarters. So that's not too useful to the guy who just wants to verify correct operation of 911 services for an office install. The short form: *ASK* your local 911 center what they prefer you to do. In general, they *want* 911 to work right, and there will be some way to get you what you need. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: DSL without voice
A lot of people are going for the VOIP only approach, but SBC says you have to have an active analog voice circuit before they will sell you DSL. Does anybody know which DSL providers will sell you DSL without making you pay for a voice circuit? SDSL service is delivered on a dedicated circuit. You should never need to have an analog voice circuit before ordering SDSL. (So is, for that matter, HDSL, though that is frequently misrepresented as T1 service) There are also a small number of providers, like Speakeasy, who are now offering ADSL-over-bare-copper services (I believe they call theirs Onelink). There is really nothing prohibiting DSL providers from doing this - they just end up paying Ma Bell for the entire cost of the copper, and that's not really all that popular. Don't forget, you ought to have a conventional phone line for E911 purposes, including what happens when a hurricane goes through and my ISP becomes toast. VoIP is a neat technology but it lacks the resiliency of the traditional phone system. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: DSL without voice
Most RBOC's ILEC's have in their tariffs that the DSL subscriber MUST have a working POTS line before they can be sold DSL. So, let me get this straight, /they/ chose to put in /their/ tariffs that the customer must have a working POTS line, then /they/ use that as a reason to sell more POTS lines. Why am I not crying for the ILEC's here? I am not interested in their desire to sell POTS lines through extortion. Neither are many public utilities commissions, who are generally dismantling such rules. Incidentally, such tariffs do NOT impose such a requirement on SDSL or HDSL, at least around here, and now in a lot of areas we're seeing deployment of services like OneLink, where the customer just pays a little extra for the cost of the dedicated copper. ILEC's are generally full of , by the way. Around here, they were charging the CLEC's something like $10/month for rental of the copper to provide service (POTS, whatever). SBC whined and whined that this was far below their cost and proposed a minor readjustment of only a little more than double, up to something like $22. Note that many direct SBC customers get their entire phone service for less than $22, so I'm not sure how it is that leasing the wires at wholesale rates should cost more than actually providing full service to retail customers. Hell, they used to provide dry copper for just a few bucks a month, sold in fairly large quantities to alarm companies, etc... http://www.jsonline.com/bym/news/mar04/214278.asp I have very little sympathy for the ILEC's. I would probably be fine with seeing their physical plants taken away from them, sold to a highly regulated company that was chartered only to provide wholesale wire services, and then have everyone rent copper at fair prices - including the ILEC. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: DSL without voice
Joe Greco schrieb: Don't forget, you ought to have a conventional phone line for E911 purposes, including what happens when a hurricane goes through and my ISP becomes toast. VoIP is a neat technology but it lacks the resiliency of the traditional phone system. For this you can take your mobile. When my local company (T-Com) decides to allow ADSL without a phone line I will take it. I've got my mobile for cases of emergency. And since in germany there is really no danger of a hurricane the stability of the mobile nets should be sufficient. ;-) I do think the thing that worries me about this trend is the unexpected scenario. Right now, we have a fairly high quality E911 system (dunno about where you are) and people expect that they can dial 911 and the right things happen. So what if you've got some friends visiting your house and you have a heart attack and no 911 on your POTS-via-VoIP? Are they expected to know your cell phone's unlock code? Are they required to bring their own cells as a prerequisite for visiting? Or is it acceptable for them to have to go finding a neighbor who has a usable POTS phone? I know it's *unlikely*, but emergencies always are. I agree with your argument for non-emergency purposes: the advent of good cell phone service may mean the demise of many landlines, as cells may be more practical for some users. As early adopters, we may not have any good solutions, and that may in fact be fine, as long as we know it. It's just worth thinking about... ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: DSL without voice
On Fri, 17 Dec 2004, Joe Greco wrote: Joe Greco schrieb: Don't forget, you ought to have a conventional phone line for E911 purposes, including what happens when a hurricane goes through and my ISP becomes toast. VoIP is a neat technology but it lacks the resiliency of the traditional phone system. For this you can take your mobile. When my local company (T-Com) decides to allow ADSL without a phone line I will take it. I've got my mobile for cases of emergency. And since in germany there is really no danger of a hurricane the stability of the mobile nets should be sufficient. ;-) I do think the thing that worries me about this trend is the unexpected scenario. Right now, we have a fairly high quality E911 system (dunno about where you are) and people expect that they can dial 911 and the right things happen. So what if you've got some friends visiting your house and you have a heart attack and no 911 on your POTS-via-VoIP? Are they expected to know your cell phone's unlock code? Are they required to bring their own cells as a prerequisite for visiting? Or is it acceptable for them to have to go finding a neighbor who has a usable POTS phone? This random thought just popped into my head: Seems like I've read that any cell handset will place a 911 call, regardless of whether it is associated with a valid and paid-up account. Is that true? If so, then maybe we could just attach GSM interfaces to our asterisk box to provide communications in the unlikely emergency (so long as the LAN and * box have power to operate, that is). Whaddaya think? In five years, when GPS cell phone location services are mature and stable, this is probably a fairly good solution. Until then, it suffers the same problems as contemporary 911-via-cell service. :-/ It's that whole early adopter thing again. Heh. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: DSL without voice
www.Covad.com I have their TeleSoho dedicated loop DSL. It costs the same as the bundled loop. ADSL or SDSL? (I haven't looked at Covad's pricey offerings for a while) ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] NPA NXX data
On Fri, 17 Dec 2004, Jon Bebeau wrote: HI all - I know, slightly off list, but.. I'm looking for a NPA NXX database with City and State. Actually it's for an Asterisk routing app I'm working on. I see several vendors that want a few bucks to those that want an arm and leg. I expect this is published somewhere by some government agency, but Google hasn't got me to it yet. I dug up this message from the list archives back in September. Hopefully it'll help you find the info you're after: Just go to the source. http://www.nanpa.com/area_codes/index.html ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Re: Asterisk crashes my router!?
