This was a pretty quick change but one of my friends recommended that I try out Switchvox which is an IP PBX build on Asterisk and is owned by Digium. I took a few looks at the webpage and I was pretty much sold. It looked so easy (and pretty). I installed it on a separate machine that I just picked up from a school district that was getting rid of PC’s for dirt cheap from an old computer lab. The setup was almost the same as trixbox but had fewer questions for me to answer making it simpler overall. Once installed, the first thing that I noticed was the SSL based access to the box was the only way to manage the server. This was cool and questionable at the same time as command line traditionally is the easiest/best way to debug anything. Well, I logged into the server with my friend on the phone, added in my Teliax information and in 2 minutes I was able to call out. This was amazing in my opinion. Something this easy has to come with a price tag. Nope, I’m using the free edition…with a big smile on my face. 
A few minutes later and I was able to call through my provider from my cell and hit voicemail (that was already setup). The setup of dial plans, providers, hardware interfaces, and extension is SO EASY. Much easier than trixbox and I thought it was easy. Switchvox even auto detected my Sipura SPA-1000 device. At this point I was completely sold. To be honest, the only complaint that I have at this point is the inability to go to command line to debug stuff. That’s it. I would recommend this product to any home or small business.
Well, a few weeks ago I really wanted to get a home phone setup for my house. My wife an I have been using our cell phones for pretty much everything for the last 2 years and thought it would be a good time to get something else. So instead of taking the easier route with a telephone company, I chose to setup Asterisk on an old extra computer with a Sipura SIP converter connected to a traditional home phone. My VoIP provider is TelIAX out of Colorado and so far has been pretty cheap. I would say the support isn’t the best but as long as you know what you are doing, the system is always online. The real reason I chose them was their IAX2 support. I didn’t want to have a huge number of ports opened on my firewall to allow SIP to work. Also, traditionally SIP has not been the nicest with NAT though Asterisk does a pretty good job with that issue.
Instead of going command line or even installing the package manually, I chose Fonality’s trixbox CE which is free and is an all-in-one solution for IP telephone. At least on the server side. Install is straight forward, answer a few questions and it’ll eventually reboot and you’ll have a functioning Asterisk server with FreePBX installed as well as some other goodies.
Once you have trixbox up and running, you login to the web GUI and start configuring. Mine is http://192.168.1.10. Under FreePBX I had to configure 3 things:
1. Trunk - This is to tell Asterisk who to connect to for inbound and outbound calling. You have to configure things like registration strings, usernames, passwords, and any specific information for your provider. I have attached my configuration to this post.
2. Extension - I created a new extension (201) to allow my Sipura SPA-1000 to register to my trixbox. The setup on that was fairly easy with just an extension number, password and a few options for voicemail and fax.
3. Inbound/Outbound routes - Tell Asterisk to use a specif trunk for outbound calls and specify what dial patterns you want it to pick up on. Then on inbound you need to tell Asterisk what extensions to ring when a call is coming in.
That’s it. Really, really simple. This was not my first time with trixbox but it was the first time that I actually got it to work. I was quite surprised how clean the calls sound through the Internet, I was expecting to need to do QoS to get it right. I’ll still do that but so far I have not needed to.
My next goal is to get some of the advanced features running. Music on hold, failover call routing, etc.
Each and every day I use a set of tools, mostly free or open source ones that help me get through the day. I though I would list of a few of them for you so that you can give them a shot as well.
Home Computer
I have a Panasonic Toughbook laptop running Ubuntu 7.04 that I really haven’t modified too awful much because I like the look and feel of the OS as it is. Here’s a list of things that I use everyday or every so often to accomplish a task without spending any money.
Operating System - Ubuntu 7.04 - Stable, clean, easy to install, based on GNOME and very well supported by the community. I would say that the forums for Ubuntu are better than most and for some reason, the users of Ubuntu are much nicer than that of Red Hat and others.
Blogging - Blogger.com attached to my Gmail account (I do my own hosting)
Firewall - pfSense - I mentioned this a few post’s ago. I absolutely love this firewall.
Document Management - Google Doc’s and Spreadsheets - This one is really neat, you can upload your Microsoft Office Word and Excel files as well as OpenOffice equivalent documents up to Google, edit them, and even save off as PDF documents if need be.
Music - Pandora.com - This site has been around for a little while now, It allows you to basically make your own radio station, and it dynamically learns what music you want to listen to. A side spawn of this project is Squeezebox which allows you to turn your music library into a radio station with streaming music.
