Matt G. Watson

A few days ago Matt Ray, Zenoss Community Manager, emailed me to let me know that they had posted a beta release of a new ZenPack created by Andrea Consadari for monitoring the Asterisk PBX system using Zenoss. Matt had orignally told me awhile ago that he was working with an Asterisk solution provider that was not only creating a ZenPack to monitor your Asterisk installation, but that they were even going to give you the ability to send alerts through a community-provided Asterisk server. Unfortunately whomever that Asterisk solution provider was appears to have dropped off the map. Andrea Consadari has stepped up to the plate now to at least provide the monitoring ZenPack, read to find out what it can do for you! (more…)

Synopsis

This HowTo will guide you through the process of installing and configuring AstManProxy.  AstManProxy is a proxy server for Asterisk’s Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI).  The reason we want to use a proxy server infront of AMI is that AMI was not really designed to handle alot of simultanous connections and can cause extreme performance problems on the PBX.  A proxy server like AstManProxy can help this problem by acting as a hub for all of those connections and aggregating them into a single connection to AMI.  Using a proxy server also allows us to have a little more control over the input and output formats.  Asterisk uses a rather unique protocol for AMI, one which some developers find rather difficult to interface with.  AstManProxy can help by allowing you to interface using a REST/XML-RPC like interface, as well as getting plain text or XML responses.  Something that developers would much rather deal with. AstManProxy also has an ‘autofilter’ function which also helps developers interface by automatically filtering out un-wanted messages from Asterisk. (more…)

Synopsis

This HowTo is a guide on using Asterisk’s AlarmReceiver() application to make Asterisk act as an Ademco Contact ID alarm monitoring station. In short this application is capable of receiving calls from your alarm panel every time an event occurs on your system. This is essentially a complete home grown self-monitored alarm setup.

I should mention upfront that this application is not approved by the Underwriter’s Laboratory and as such, any insurance benefits you have from having an alarm system will probably be null and void with your insurance company if you go down this path. Personally, I think alarm systems in homes that do not utilize cellular connections are useless anyways. Landlines are too easy to disconnect on most homes… rendering the alarm monitoring useless.

Additionally, this guide assumes that your system is already programmed for monitored and that you just want to interface it with Asterisk. (more…)

Synopsis

This will be a quick and dirty tutorial on how to properly tune your Zaptel / DAHDI FXO interfaces on Asterisk via the Zapata channel interface chan_zap.

The purpose of tuning your FXO interfaces is first of all, to have proper audio levels on your FXO PSTN interfaces. However, my initial motivation for tuning my interfaces was to reduce the awful hybrid echo that was being caused on my FXO interfaces. The short of what hybrid echo is, is that there is a device in telco switches called a hybrid. Essentially what this device does is convert your single pair copper that connects to your house/office into a 2-pair connection, 1 pair that carries the receive audio, and 1 that carries the transmit. Telco’s do this because they need to amplify the signals independently for carrying calls over long distances. Unfortunately due to the nature of this device, it causes electrical leakage which causes the echo.

When using only regular analog phones, the echo created by the hybrid is still present, but there is such a short delay, it sounds like regular sidetone. When we enter the VoIP world, the delay increases due to processing and IP network stuff. This delay is not large generally, but its large enough that it becomes very obvious that you are hearing an echo of yourself. To help solve this we have echo cancelers, but echo cancelers can only do so much, the better the signal we can get to begin with, the easier the job the echo canceler has. To get a clean signal we need to adjust our rxgain and txgain values in zapata.conf for Asterisk.

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