| m0n0wall is a project aimed at creating a complete, embedded | firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded | PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes | (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software). | | m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web | server, PHP and a few other utilities. The entire system configuration | is stored in one single XML text file to keep things transparent. | | m0n0wall is probably the first UNIX system that has its boot-time | configuration done with PHP, rather than the usual shell scripts, | and that has the entire system configuration stored in XML format. It's a firewall designed for embedded hardware, not a UNIX system. It just happens to have a FreeBSD kernel at its core. That's something else entirely. In that context, the fact that the author has chosen to use PHP to tie everything together, instead of /bin/sh, and that he prefers XML for his configuration file format, is perfectly all right. On the other hand, a *UNIX* system with its boot time configuration done with PHP, and its entire system configuration stored as a single XML file, would be something I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. As though using /bin/sh and dozens of files in varying formats in /etc, /usr/local/etc, and elsewhere around the system makes any more sense. Yeah. I've been working in sh long enough to know that it has some significant failings, and that there are advantages to going and doing something completely different. I've written several system init applications in C, for example, which has none of the advantages of instant editing that all the /etc/rc scripts do, but also has none of the limitations imposed by sh. I'm also quite aware that it is difficult to do the equivalent of copy running-config backup-config on a UNIX based system, which is something people like to do on appliance class devices. And there's no reason that lots of applications can't be viewed as appliance class applications. I'm certainly not arguing that mainline UNIX releases ought to go and dump sh and move to XML, but saying that you wouldn't touch one that did is a bit silly, because there are some clear advantages to be gained, once you get past the learning curve. My vote for worst-of-all-worlds: configuration snapshots on an Ascend GRF (UNIX based routing platform with dozens of /etc/* files controlling the important stuff). ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] drive space for voice mail
Matthew Boehm wrote: Can you say 'overkill' ? *smiles* I just recorded a 2min voicemail and the resulting file on the server was slightly over 200KB in size. We are only storing 1 format of soundfiles, WAV49. A 160GB drive is approx 1,677,721,160 KB. At the rate above you would be able to store almost 28,000 hours of voicemail messages. Someone wanna check my math? Unless my recent math [280,000 hours] was wrong, thats ~ 31 years of voicemail :) Actually, it works out to about a quarter of that, you need to figure in MTBF. :-) Actual numbers depend on # of simultaneous recordings, etc., of course, but it's just interesting to note that MTBF likely becomes an issue before capacity does. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] PRI litmus test
Hi all, I'm diagnosing a problem related to PRI card. I would like to know the following: assuming I've got a working PRI card and correctly installed Linux drivers and a PRI line connected to the card, even without starting asterisk, shouldn't I hear a ring tone when I dial the number? I'm getting busy tone all the time. I'm guessing that without anything on the PC actually communicating with the PRI card, it's about as dumb as a brick (no higher level protocol layer). PRI will usually show busy when the switch doesn't see anything on the other side of the circuit. This allows correct operation of multi-span installations where one span goes bad. Try running something on the PC which actually sets up the ISDN card and talks to the switch. Good bet that it'll suddenly start working. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] asterisk newsgrup proposal or phpBB forum
Not everyone has decent access to NNTP either due to firewalls coporate or otherwise That's why many news servers allow access on alternate ports. :-) or are under a quota due to the amount of illegal activity that appears there. Add to it the inability to control spam or kick an unruley users if the need arises. NNTP doesn't solve any problems, and phpBB creates a bunch. Better question is why do you feel there needs to be a change? You've missed some best of breed options. A newsgroup by itself may or may not be useful. However, either way, USENET (which isn't entirely limited to NNTP, incidentally) has a bunch of powerful clients that are designed from the ground up for participating in large threaded discussions. This is a major failing of many mail clients. I find it easier to follow large discussions with the text-based trn newsreader than with any graphical mail client I've seen to date - bar none - and trn is old technology. Just the thread tree view itself is so useful, not to mention one-key cruising through the tree nodes. Many sites gateway various mailing lists into local hierarchies, for the explicit purpose of solving some of the problems that NNTP doesn't solve, because the medium was designed to deal with the functional equivalent of mailing list traffic from day one. You can avoid some of the problems of public newsgroups by making it a one- way gateway, with moderator pointing back at the original list, therefore subject to all the normal list posting controls. Setting up a one-way gateway isn't too difficult. Is there interest? I can certainly start one. We already do all the FreeBSD lists and a bunch of other stuff here. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] asterisk based bbs
