Posts Tagged ‘VOIP’

Let the lake weekends begin

Saturday, May 9th, 2009
First post from the lake, internet on and working great out here… Snapped a few pics, they’re in the snapshots gallery:
Click the photo to view the snaps of what’s going on here. Some painting and what will be a very chilly night of sleep (going to get below 40 degrees, with the heat off it could get questionable!) but everythings working water wise and what not. Really hasn’t been any huge hassles yet!
IMG_1345[1]

Heard something funny tonight, an ad against software piracy that said something to the effect of “imagine if 1 in every 5 cars were stolen, it’s no different, so don’t steal software”. I’m not a software piracy advocate, however, I just want to point out that that’s a really stupid line to take. I’m going to guess that software has about the same R&D of a car (probably being overly generous, honestly). So we’re even at that point, with me? We sell 20,00 copies of the software for $100, and 20,000 cars for $20,000/each… still with me? Each car costs $12,000 to build, each piece of software costs $2 to press and box. You steal a car, the company loses the $8,000 profit and the $12,000 worth of build, steal software they loose the $148 worth of profit. – Slightly different. Not okay, just not the same.

Also I’m doing some more with freeswitch and have all my phone #’s moved over to Aretta, which has been working out excellently, a more detailed post on that soon!

PfFreeswitch + Aretta or Vonage Sphone

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on getting the new IP PBX setup, and it’s nearly done now! I’ve got freeswitch running on my pfsense firewall box, serving 3 gateways right now. Two of those gateways are vonage softphones and one is an Aretta trunk. I’m moving from Vonage to Aretta for the pure SIP and pay as you go ability. (1.9cents a min, too!) That means I can use 500 min inbound and outbound for $9 a month, plus DID fees (~2.00) and have a monthly bill of about $12 every month if i use that much. Last month i used 350 min, so, hopefully my phone bill is about to plummet from the normal $48 vonage bill. (yay!) Another nice part is that I can do remote extension (one at the lake, or my Friend Dan can have one too!). I’ve even got Dan’s sphone running through my pbx, and he dials out on my internet, which is a handy setup until he gets his own pbx, then he’ll just have an extension for free desk-to-desk calls. I’m still working on my IVRs for each incoming number and now I need to get the numbers ported, but hopefully in a couple weeks I’ll have another update saying everything is workign great :) A big shoutout to mcrane, a developer who is souly responsible for making pfsense run freeswitch so well. He’s been a load of help, as well as the folks on the #freeswitch IRC channel (freenode).

Using A linksys SPA941 With Vonage Softphone

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Delving into PBX & VOIP bits for a bit now and just got a SPA941 to play with today. I jumped online to vonage and activated a softphone account for testing purposes and went to work.
To get the vonage account accessible through the phone you really only need to set a couple parameters:

SIP Config

Plunk the vonage server sphone.vopr.vonage.net into the proxy address, your phone number as your user and the password they provide as the password. Save and you’re running!

Things that don’t work: Vonage fun keys (* keys), which unfortunately includes voicemail. It tells me I have a voicemail but no combination of things lets me GET the voicemail. Edit your dialplan to be this: (*xxx|*xx|[3469]11|0|00|[2-9]xxxxxx|1xxx[2-9]xxxxxxS0|xxxxxxxxxxxx.) in the EXT 1 ADVANCED page and add *123 as your voicemail number in the phone page and you’re golden!

worth noting that the name you put in or the caller ID outgoing in other programs/phones shows up for other Vonage customers but not anyone else. (BOO VONAGE!) So put “King of the World” If you want to see how many of your friends have Vonage..

next is a dedicated PBX I think. Then I might go with a SIP service other than Vonage.