Direct Inward Dialing with Asterisk and Broadvoice

When I wrote about building my own PBX, I mentioned that I set up Direct Inward Dialing (DID), a feature which allows virtual phone numbers to be routed directly to extensions while using shared trunks (phone lines). I figured out how to accomplish this after reading this discussion, but made improvements along the way.

Quick Fix for Asterisk/BroadVoice Number Conflict.

I have a strange issue on my Asterisk box. If I call BroadVoice tech support using one of their trunks, I connect normally and hear the initial IVR, I press "1" and hear "Your call is being transferred." Then the weirdness starts: I remain connected, but I hear my own hold music. As near as I can figure, while I'm on hold in their call queue, Asterisk has dumped me in to hold and I can't get out. If I stay on long enough for a tech to pick up, they either hear nothing or my hold music and hang up. Free beer goes to anyone who can identify and solve this issue, meanwhile I have developed a workaround.

Linux Bane

The Cat Who Walked Through Firewalls

While I was cooking last night's dinner, I made the mistake of leaving my laptop running, open, and unattended. Because ours is primarily a Linux household (my wife is a Mac user),`aptitude update && aptitude upgrade`. Laptops, however, are an entirely different story. As you can see in the photo, we live with a creature that is essentially a heat seeking missle bent on killing laptop computers. Sure it was funny the first couple times, but amusement quickly turned to horror when I saw that she can actually crash Linux. All my base are belong to her.

I normally don't worry much about the computers. The servers, devices, and desktops tend to chug along without needing anything more than an occasional

Red Box

I finally built a red box, not the phone phreak device that generates coin tones for pay phones, but rather a Linux PBX which gives me the power and flexibility of a commercial grade phone system at a fraction of the cost. I call it a red box because the primary VoIP number I chose suggests ^[1]June 20, 1963-- the day the “red telephone” went live between Washington and Moscow. Once I painted the side panels a nice, shiny red, I decided that in keeping with the metallic network naming I use (cobalt, tungsten, strontium, etc.) the best name for my new PBX would be 'copper'.