Em Dom 28 Nov 2004 13:55, Michael Vogel escreveu: lenz schrieb: I was wondering: anybody ever wrote an asterisk based bbs? not a bbs about asterisk, but a vocal bbs that runs on asterisk, so that people can call, hear the discussion of the day, leave messages, etc. It doesn't really make sense to me. It only makes sense for some very limited fields. e.g. when somebody cannot read or write (he hasn't learned it or is blind). Everybody else could use the computer. Most people who would use such a system do have a computer at home I guess. A lot of people thought the same before WWW, when text based contents were the basis of networks. The real problem with bulletin board systems (speaking as someone who authored bulletin board systems back in the days of 110 and 300 baud) is bandwidth. Information transfers slowly at low bit rates, and we optimized the hell out of the online experience, doing things like shortening the message headers (To:, Fr:, Su:, etc), making sure that character inputs to move on to the next message could be entered at any time, using short menus but always leaving more detailed help options available, etc. A vocal BBS would inherently involve a very slow transfer of information, and there's just so much time people are willing to commit to participating. The Internet as a textual medium moving towards graphics is a very different thing; the human eye inherently has a *huge* amount of bandwidth available, so adding graphics to the Web only caused us to keep increasing the technological transmission speeds so that people would not get bored waiting for the computer to download all the graphics. To put it another way: I can pull up a listing of messages in a folder and eyeball them 50 at a time, looking for interesting things. It takes me less than 10 seconds to make it through the subject list. If I had to listen to 50 subjects, even at a mere five seconds per, that would involve nearly five minutes of time. This aspect will generally limit the amount of time people are willing to spend participating. A compelling purpose would help, of course, and in fact might be required for a vocal BBS to enjoy much popularity. You know, I think I've just come upon another reason I hate voicemail so much, and usually listen to it with half an ear while I'm doing something much more productive - like reading e-mail. :-) ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] asterisk newsgrup proposal or phpBB forum
On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 15:52 -0600, Joe Greco wrote: Not everyone has decent access to NNTP either due to firewalls coporate or otherwise That's why many news servers allow access on alternate ports. :-) On a proper network firewall, it is deny all, allow these few ports. So unless you are running NNTP on a port like 80 or 443, it probably will be blocked. Even then a good admin would have a proxy in place to help cut down the bandwidth usage and would therefore break NNTP. Practical experience (bearing in mind that one of our businesses is a wholesale USENET outsourcer providing service to numerous ISP's) is that if you cover 20, 23, 80, 110, 120, and 1024-3999, you have given people the ability to bypass at LEAST 95% of all firewalls out there. or are under a quota due to the amount of illegal activity that appears there. Add to it the inability to control spam or kick an unruley users if the need arises. NNTP doesn't solve any problems, and phpBB creates a bunch. Better question is why do you feel there needs to be a change? You've missed some best of breed options. A newsgroup by itself may or may not be useful. However, either way, USENET (which isn't entirely limited to NNTP, incidentally) has a bunch of powerful clients that are designed from the ground up for participating in large threaded discussions. This is a major failing of many mail clients. I find it easier to follow large discussions with the text-based trn newsreader than with any graphical mail client I've seen to date - bar none - and trn is old technology. Just the thread tree view itself is so useful, not to mention one-key cruising through the tree nodes. Who said mail needs to be graphical? Nobody. However, I don't see too much development in the non-graphical arena, and the threading capabilities of the text mail readers isn't all that great (usually zero, with less than a handful of exceptions). I know a great many people still using mutt for their mail You'll note my X-Mailer :-) I'll thank you not to refer to Mutt as a has-been... for some of us it's the next client. and it probably will resemble trn close enough for your taste. Highly unlikely. I've actually tried to make the jump to Mutt several times, mostly because Elm is a has-been, but there's a substantial enough set of annoying differences that I've always gone back. Mutt *rocks* at mail filtering, and in fact when I'm cleaning the inbox, I frequently pull Mutt up and do heavy purging. However, I've never found its threading to be all that good. I'm used to cruising in four directions in trn, being able to wipe out whole subtrees at a stroke, etc... Mutt seems much more like they tried to graft threading on top of a conventional mail reader. Of course there are plenty of graphical email readers that support threaded views. I happen to use evolution with threads turned on and enjoy it. Your right, threaded trees are great. I love it when there is enough people using correct enough software to help keep the information correct. Of course we get to the same problem here that not all software mail or nntp actually puts the in-reply-to or references headers in to make the tree view work. Yeah, and it's not like it's *hard* to do. Too much software written by people who thought they were done when the program ran without crashing. Many sites gateway various mailing lists into local hierarchies, for the explicit purpose of solving some of the problems that NNTP doesn't solve, because the medium was designed to deal with the functional equivalent of mailing list traffic from day one. Gateway mailing lists to local hierarchies to solve problems that hierarchies doesn't solve? Huh? I said many sites gateway mailing lists into local hierarchies. For example, we dump the FreeBSD lists into sol.lists.freebsd.* (complete with correct re-tagging of the Message-ID's). Sounds like broken hacks to me. Maybe in your rush through that sentence your meaning didn't get fully expressed. I think you misparsed something. I quoted the NNTP doesn't solve that had previously been asserted. NNTP solves lots of problems, but you kind of have to know the ins and outs. For example, NNTP is terrible at handling mailing list traffic if you do not re-tag Message-ID's with a local site identifier. Many amateurish attempts to gateway use the original message's Message-ID, which is wrong, because in many cases there are multiple sites gatewaying a list onto the NNTP backbone - each with a different local hierarchy. As for the design, like many older technologies, NNTP was designed before the unrulely behavior of spammers. While I know there are some private nntp servers that enable authentication to protect themselves, it isn't the norm. NNTP has evolved, and the spam problem is much more under control via NNTP than it is via e-mail these days. We operate DSRS, a fairly
Re: [Asterisk-Users] asterisk based bbs
You're right! But I wrote that voice will be the next content that we will
use in networks environments...
