Shift8

Today I was looking for a way to reboot a Grandstream phone by command line, so I can script some provisioning. I came across this handy utility written by Charles Howes called gsutil. It will even backup/restore config’s. Check it out at: http://www.pkts.ca/gsutil.shtml . I just had to install some dependancies (perl and perl-libwww-perl) and it was ready to go.

This week, I decided to start monitoring some of my Asterisk servers with the new SNMP module in 1.4. I was amazed how relatively easy it was. Mark had written a very nice write up on voip-magazine that went over all of this. I am not sure what happened to it on voip-magazine.com, but the article is gone. If you know, please drop me a comment. Maybe they moved to a different domain name. Luckily, I printed the article to PDF back in 2006. The readme on SNMP is helpful as well. It can be found in doc/ of your Asterisk source directory.

Here is how I installed it and got it working. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I went to Polycom’s site to see about getting the latest version of the SIP firmware. It looks as if they are no longer requiring you to get the firmware from a reseller. I clicked the SIP 2.2.2 link expecting to get a login window, but instead the download started!

Here is the direct link to the 2.2.2 firmware.

http://downloads.polycom.com/voice/voip/sp_ss_sip/spip_ssip_2_2_2_release_sig.zip

When ever I run Asterisk and Zaptel on a machine. I always run the processes as the user “asterisk”. Then chown all the asterisk directories to the “asterisk” user.

Today I reinstalled my system with CentOS 5 which uses the new 2.6.18-8.el5 kernel. After installing zaptel, I ran “make config” to have it install the zaptel.rules file into /etc/udev/rules.d . This worked fine, but when I started zaptel only the zttranscode device would be owned by the asterisk user.

It turns out that in CentOS 5 (RHEL 5), there are already rules that define zaptel devices. They are located in /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules . To fix this issue, just edit the 50-udev.rules file and uncomment the following lines:

# Section for zaptel device
# KERNEL==”zapctl”, NAME=”zap/ctl”
# KERNEL==”zaptimer”, NAME=”zap/timer”
# KERNEL==”zapchannel”, NAME=”zap/channel”
# KERNEL==”zappseudo”, NAME=”zap/pseudo”
# KERNEL==”zap[0-9]*”, NAME=”zap/%n”

Check that zaptel.rules is listed in /etc/udev then restart zaptel.

I don’t normally post personal events, but I couldn’t help myself this time. I am proud to post that I took the dCAP in San Jose last week and passed!

I’d like to post a macro used to dial phones. I have a slight variant to the standard dial macro that will add the “o” and “a” extensions. The “o” extension is used to dial the operator while in a caller is in VoiceMail. The “a” extension is used to drop the caller into the VoiceMailMain application, by pressing * in VoiceMail. First let me tell you some background on how our phones are setup. We have three main locations all handled by the same Macro. Each location has a four digit extension:

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This is a simple way to keep a blacklist of phone numbers that you don’t want to allow to call you/your company. The Macro will quickly check a MySQL database for the incoming callerid. If the callerid exist and the block is enabled, then the caller will get placed into the [blacklistednumber] context.

Create a new table in you MySQL RealTime connection.

CREATE TABLE `blacklist` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`callerid` varchar(10) NOT NULL default ”,
`blockenabled` char(1) NOT NULL default ‘1′,
`notes` longtext NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

insert into `blacklist` values(’1′,’5556671212′,’1′,’Spammer’);

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Polycom has released their 2.2.0 firmware, which is supposed to fix some Microbrowser problems. If you click the link for 2.2.0 they request you get the firmware through your reseller. So, if you look at the download link for the 2.1.1 firmware, you can guess at the download link for the 2.2.0 firmware.

http://downloads.polycom.com/voice/voip/sp_ss_sip/spip_ssip_2_2_0_release_sig.zip

The link works for now, until Polycom decides to protect it.

I needed a simple script to take some extensions and names from a CSV file and build a FOP (www.asternic.org) button config file. This script is just a simple “for” loop that will take input from a CSV file, and build a button for each line in the CSV file. I wrote the script for a 4 digit extension in the input, and will need to be modified if you want to use it on a different size extension (Check out the cut lines)

This is most useful if you are separating your buttons into individual include files, within the op_buttons.cfg file.

The VoiceMailExt option is new to .27.  You can put a context in extensions.conf that looks like:

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We just recieved a ton of Polycom SoundPoint 330’s and 550’s.  The Polycom 550’s, when loaded with the 2.1.1 Rev C firmware, have an issue with the Microbrowser using a very light grey text on the microbrowser.  I believe this is because the firmware adds support for 16 shades of grey in the microbrowser.  The phone seems to default to the lightest shade of grey.  We have talked with Polycom Support and they are now aware of the issue and working to get it resolved.

We ran into a small issue with the Polycom 330’s.  We are using them with the Cisco 3550-24 PWR switches, which uses a pre 802.11af-2003 standard.  It seems that right when the phone finished loading the sip.ld application, it would drop the ethernet link for a second which would disconnect the power long enough to force a reboot.  To resolve the issue we configured the ports to keep the power on for the initial 5 minutes of the port going up.

On the port of the Cisco switch type:

power inline delay shutdown 5 initial 300