Matt G. Watson

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Project Home Phone continued on tonight, Part 1 was just getting the BIX mount up on the wall.

The goal for tonight was pretty simple, I wanted to get the RJ11 lines in the house terminated on the BIX block. I got one of them done… the rest are really just a matter of connecting a couple more wires. I got kind of side-tracked with a little programming on my DSC Power832 alarm system - which was the first device I wanted to get terminated on the block.

Anyhow, here are some pics:

Project Home Phone - Part 2!
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Since the Asterisk project is done at work, its time to work on the Asterisk project at home! Who doesn’t need a PBX in their house? Oh right, just about nobody. Well I’m going to have one anyways since I happen to have the hardware for it.

Basically what I plan on doing is re-wiring the bulk of the phone lines in my house. In my house I have several RJ11 jacks (none of which are active since I don’t have a landline). I came across a spare BIX punch-down panel with 60 some odd RJ11 jacks on it. I figured what the hell, this is super geeky, why not use it in the house?

Well step one is getting the punch down block mounted, I just finished that off tonight, here are some

pics!
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As you’ll see in the pics, basically what I’ve done is cut a piece of 2×6 then used some sleeve bolts to fasten it to the wall. I used 3/8ths 3″ sleeve bolts, which should put it about an inch into the concrete, that thing is never coming off! Once I got the board mounted on the wall I drilled a couple of small pilots where the mounting holes on the BIX mount were, after that it was just a matter of putting a couple screws in and the mount was up.

Continueing on from where Part 2 left off, this post will be mostly filled with configuration information used throughout our infrastructure getting it getting for Asterisk.

I left off Part 2 talking about my TFTPd modification that allows me to execture arbitrary commands when a file is requested from my TFTPd server, to explain the rule mentioned in my previous post.

x ^00085D /usr/local/bin/mkaastracfg

the ‘x’ means this is an ‘execute rule’, this is what my patch added. the ‘^00085D’ is the pattern to match, the Aastra phones request a config file named <MAC>.cfg, that 00085D is the OUI prefix for the Aastra phones. Then as you can see it executes my mkaastracfg program, the filename being requested gets passed to mkaastra config as a command line argument, this is how the program collects all the configuration data. The only extra step here is configuring your DHCP server to set option ‘66′ (boot-server) to the IP address of your TFTPd server.  If you are using ISC DHCPd you just need to add the following line to your scope.

option tftp-server-name “10.1.0.10″;

This now essentially allowed us to create devices and assign default users to devices inside FreePBX, then plug a brand new right out of the box phone into one of our PoE ports the phone boots up our TFTPd dynamically creates its configuration file when it boots and thats it, the new is up and rocking, no additional configuration required. I also recommend dropping your firmware files on your TFTPd server as well, as your phones will automatically download updates when you place them there.

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Continuing on from part 1 of my Migrating to Asterisk VoIP PBX - Part 1 series off. In part 1 I talked about the problems we faced with our current PBXs and what the general plan was to fix it. In this part I’ll be discussing how we got our infrastructure prepared and began to take the idea from research to an implemented stage 1 of our plan.

I believe I failed in mention that in Part 1, as part of our research we needed additional software on top of just Asterisk. Management at our company wanted the system to be maintainable by the non-nerdy, mostly to just be able to do basic things, create extensions, change voicemail passwords, these kinds of things. Originally we outright said “sorry, thats not going to happen”, our initial plan was to write the entire Asterisk dialplan by hand, seeing as how Asterisk was new to use we knew this was going to be a challenge, but we were prepared to do it. Asterisk dialplans I consider to be a bit of an art form, while in a sense it is just another programming language, once you get into it you quickly realize it shares very little similarity to any programming language you already know. Asterisk does however offer an alternative to its regular configuration language that is a more programming-like language called Asterisk Extension Language (AEL). AEL however is considered experimental, that word alone was enough to make us shy away from it. I kept asking my friend Matt Gibson about Asterisk and how he managed it, he pointed me in the direction of FreePBX which is essentially web-based configuration utility for Asterisk that writes the majority of the configuration files for you, not to mention gives you a ton of features out of the box without having to write any dialplan by hand. Score 1 for management, they got the ability for the non-nerdy to manage parts of the system even after we said it wouldn’t happen!

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