Um, voice was pretty much the first content used in networked environments
(telegraph doesn't count because it wasn't generally networked, at least
in an automated manner). Even today, most of the Internet runs over data
circuits originally envisioned as carrying digital voice traffic.
of course, the model of exchanging information will upgrade too!
You will make a GOOGLE search, just talking with your voice browser,
something like:
- Asterisk _plus_ BBS
- We found 30 references for Asterisk and BBS...
You will have your hands free to write an old email to your friens at the
same time that you ask and listen for a file stored in your server...
We gonna have another interface to the information, that means: more
information per second(i/s).
BBS is an old idea, we must update its concepts.
You're talking about a voice based PDA, not a voice based BBS. BBS is an
old idea, and it's better to not morph its concepts to mean something
completely different than what it has historically meant, when more modern
concepts exist that fit much better.
That all said: There's nothing wrong with that idea. I'll note that
services like inphone currently accomplish some basic features along
this line via a human operator interface; the natural evolutionary
direction for this is to be a more virtualized voice PDA service of some
sort like what you're describing.
Regardless, while it may be handy in some circumstances, it doesn't really
translate to more information per second. Lots of people have cable modems
and a phone line; I find very few of them running a modem on the phone line
in order to increase their overall transfer speed to the Internet. The
trivial bit of added speed usually isn't of value. The speed differential
between cable and modem is roughly similar to the speed differential
between eye and ear, and then there's the notable bit that many people
don't efficiently {read,type} /and/ {listen,speak} simultaneously anyways.
Humans are not naturally capable of concentrating on two things and doing
so proficiently.
I don't think that you're actually going to find people using a voice PDA
to do Google searches while writing e-mail on their computer... it's
easier and faster to simply open another browser tab and go to Google,
and then flip back to e-mail.
Focus on when it'd be /really/ useful and usable: when you don't have
instant Internet access at hand, but you do have voice communications
(I'll include the visually impaired as a class of people who don't
necessarily have instant Internet access at hand, at least not in the
same way most other people do)
... JG
--
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
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Re: [Asterisk-Users] am i baned or something?
Soemthing goes wrong with this mail list: I am getitng something like it: Sorry. Your message could not be delivered to: Aster risk (Mailbox or Conference is full.) ?? Probably nothing to do with you. A lot of people run mail software that isn't fit for consumption even by pigs (or goats or whatver you prefer). In particular, people like to run autoresponders and the like which completely ignore the envelope sender (which is where all backchannel communications, such as errors, ought to go) and instead target the listed From: address in the body of the message, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the transaction, other than perhaps having originally authored the message at some past point. This is, of course, generally the fault of the software they run. I'll further note that the software in question is frequently MICROSOFT BROKENWARE. Sadly, the small portion of the Internet community that has a clue does not seem to care enough to do something to deal with this problem, such as finding ways to deliberately cause these mechanisms to break horribly until they're removed or turned off by their clueless MCSE admins. Regards, ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] D-LINK PoE switch,
As an alternative to the expensive PoE switches out there, I found the D-Link Web Smart DES-1316 switch for just around $400. Now, the issue is, it does 802.3af power and, as I've found out through previous discussions, this original 76?0 series phones (the non G variety) do not use 802.3af. So I'm assuming I just need to use the special cable thing as per http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Cisco+POE and it will work. Is it this simple to save myself $1000 over the next lowest price PoE switch? To the best of my knowledge, both the 7960 and 7960G are Cisco pre-standard PoE. The 7970G is 802.3af. Now, there's something you need to know: 802.3af compliant switches are not supposed to just put out voltage. There's some sort of protocol used to negotiate power between a device and a switch, and without that, the switch will not send power. The little cable scheme on the Wiki assumes a dumb PoE injector which is basically little more than a DC power supply dumping current on the spare pairs to power an 802.3af compliant device. Apparently devices will accept power just fine even without negotiating, and that applies to Ciscos as well with the reversed-lead modification on the Wiki. On a smart switch, however, I wouldn't expect it to happen, since power will not have been negotiated. You might still find that switch and a bunch of 3CNJVOIP-CPOD to be cheaper than a Cisco compatible PoE switch, however. Regards, ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Opinions on renice or turning off swap or ramdis
I have 4 gig in my * box. I'm tuning for performance and I'd like to ask opinions: Bear in mind I come from a FreeBSD background. Linux might behave differently. 1. asterisk -p == renice -20 ?? Why? If you have other things running on the machine, get a dedicated box for Asterisk. It might make sense to give it a mildly elevated priority, but running it at -20 might cause problems if you needed to get in and administer a runaway server. 2. I've turned off swap with no apparent ill effects. Can anyone commment on long term effects with moderate load (say, 30 SIP phones / 2-3K calls /day) Unless Linux has a really poor swap strategy, this is a terrible idea. Even a mediocre swap implementation will begin swapping out lightly used pages when memory starts getting short. That swapping out actually *frees* memory up, memory needed by active processes. Turning off swap merely causes the system to work harder, and in the event the case where a lot of unexpected memory is being used, you're forced to keep it all in core - probably denying memory requests to processes that need them. What about when Asterisk has a really slow memory leak, growing a meg a day? In normal system design, while this is not desirable, it is simply swapped out to disk, and life goes on (at least for a lot longer than the without-swap case). Turn on swap. Turn on *big* swap. Set an alarm on swap so you're notified of any significant amount of paging. That's the best of all worlds. 3. Can anyone comment on using ramdisk as swap and whether this is a good idea or bad idea? RAMDISK as in something like a hardware RAMDISK? Go ahead, but you're throwing away money. Figuring out why a system with 4GB of memory and is only running Asterisk is swapping is a cheaper fix. A software RAMDISK? No way. You're eating up system RAM to provide for the lack of ... system RAM. Not smart. I'm using 2.6 kernel. I've modified the PCI latency in rc.local: setpci -v -s my T100P address latency_timer=ff Anyone else have any performance tips? Carefully profile your system to find out where the bottlenecks really are. Then get out the Attitude Adjuster (BOFH's find that it works nearly as well on systems as it does on people). Then go buy a system with none of those bottlenecks. ;-) ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] [OT] PoE switch question (Netgear FSM7326P
