Cisco 7912
Ok, so I figured I’d write this up before I forgot. I bashed my head in last night for nearly an hour tweaking my dialplan to figure out why every time I got to the Voicemail on the system it prompted me for my password instead of announcing to leave a message.
I created an extension for the voicemail system in the inside-lines context so people could check their voicemail:
exten => 2501,1,VoicemailMain(${CALLERID(number)})
exten => 2501,2,Wait(1)
exten => 2501,3,Playback(Goodbye)
exten => 2501,4,Hangup
and I dial the internal lines using an extension that drops to voicemail if the channel is busy or unavailable:
[macro-exten]
;This makes it easier to exit extension actions
;it takes, as arguments
exten => s,1,Dial(${ARG1}|20|j) ; j flag means jump to n+101 if all chans busy
exten => s,2,Voicemail(${ARG2}|u)
exten => s,3,Playback(vm-goodbye)
exten => s,4,Hangup
exten => s,102,Voicemail(${ARG2}|b)
exten => s,103,Playback(vm-goodbye)
exten => s,104,Hangup()
But if I changed the Voicemail statements in there to Playback(vm-invalid) so I’d get a message instead of voicemail I was still being prompted for the password. Even dialing inbound through the Zap channel dropped me to the password prompt after the 20 seconds ring timeout. I was totally baffled and quite irritated.
Finally after rewriting debug hooks into half my dialplan and many irritated moments still hearing “Enter Password” I realized that I had programmed the voicemail extension into the Cisco phone. I deleted it and viola! Everything works perfectly. It seems that the Cisco phone uses the Message Extension not only for the Voicemail softkey but if it times out or doesn’t have any lines available (the 7912 is a 1 line phone, though it can call out on multiple lines with Conference and Transfer functions) it blind transfers the caller to the Message Extension and passes it’s own callerid info along. So the call would timeout and it would blind transfer my call to 2501 with a CallerID of 2001, which is a valid mailbox so it would simply ask for my password.
Sigh, THANKS CISCO.
But, so far asterisk is working fairly well. I have to cleanup my dialplan a bit but the rest of the old analog phones are disconnected in the house at the moment. I certainly couldn’t have done this without Nugget’s Experiences all written up nicey nice.
Complex software to do simple things
For some reason I’ve gotten the hair in my arse again to play with that newfangled VoIP crap again. So I borrowed a Cisco 7912 from work and got it working with Asterisk 1.4.5. I have had a NuFone account for ages so I can assure you that it works when connecting out to another IAX2 system. Hooray.
So a while back I bought a clone Digium X100P FXO interface (this connects my normal old POTS line to the system so I can use it for VoIP stuffs). I threw that in apollo and tried to build the drivers.
Well what the fuck Linux. I havn’t had USB support compiled into this box because it’s a server and I don’t use any USB stuff with it. Of course the Zaptel driver pack (1.4.3) REQUIRES the kernel to be built with USB support before it will build the PCI modules.
Sigh.
make menuconfig, make modules, make modules_install, make clean, make make install… blah blah blah… done!
Ok, modprobe…
Zapata Telephony Interface Registered on major 196
Zaptel Version: 1.4.3
Zaptel Echo Canceller: MG2
wcfxo: DAA mode is ‘FCC’
Found a Wildcard FXO: Generic Clone
Well it’s about damn time. More later if this thing even works now.
Google, you have begun to restore my faith!
So I was browsing around the internet an el register informed me that Google had released a Desktop search for Linux! Completely in disbelief I scurried over to desktop.google.com and was immediatly heartbroken. Binary packages for Ubuntu/Debian and Redhat/Fedora/SuSE only… No generic installer like with Google Earth. Hopeful, I grabbed the rpm and used Slackware’s rpm2tgz command and installed the resulting .tgz package.
It worked.
Even the little popup box that you get by whacking control twice works. Crazy. Go Google, I can’t wait to see if this is as good as I hope it is, because with 400GB of data strewn about I lose stuff constantly :)
For the record, I’m running Slackware 11.0 with Dropline Gnome 2.18.1. When I get home I’ll try it on istari, which is running Slackware 12.0 (current)
It is about time…
One of the unfortunate side-effects of working the abuse desk is that I get to see the PILES of litigious nonsense that the RIAA and other copyright cartel members such as the BSA spew in every direction (even though I am not the company’s designated receiver of legal notices!). It is nice to finally see people standing up for their rights eg: Recording Industry vs The People (blogspot). In that spirit I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time and donated to the EFF. It’s a worthy cause, since no one else seems to be standing up for our rights in this world, and after all, all that is needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.
And so the song remains the same.
So my little sister is in Australia again, this time she will be interning for her masters program for the summer. Unfortunately my international travel plans have been put on hold this year so I am envious of her. I am sure she will have a fantastic time. Things here are about as they always are, albeit a little bit cleaner and quieter somedays. I am rapidly approaching burnout so I went ahead and scheduled a week off which I plan to use laying about accomplishing as little as possible, though I do have to clean the house up a bit. My friendship with Carla is improving bit by bit and I remain motivated to ensure it remains that way. I nearly feel able to claim that I have forgiven myself, though there are still dark moments in my heart I am feeling much better. Tomorrow will be 7 months since we broke up. I had stopped counting.
In other unrelated but equally important news I bought a bottle of Macallan 12 year old single malt highland scotch whisky. It came recommended from a friend and co-worker so I figured it was a worthy investment since I have finished yet another bottle of the Glenlivet that I had been drinking. Initial impressions are good however and it was fairly reasonable at the local liquor emporium.
Oh well, off to watch more Babylon 5 and then to bed with me. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer so far, it is shaping up to be a scorcher here in good old Rochester.