Chat - Gaim - It’s easy to use, installed by default on Ubuntu, and supports multiple accounts. On Linux and Windows you can use Pidgin and for Mac OS X you can use Adium.
VoIP - Twinkle - So far this is the best SIP capable client for Linux I have found. You can installed it through apt-get or Synaptic on Ubuntu or download it here. On Windows and Mac OS X I use X-Lite from CounterPath. I would say X-Lite is the best of the two but the Linux version sucks in my opinion.
PBX - trixbox - I just started using this because I’m trying to get my company or rather the company I work for into a new market so that we can make some more money as a company which personally helps me through profit sharing. Though, if I didn’t get that last bit, I would still peruse doing phone VoIP systems because I think they are interesting. I have it installed on an old PIII 500 with 256Mb of ram and it suits the needs of my wife an I just fine. A larger scale deployment would need a better server though.
Email - Gmail and Evolution - I just started using Evolution about a month ago because Outlook Web Access on Microsoft Exchange 2003 sucks when viewed from Firefox. Damn Microsoft. Kidding. Evolution seemed to be a logical choice for me because well, it was already installed on my computer and quite frankly I needed a way to check my mail. Sounds like a match made in heaven. Gmail, as you all probably know, is free and has cool features like web sharable calendars, documents and photos. You will probably see a trend here for me liking everything Google.
I think that’s enough for now. I’ll make a part 2 to this one pretty soon with quite a few more added programs and services that I use everyday for free. Compute free or die.
In my last post I mentioned that I needed to install a non standard package to get my laptop wireless device working. Well, I decided that because it took me about 20-25 minutes to find the fix for this I would post it so I can save someone some unneeded grief.
To get the wireless hardware working with the OS most people recommend NDISWrappers but the easiest and most supported was is to use Synaptic (the package manager) to install bcm43xx-fwcutter which is nothing more than the firmware that the kernel needs to load during the boot process to make the Wireless NIC usable. After installation just reboot and the viola you have a working Broadcom wireless NIC which supports pretty much any encryption method available.
Quite recently my eyes were opened to a Linux distribution called Ubuntu. The latest release from the open source company Canonical is called Feisty Fawn. How can you deny or refuse a name like that.
Well, I figured I would dedicate a post to how much I truely enjoy the OS vs it’s or Linux competitors as well as the big Microsoft. The installation disk is easily available via http://www.ubuntu.com where you can either download it or have 1 or more copies sent to you via snailmail (I get 25 because I’m a consultant). On the install CD (not DVD) there are a few cool features that make the product stand out from the rest like a suite of open source Windows apps that can be installed directly from the CD to include Firefox, Thunderbird, Clam AV, and others. Truly unique. Then when you boot from the CD you actually boot to a live distribution where you can either use the live CD to see if you will actually like the or install it to your hard drive via a very intuitive wizard. The wizard asks you a few non technical questions and guides you through the install. You can dual boot with Windows or another OS or just wipe the drive and start fresh.
On a side note, because of how well setup the live CD is, you can actually read and write to the NTFS, FAT or other drive that you have in your computer as a quick and easy disk recovery tool. Still not impressed. Ok, I really haven’t told you very much but for the novice user these fundamental options make the OS very attractive. After you go through the install, you reboot and come up to a login window and then into the operating system. The only thing that my laptop needed done in addition to the OS install is the installation of the Broadcom WIFI card firmware for my specific hardware which was easily done in Ubuntu’s intuitive package manager, Synaptic. Synaptic is a front end for apt-get that makes installing and updating packages a synch.
I usually judge a product by it’s “Out of the Box” features. As for Ubuntu, the OS installs, Firefox, Evolution Mail, Gaim, OpenOffice, graphics rendering software, a photo viewer, a suite a games, and a terminal services client. So in my opinion, it’s already a step ahead of Microsoft. Accessing shares and other network resources is quite simple just like in XP and has a neat feature that saves the user name and password for a particular network resource in it’s password manager.
I plan to do a few more blog entires regarding the use and utilization of Ubuntu in the home, business and corporate environment on both the client and server end of the spectrum. As the OS is still a Linux derivative, it can run Postfix, Sendmail, Apache, MySQL, Spam assassin, and all of the server centric applications that we rely on everyday. Hope you all at least give the OS a try, I’ll have my first Ubuntu “how-to” on here soon for your enjoyment.