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Kevin P. Fleming wrote: So, I ask again: given the choice between a sub-$100 16-port full-duplex 100Mb switch and external power supplies, and an over-$1000 12-port switch with internal power supply, which do you think is a better value for a small LAN? I can buy $20 3Com PoE bricks and hook them all up to a UPS for a lot less than $900, with the downside being that it will be ugly to look at (and the bricks aren't real PoE, but they are close enough for VOIP phones). Well, that depends how important it is to have phone service during a power outage, and what their UPS budget is! ;) When you add another $55 / workstation for individual UPS units just to ensure the phones work, rather than centralizing that and getting a big-ass central UPS for the entire system, the numbers even out a bit more! ;) I think he was talking about using external PoE injectors located by the hub, so there would be no need for anything other than a big-ass central UPS. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Fw: Gift for Mark Spencer
On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 18:47 -0600, Steve Maroney wrote: Is that directed towards me ? Why ? I doubt it was directed at you. If your read your message in a good threaded mail reader, you would have seen it is in response to my message that was aimed at the hackerwanker. Let's not be abusive towards the victim of an unsolicited bulk e-mail. http://spam.abuse.net/overview/whatisspam.shtml While I believe that the senders of this spam did in fact have good intentions, that doesn't change the inappropriateness of having sent it. Certainly there were some valid questions about the authenticity, and if it were not an authentic message, then warning the mailing list about the problem would be a good idea. On the flip side, senders of spam should not expect recipients to go to much (or any) trouble on their behalf, especially given the current spam environment on the 'net. They - not hackerwaCker - blew the surprise by sending the message to recipients unknown. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Fw: Gift for Mark Spencer
On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 19:06 -0600, Joe Greco wrote: [..snip..] On the flip side, senders of spam should not expect recipients to go to much (or any) trouble on their behalf, especially given the current spam environment on the 'net. They - not hackerwaCker - blew the surprise by sending the message to recipients unknown. I'll just summarise all you said into one conclusion which remains the same as to what Steven said: hackerwanker is a moron. :-) No, that's not what I said. If you want the short, brutal summary, it'd be: The spammer who sent the message is the moron. Really, there are all sorts of bizarre phishing schemes and other scams out on the 'net. If you go asking random people for donations, and cannot put the request in the context of solid well-knowns, such as an organization or individual who is clearly legitimate, then it looks quite possibly like a scam of some sort, and posting it to the list isn't exactly unreasonable - it's more like a watch out for this scam community service. However, we also have to remember that even being a well-known wouldn't make it right to send unsolicited bulk e-mail. So. It's unfortunate (for the people trying to organize the gift) that hackerwacker sent an alert to the list. It's not unusual, though. As service providers, many of us actively encourage customers to put a stop to abuses of the mail system such as chain letters and other scams by asking people to take active countermeasures. I'd consider this to be an example of just such a countermeasure. It seems fitting that spammers should not have their goals furthered by the act of spamming. It would seem that this is precisely what happened in this case. I'll further note that I did receive a copy of the spam in question. While I did not choose to complain to the relevant sites about it, or to post a message to the mailing list, the Boulder Pledge is certainly applicable - I will not be contributing towards a gift effort that spammed. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Fw: Gift for Mark Spencer
You, bloody moron. Is not most email unsolicited. Are you familiar with the spam problem? Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail. It is problematic for any number of reasons. A single unsolicited message may be unwanted, and that's an issue of some sort, but the real problem is when someone feels free to broadcast their message. At the expense of all the recipients. I never asked you to send an email, Are you the person in charge of telling people when they can send messages to the list? If not, then that's irrelevant. Your message is off topic, That's debatable. Your getting rude, Actually, my original reply was quite innocuous. When someone decided to quote it and say I was saying something other than what I was actually saying, I got a bit more explicit. Am I not allowed to correct a misquote? therefor *YOU* are a spammer. Test fails: bulk (UBE). I sent one message. Therefore not spam. By definition. Alternate test fails: commercial (UCE). I'm not selling anything. Therefore not spam. Also by definition. Sorry, I'm not a spammer. Heck, we do all sorts of anti-spam stuff here. You can try to figure out what my .sig means... ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Fw: Gift for Mark Spencer
What mailing list is this? Asterisk-Users.
The request wasn't made on the mailing list. It was made via direct spam.
If it were made on the mailing list and conformed to whatever posting
guidelines might exist, then it'd be fine.
Why do we even HAVE
Asterisk? Because Mark Spencer and the folks at Digium (and others)
have been busting their butts to provide such a quality piece of
software. You wouldn't even have a mailing list to complain on if it
weren't for Mark. Not only would I love to contribute to this, I think
the whole idea of a hot tub and it being a surprise is wonderful
(assuming Mark can keep his laptop out of the tub). Furthermore, how
else are you supposed to contact the 8,000 or so people on this list
(without posting to it directly, and thus blowing the surprise)? The
Batlight from Batman?
