The Loomiverse

Configuring Asterisk - Part 3

loom — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:50:19 +0000

OK, writing this one quickly in my lunch hour.

Connecting to Asterisk boxes together using IAX2.

Basically, I’m creating two IAX2 connections between two boxes, one in each direction. The code below goes in iax.conf - or if you’ve been following my other posts iax_local.conf.

Replace the fields listed below with whatever is appropriate for you. Usernames and passwords can be whatever you like, they only exist within Asterisk.

And of course, swap the local and remote stuff around for one end of the connection

LOCALNAME : username for the remote connection to use when connecting to the local connection
LOCALPASSWORD : A local password for the remote connection to use when connecting to the local connection

REMOTENAME : username for the local connection to use when connecting to the remote connection
REMOTEPASSWORD : password for the local connection to use when connecting to the remote connection
REMOTE.ASTERISK.BOX : The ip for name of the remote asterisk box (I use dyndns.org)

If the Asterisk servers are behind firewalls, then the approriate port (4569) will need to be forwarded

[LOCALNAME] type=user secret=LOCALPASSWORD nat=yes context=from-remote [ToRemote] username=REMOTENAME type=peer secret=REMOTEPASSWORD qualify=yes nat=yes host=REMOTE.ASTERISK.BOX context=from-remote

My next post will cover dialling rules which should make everything work together nicely.

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Configuring Asterisk - Part 2

loom — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:56:35 +0000

In Part 1 I looked at how to add extensions to an Asterisk configuration. If all went well, we have two extensions 1000 and 1001 which are able to dial each other and not much else

While this is incredibly exciting - for about 5 minutes - it isn’t actually very useful. In this article, I’ll be adding the first of two Trunks to Asterisk.

Again, my terminology is what works for me, I recognise that some people may disagree with this and suggest that I should use the propper terms for everything - I even agree with people who say that kind of thing - but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to do it. As far as what I’m doing here goes, a Trunk is any connection to the outside world. I’ll be setting up a connection to a VOIP provider using SIP, later, I’ll and an IAX2 connection to another ASterisk box - run by a friend of mine.

Connecting to a VOIP provider.

I use PennyTel for my VOIP provider, I live in Australia, they’re in Australia, and I’m happy with their offering. In particular, cheap calls, and a normal phone number that supports multiple dial-in lines.

PennyTel let me connect using SIP, so the configration goes in the same sip_local.conf file that we created in Part 1. If you wanted, you could use #includes in the cip.conf to seperate extensions and trunks into two seperate files - in fact I may do that myself some time.

Basically, we add the following blocks into sip_local.conf to create an incoming and an outgoing connection for PennyTel.

[613nnnnnnnn] username=nnnnnnnn type=user secret=PASSWORD qualify=yes nat=yes fromuser=613nnnnnnnn context=from-trunk canreinvite=no

[PennyTel] username=613nnnnnnnn type=peer secret=PASSWORD qualify=yes nat=yes insecure=very host=sip.pennytel.com disallow=all context=from-trunk canreinvite=no canredirect=no

And finally so PennyTel knows where to find us when a call comes in, add the following to the [General] section of sip.conf

register=613nnnnnnnn:PASSWORD@sip.pennytel.com/613nnnnnnnn

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Configuring Asterisk - Part 1

loom — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:43:31 +0000

Tools like Asterisk@HOME and FreePBX make the process of configuring an Asterisk box incredibly easy. They have pretty web-based user interfaces, downloadable modules, and generally just make things easy to do. If anyone has managed to get a package to run freePBX on OpenWRT sorted, I’d love to hear about it. Until then though, it’s all done through the files. Which is not as difficult as you might imagine, once you get the hang of it.

I break everything in Asterisk into one of three categories - I’m sure someone will tell me I’m wrong on this - Extensions, Trunks and The Rules. These categories have may or may not be related to do with the names of the files that they are configured from, they are just the way I think about this stuff.

Extensions - These are the actual telephone(s) that are connected to your PBX

Trunks - these are the connections from your PBX to the outside world and/or other peoples PBX’s

The Rules - these are the bits which make everything work.

The easiest place to start is probably setting up extensions. In my case, I’m using a Linksys PAP2T to provide two local extensions. The set up of each of these is a two step process :

Configure asterisk to take a SIP connection
Configure the PAP2T to connect to Asterisk

My Asterisk box is running on an Accton MR3201a at 192.168.0.30, my PAP2T is configured to use DHCP, usually 192.168.0.50. To configure the Asterisk end of the connection ssh into the MR3201 and edit sip.conf using vi. First though a note on Asterisk configuration files.

