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Tag: JKL5

FAQ – Frequent Asterisk Questions – #4

Published by MichelV69 on July 23, 2014

Post Views: 5,114 Introduction I’m a contributor at StackOverflow, answering questions concerning the Asterisk PBX system.  These types of questions, at their core, are part of my bread-and-butter work.  I’ve been working with Asterisk since 2004 and have personally deployed it successfully in 10 different countries under a wide variety of circumstances and use-cases. Q: I have weekly conference calls for staff.  Can Asterisk call the conference participants and add them automatically at the start of the meeting? For this to work, we need to solve a puzzle in three parts.  One of those things I tell my customers all the time is that if they can dream it up, we can get Asterisk to do it for them.  This is a classic example of what I mean. First, you need to…

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FAQ – Frequent Asterisk Questions – #2

Published by MichelV69 on July 9, 2014

Post Views: 317 Introduction I’m a contributor at StackOverflow, answering questions concerning the Asterisk PBX system.  These types of questions, at their core, are part of my bread-and-butter work.  I’ve been working with Asterisk since 2004 and have personally deployed it successfully in 10 different countries under a wide variety of circumstances and use-cases. However, there are a few things that are just “nice to have” in the tool-kit for a starting AST PBX admin.  So, I’m going to post a few of them on my blog.  It’s paying forward for a lot of the help I’ve gotten over the years. Q: Can I “rimshot” a call to my mobile phone? Yes. This is very straight forward.  We do it for some of our customers on our Cloudphones platform, in fact.  A…

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FAQ – Frequent Asterisk Questions – #1

Published by MichelV69 on July 2, 2014

Post Views: 290 Introduction I’m a contributor at StackOverflow, answering questions concerning the Asterisk PBX system.  These types of questions, at their core, are part of my bread-and-butter work.  I’ve been working with Asterisk since 2004 and have personally deployed it successfully in 10 different countries under a wide variety of circumstances and use-cases. However, there are a few things that are just “nice to have” in the tool-kit for a starting AST PBX admin.  So, I’m going to post a few of them on my blog.  It’s paying forward for a lot of the help I’ve gotten over the years. Keep A Call Alive Past Hangup A common requirement is to do something after the call ends.  Maybe run an AGI program to update a database for billing, or marketing. The…

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A Simple Small Buisness/ Home Office Server

Published by MichelV69 on August 23, 2013

Post Views: 1,081 As I’ve said before, one of the hats I wear is that of an entrepreneur. Part of the mission for my company is finding ways to deliver smart solutions for wired office spaces for start-up budgets. Clearly, when you’re on that kind of a mission, the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) movement is a great place to start. I just built a small in-office file sharing server using some spare parts I had from other retired machines. I’m sufficiently pleased with it that I thought I might post an overview of what I did with it and what it does. The hardware is a modest dual-core AMD machine with 2GB of RAM, an internal 128Gb SSD hard disk driver and an external 64Gb USB/3 SSD…

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Consulting Blues – The Expensive Customer

Published by MichelV69 on April 13, 2013

Post Views: 185 Recently I put a bid forward on a “Request For Quotation” (RFQ) as part of my telecom consulting job.  Unfortunately, the potential customer’s RFQ was essentially “go watch this YouTube video, and build something like that.  It should be easy, so I only want to pay $200”. The video was essentially someone talking about a proof-of-concept project they had done.  None of the back-end infrastructure was discussed; it was apparently Asterisk based, and used a database of some kind to hold the relevant data.  Nor did the potential customer give any indication if they even owned their own phone system or what database technology they wanted used. I sent in a “back-of-the-envelope” price tag based on the notion that I’d have to do everything from scratch, and…

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Quick Hacks: Asterisk account codes, Ruby programming, and the Freshbooks API

Published by MichelV69 on January 23, 2013

Post Views: 623 I put together a quick hack last night that will help with managing truant accounts on JKL5’s “Cloudphones” SMB VoIP PBX. Ostensibly, it’s a pre-paid service for small to medium businesses, as well as a couple of residential customers. However, we have a couple of problem accounts that require checking on the accounts payable report followed by a few nagging emails to get to pay their bills at the 45 day mark. In each trunk and phone configuration, I have the customer’s company name set as the “Account Code” for any call they take or make. In an IAX2 trunk, it looks like this: [example_incoming_trunk] type=user host=iax04.unlimitel.ca username=1112223333 context=call_router requirecalltoken=yes accountcode=jkl5group [example_outgoing_trunk] type=peer host=edge01.my_itsp.com secret=some9797numbers username=1112223333 accountcode=jkl5group With something like a SIP phone, it’s just as easy:…

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Clever Call Recording With Asterisk PBX

Published by MichelV69 on October 12, 2012

Post Views: 2,750 In addition to being an author, I’m also a telecom/ linux geek.  Someone recently posted on “StackOverflow” that they couldn’t find a good “how-to” on call recording for Asterisk PBX systems. I’m not convinced they looked too hard, but I figured it would not take me too long to post one up.  This works with both Asterisk 1.4.x and Asterisk 1.8.x.  YMMV on other revs. Please note that this post is written for someone that has a basic understanding of Asterisk call routing and dial plans.  If you don’t have that, I strongly recommend you take a read of: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Creating+Dialplan+Extensions http://www.asterisk.org/doxygen/trunk/Config_ext.html http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+config+extensions.conf So, let’s get started: Add a line like this to your outbound dial route and your inbound dial route: same => n, Macro(do_call_recording|${MACRO_CONTEXT}|${CRS_ID}|Outbound)…

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Testing your Ruby/Rails 3.x Model with Cucumber

Published by MichelV69 on September 6, 2012

Post Views: 756 So I’m working on a Ruby/Rails development project for a customer, and using TDD/BDD from word “Go”.  The weapon of choice here is Cucumber.  I know some of the more serious code-cutters prefer RSPEC, but I just like the “feel” of Cucumber. Naturally, part of the job includes ensuring that the various Models in the project pass very basic tests, such as if they are defined properly.  In RSPEC, you can use a solid set of tools to do that, but Cucumber is much more “View” centric in the MVC than it is good for peeking at the Models. So, for amusement, I decided I’d work out a simple Feature and Step set that can be used to verify a project Model. The Cucumber Feature…

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