Principles are an interesting thing.
You can tell a lot about people by whether they actually live by them or
if they only pay them lip service.
Spam doesn't become okay just because you're doing ${THING}. For any value
of ${THING}. If you're sending bulk quantities of unsolicited mail, you
are spamming. That's a fact. Check your ISP TOS. It doesn't say You
can't spam unless you are doing it to send solicitations for money for a
gift for Mark Spencer.
What happens next week when someone gets the bright idea to solicit a few
million people for a $1 donation for the Buy Linus Torvalds a Hot Tub
fund? Is that somehow OK, then? What about the Buy Bill Gates a Skunk
fund?
Think about that question very carefully before you reply.
Because if you think that the spam being discussed is okay, and you say
you don't like spam, well, there's a little conflict there.
... JG
--
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
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Re: [Asterisk-Users] [OT] PoE switch question (Netgear FSM7326P works
Sean Kennedy wrote: Jeeze, how can you NOT justify a 1000 bucks for a PoE switch that has QoS? I was under the impression that QoS was a requirement for VoIP. Well, not technically, but rationally, I wouldn't set any client up on a VoIP system that didn't have a switch that couldn't push the VoIP packets to the front of the queue. Uhh, yeah, explain to my customers that have 6-8 phones, 6-8 PCs, a small NAS and a DSL connection that they need a $1000 switch. Go ahead, I dare you :-) QoS on the internal LAN is not something I am at all concerned about. All the switches are 100Mb full duplex, and have switching fabrics capable of much more than that. Any traffic generated between the PCs and the NAS is not likely to affect VOIP at all. There are no queues being shared between the VOIP phones and any other devices on the network, except for traffic leaving the LAN. You have to either have a bad switch or a heck of a lot of traffic to get any latency on a 100/full network. If it's a problem - get another switch just for the phones. That's not terribly hard. You can pick up nice, managed 16-port switches on eBay for sub-$50 if you don't mind the used route. Where these clients _do_ need QoS is on their router that connects to the ISP, but we can handle that, again without spending $1000. So, I ask again: given the choice between a sub-$100 16-port full-duplex 100Mb switch and external power supplies, and an over-$1000 12-port switch with internal power supply, which do you think is a better value for a small LAN? I can buy $20 3Com PoE bricks and hook them all up to a UPS for a lot less than $900, with the downside being that it will be ugly to look at (and the bricks aren't real PoE, but they are close enough for VOIP phones). As much as I agree with that general sentiment, I think I'd be a little afraid of doing that. I've seen reports of people blowing stuff up with dumb PoE injectors, and I've seen enough legacy wire abandonment and subsequent hey there's a jack let's just plug in to make me somewhat hesitant. The PoE switches are heavily overpriced. No dispute there! And then you have companies like Cisco pulling off stunts like their pre-standard non- standard PoE. Anyways, Not That I Would Encourage Anyone To Do This, but NFR's of Netgear products are available at half off list ($875 for the switch in question) to Powershift partners. That's gotta be one of the better prices for that switch at this time. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] Possible to display which extensions are in
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004, Jason Becker wrote: On our current phones (Iwatsu) we have a button on the phones for each extension that lights up when that extension is ringing or is in a call, so I can see at a glance if one of my coworkers is on the phone before I go barging into his office. Also, if I am in a coworker's office and my phone rings, I can hit my extension button on his phone and answer the call. [snip] This question was dealt with in a recent thread. What it comes down to is a paradigm shift from a key system unit (which is what you describe) to a PBX. I don't think this is really a key system. AFAIK a traditional key system has a one-to-one mapping between lines and the buttons. Some pbx:es offer a mode where each *extension* is / can be represented by a button. This is called a Busy Light Field (BLF) for the status indications and also allows Directed Call Pickup. These systems exist on scale between a pure key systems and pure pbx. It is actually a very nice feature to have. It is, but it seems to me it's also a bit more complex to determine what constitutes busy on something like a 7960, where you've got multiple extensions each capable of more than one call appearing on the phone. Not saying it can't be done, but there's some sense to the large PBX mentality of just not bothering. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] How to generate ringing tone to a calling party.
Who to generate ring tone to a calling party when the call is passed to an extension. The asterisk answers correctly, plays welcome message and ring an extension, but the caller does not here the rings. Did you tell Asterisk to indicate ringing? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] How to generate ringing tone to a calling
Joe Greco wrote: Who to generate ring tone to a calling party when the call is passed to an extension. The asterisk answers correctly, plays welcome message and ring an extension, but the caller does not here the rings. Did you tell Asterisk to indicate ringing? Asterisk will ALWAYS indicate ringing if it can. The r option to Dial, Playtones, and Ringing are all hacks/workarounds for when Asterisk cannot indicate ringing to the calling party. You should diagnose and fix the real problem, rather than try hiding the issue. I have to confess that I don't understand the real problem, then. What else are you supposed to do when you've already answered a channel and you then want the caller to hear ringing? It didn't seem to work automatically, and I'm certainly not convinced that it should. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
[Asterisk-Users] LookupCIDName - 1 vs
Hello, I noticed that some calls here were not picking up Caller-ID name data from our local database. /blacklist/4149361212 : Blocked Number /cidname/4148441414 : Ameritech Time Turns out to be a simple case of our Sipura 3000 appending a 1 in front of the area code, so the LookupCIDName call isn't matching it. I was wondering what people think the best fix for this is, since that would obviously affect the blacklist functionality as well. Most likely I'll end up with a 1NX - NX rule of some sort in the Sipura's inbound context, but that seems kind of ugly. Has anyone devised a neater solution for this? Regards, ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation
Joe Greco wrote: I'm struggling to think of another free software project where contributed code bearing an identical GPL or BSD license would require any such additional disclaimer. How about any softwaer owned by the FSF, MySQL, SleepCat DB, QT. I can continue if you want... :-) Really? Has the FSF really lowered itself to forcing people to sign away future acquired patent/IP rights? I wonder if IBM has signed such an agreement, because that'd have an interesting effect on some of their technology patents. I'm going to have to start echoing someone else's comments here who called it software communism. I probably wouldn't have been quite that extreme, but hey, you learn something new and interesting every day. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation
Joe Greco wrote: The GPL is fundamentally flawed in that it's never been functionally tested and challenged in court, and many IP lawyers believe that there are challenges that it would not survive. The fact that some lawyers may have found further legal loopholes to exploit is not shocking, given the holes in the current implementation. Actually, this is not true. The GPL was tested in a Germen court and survived very well thank you very much. I'm not so worried about courts where a straightforward reading of a license may be interpreted without many complications by an impartial judge. (I apologize for having forgotten that large parts of the rest of the world have a sane legal system. Look at us, we finally got rid of Ashcroft...) I'm much more interested in the U.S. system, where case law often has an unexpected and interesting effect on rulings, and frequently the party with more money to throw at a problem can win anyways. IOW, I wouldn't want IBM to try breaking the GPL in a courtroom, because I believe there'd be a large chance that they'd find a way to succeed. But this is not the most improtant point. The important point is this: The target of a good license (or any legal document for that matter) is not to survive in court. The purpose of a good license is to be so iron clad clear that it never ever gets into court in the first place. Well, there, that's the BSD license for you. Short. Sweet. Ironclad. That's *not* the GPL, which is a myriad maze of twisty turns and various requirements and obligations, all of which represent attack vectors against the litigants and against the license itself. Until they've all been tested in court, I'm not really convinced that it is ironclad. And this, my friend, is something the GPL has done *very well*. Mostly because people have been afraid to bring it to court, because their IP lawyers are staring at it in horror. Things like the preamble are completely stupid, because it talks about the goals of the license. A court is allowed to consider that additional data when evaluating a case, and if there were to be a conflict between that and the actual license terms, it is ambiguous (and up to the court) which of the preamble and the terms would actually win out. Yuck. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] RE: BRI in the US
One goal is to get BRI support in Zaptel if possible. I'm right now in the planning stage :P Plus BRI is much cooler than pots. Why invent the wheel again, what's wrong with bristuff from junghanns.net? US bri (afaik) is not EuroISDN, but NI or something like. funny mode Of course US people have their own standards : ulaw instead of alaw, NI instead of euroisdn, T1 instead of E1, miles instead of km and so on... :) /funny mode But since junghanns.net does already the cards (transport layer is the same for both, only layer-3 is different, afaik) perhaps adding to */libpri/zaptel euroisdn bri (from klaus) and us bri could be a great idea. is of course a bigger plus for * itself By the way, is anyone actually working on this? I would contribute to a bounty for solid US BRI support within Asterisk (preferably under FreeBSD, but I can deal with Linux if I absolutely have to). ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation (lets think before we
Hey All, Isn't it possible that part of the commercial licenses that is offered is that you (the buyer) are not required to advertise, disclose, or even admit that your products offerings are based on an open source project? What other reason would one have for buying a commercial license for an OS piece of software? In this industry? Lots. Let's start with linking it to a non-GPL- compatible codec, move on to linking it with a propietary configuration and management system, and end up at creatively finding a reason to fund the development of an open source software project while simultaneously obtaining a licensing model for your company that doesn't make lawyers cringe. That's three good reasons that have nothing to do with it, and I didn't even think much about it. There are plenty of reasonable reasons that one might do it. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation
[snip] If someone believes that they are contributing software to a GPL'd software project, and does not realize that the nature of your disclaimer allows Digium to release their changes under a non-GPL'd license, then that is breaking with the spirit of the GPL. If that is true, then the GPL is not comprehensive enough to cover its own spirit, so what you are saying is that the GPL implementation is fundamentally flawed. The GPL is fundamentally flawed in that it's never been functionally tested and challenged in court, and many IP lawyers believe that there are challenges that it would not survive. The fact that some lawyers may have found further legal loopholes to exploit is not shocking, given the holes in the current implementation. If one can break the spirit of it without breaking it, then something is missing from it that should have there. Many people pay lawyers to find loopholes. I have no doubt that if a large company, of an IBM-like size, wanted to have the GPL found unenforceable, that there are numerous vectors on which to attack it. It is certain that the FSF did not have as many lawyers participating in drafting this license, and that the state of the art in software licenses 13 years ago (the most recent update of the GPL) was less sophisticated and less tested. I've seen good legal teams drive a truck through long legal documents that were considered to be thorough. I've seen courts throw out conservative legal documents for a variety of reasons. The GPL is both long and quite unusual as a legal document goes. To think that it has no attack vector is naive at best. On the other hand, if you are injecting some supernatural spirit (and purposely using that word to conjure imagery of the imaginary intangible qualities that can never be written on paper) of your own into what the GPL actually is, then the GPL is fine as written, which I suspect is the case. The GPL is what it says, and its spirit comes from what it says, and there is no way that anyone can break its spirit as such. Well, the GPL *is* an attempt to legally enforce GNU's concept of free software, which I refer to as the spirit of the GPL. We can be fairly certain that their concept did not translate verbatim into legal language, simply because few things ever translate 100%. Unless you are now claiming to be the author of the GPL, you should stop trying to be an expert on its spirit. The only ones qualified to do so are John Stallman and his attorneys, misguided though they may be. Who's John Stallman? Richard M. Stallman's brother? In the meantime, if you don't like the fact that I've been contemplating the GPL vs the BSD license vs other licenses for many years, that's fine. You do not need to consider me an expert... I don't consider myself one, after all. However, I do believe that I can safely discuss the philosophy of the GNU project at this level of detail without conflicting with their actual position. Yet no matter how much I don't care for the GPL, I find myself believing contributors who don't fully understand the disclaimer merely to be naive, but Digium looking a bit unscrupulous in this regard. Butter him up and then call him unscrupulous in a later paragraph. Beautifully manipulative. I said 'looking a bit unscrupulous'. How better to phrase it? There's something unusual going on. It isn't being disclosed in an obvious manner. People are signing away rights. If you'd read the GPL and the other stuff on the GNU web site, that's fairly clearly not in keeping with some of the principles behind the GPL. Manipulative? Who's being manipulative? I'm discussing the issue. If I've made a point, it's certainly not been by unfair means. That obviously won't fix the moral standing problem that the FSF would Your own use of quotes here suggests something interesting. I'll leave it to the reader to discover what. What, you're dissin' me for suggesting that Digium could at least disclose what's going on? Or are you dissin' me for what the FSF says about authors who release code under multiple licenses (which does not necessarily match up with my own philosophy on the whole matter)? Either way: Get lost. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation
On Sat, 2004-11-13 at 06:03, Joe Greco wrote: [SNIP] However, the specific item that stopped me was the second paragraph of the short disclaimer, because our lawyers would never allow signing of a blanket statement such as and will do nothing to undermine it in the future. (As it was, the remainder of that paragraph would have had to have been sent off to the lawyers, as I don't really have a grasp on how much legal territory that might cover). That sent me off to look at the long disclaimer, at which point it eventually became apparent what you were actually trying to accomplish. [SNIP] So you have read both disclaimers. Yet you state: [SNIP] Digium is making people sign a draconian agreement that gives up rights to patches and features that are integrated into Asterisk, by signing rights over to Digium. [SNIP] Which is definatly the wrong way to see it, because the first disclaimer says, that you disclaim all rights, but not that you pass them over to Digium. In fact you make your source public domain. You didn't read the second paragraph, did you. If making changes public domain was all that would be required, there would be no need for that second paragraph. Or, for that matter, for the first. Merely placing This source code is in the public domain. within the code in question is sufficient for the purpose, though it may be easier for Digium to work that out out-of-band, in which case a first-paragraph-only agreement would make sense. Interestingly enough, placing something in the public domain is potentially riskier than providing it under either the BSD or GPL licenses, because both licenses provide a strong no-warranty clause. There are a number of competing theories on whether or not the author of a public domain bit of code could be liable, with varying amounts of case law, as I understand it: 1) One theory is that you may place code in the public domain, with explicit no-warranty disclaimers (this seems sensible to me). 2) Another theory says that such disclaimers are not legally binding, and that you would need to embed it within a license, copyright agreement, contract, or something like that to prohibit use of the code in the event that the recipient did not agree. 3) Another theory says that liability is only a concern where money has changed hands. There are apparently some finer-grained distinctions in there somewhere. I don't know if I'd want to submit major changes to a project and open myself up to the possibility of having to legally test whether or not a no-warranty clause on a public domain code contribution could be enforced. The second one does neither state, that you sign your copyrights over to Digium. It gives Digium a non-exclusive, non-revocable right to use your changes. That's it. I'd check with our IP lawyer if I really cared. However, it looks a bit more sweeping than that. Even though I'm not a lawyer, I can disprove your statement: if I sign this agreement *and don't even contribute anything*, but were to purchase ownership of a patent covering something that conflicts with Asterisk, this agreement grants Digium rights that you haven't acknowledged. See, that's the ugly thing about legal documents. There are endless things to consider. We can of course agree that it ought not work that way, but that's just pie-in-the-sky. Now, that's all well and fine, you obviously /can/ do it, but what most disturbs me is that people might sign the short form agreement without understanding exactly what it is that they're agreeing to. If someone believes that they are contributing software to a GPL'd software project, and does not realize that the nature of your disclaimer allows Digium to release their changes under a non-GPL'd license, then that is breaking with the spirit of the GPL. It has never been a hidden fact, that Digium runs Asterisk under a Dual License. Digiums Website (http://www.digium.com - Software Products) states: .. Digium™ specializes in the production of Open Source telecommunications software to accompany our hardware offerings. Most Digium software is licensed under GNU GPL, but may also be licensed commercially from Digium. And then a listing of software, including Asterisk. .. The README states: * LICENSING Asterisk is distributed under GNU General Public License. The GPL also must apply to all loadable modules as well, except as defined below. Digium, Inc. (formerly Linux Support Services) retains copyright to all of the core Asterisk system, and therefore can grant, at its sole discretion, the ability for companies, individuals, or organizations to create proprietary or Open Source (but non-GPL'd) modules which may be dynamically linked at runtime with the portions of Asterisk which fall under our copyright umbrella, or are distributed under more flexible licenses than GPL. .. Which contributor should