Asterisk has a whole bunch of configuration files, most of them contain stuff that I’ll probably never need to worry about or change. Fortunately Asterisk lets me include one config file from another. When I want to change or add to sip.conf for example, I have just added the line

#include sip_local.conf

to the end of the file, and make all my changes in sip_local.conf so that they are easier to find and manage. Anyway, back to connecting the PAP2T to Asterisk …

~> ssh root@192.168.0.30
root@192.168.0.30's password:

BusyBox v1.4.2 (2007-07-23 05:59:27 CEST) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

  _______                     ________        __
 |       |.-----.-----.-----.|  |  |  |.----.|  |_
 |   -   ||  _  |  -__|     ||  |  |  ||   _||   _|
 |_______||   __|_____|__|__||________||__|  |____|
          |__| W I R E L E S S   F R E E D O M
 KAMIKAZE (7.07) -----------------------------------
  * 10 oz Vodka       Shake well with ice and strain
  * 10 oz Triple sec  mixture into 10 shot glasses.
  * 10 oz lime juice  Salute!
 ---------------------------------------------------
root@OpenWrt:~# cd /etc/asterisk/
root@OpenWrt:/etc/asterisk# ls
agents.conf             extensions.conf         modules.conf
alarmreceiver.conf      extensions_demo.conf    musiconhold.conf
asterisk.conf           extensions_local.conf   osp.conf
cdr.conf                features.conf           privacy.conf
cdr_custom.conf         iax.conf                queues.conf
cdr_manager.conf        iax_local.conf          rtp.conf
codecs.conf             iaxprov.conf            sip.conf
dnsmgr.conf             indications.conf        sip_local.conf
enum.conf               logger.conf             sip_notify.conf
extconfig.conf          manager.conf            sip_registrations.conf
extensions.ael          misdn.conf
root@OpenWrt:/etc/asterisk# vi sip_local.conf

I’m going to assume that you know how to use vi - if you don’t try installing joe, which at least gives a help screen when you press Ctrl-K Ctrl-H

ipkg install joe

The first entry in my sip_local.conf is

[1000] type=friend secret=PASSWORD qualify=yes nat=yes host=dynamic context=from-internal canreinvite=no callerid=device <1000>

The [ ] is a section header in most configuration files, in this case [1000] sets the SIP user name.

type=friend means that this device will be able to send and receive calls, other options are peer and user
secret=PASSWORD is pretty obvious
qualify=yes tells asterisk to regularly ping the connection to make sure it’s latency isn’t to high for VOIP operations
nat=yes tells asterisk that the device is behind a NAT firewall
host=dynamic tells asterisk that the device may change its IP address, and will tell us where it is. You could also put a static IP address here.
context=from-internal tells Asterisk what context to start in when processing The Rules - we’ll get to that later
canreinvite=no does something that I understand but can explain in one sentence try here for more detail
callerid=device <1000> sets the caller id for the device

I have two entries like this set up, one for each of the two channels on the PAP2T

To set the PAP2T, login to the web interface as adiministrator and set the SIP proxy to the address of the MR3201a (192.168.0.30) in my case, the User name to 1000 and the password to the one specified above. this is obviously repeated for each channel as well.

Now, plug in a telephone (or two) and asuming everything is ok, nothing at all will happen - since no extensions are set up yet.

To test that things are working, add the following to extensions_local.conf (remember to add a #include to extensions.conf as well)

[from-internal] exten => 1000,1,Dial(SIP/1000) exten => 1001,1,Dial(SIP/1001)

Now pick up extension 1000 and dial 1001, extension 1001 should ring - you may need to get Asterisk to reload it’s configuration before this will work.

The next post will explain how to set up a SIP trunk to Pennytel, and after that, we’ll get into some detail with The Rules

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OpenWRT and Asterisk - my new PABX

loom — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 02:09:56 +0000

I’ve been running Asterisk on my desktop for about a year now. A few months ago I acquired two Accton MR3201A’s configured for OpenMesh using OpenWRT. I finally got around to installing Asterisk on one of them a couple of weeks ago, and this is a record of how I did it.

To give you an idea of the size of the MR3201, her is a picture of one

Yes, that little box really is running a full-blown PABX

Anyway, enough of that, how to set it up

Using Linux on a PC with a free ethernet port run the following:

wget http://www.open-mesh.com/flashing/easyflash chmod +x easyflash wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.07/atheros-2.6/ openwrt-atheros-2.6-vmlinux.lzma wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.07/atheros-2.6/ openwrt-atheros-2.6-root.squashfs

Directly connect to the MR3201a using a standard cat5 patch lead - don’t power the MR3201a yet

Execute the following:
sudo ./easyflash eth0 openwrt-atheros-2.6-root.squashfs openwrt-atheros-2.6-vmlinux.lzma

Now connect power to the MR3201a.

Wait for a while, this will replace whatever firmware is on it with OpenWRT 7.07

The clean firmware install uses an IP of 192.168.1.1 the following should get the local ethernet to work
sudo /sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2/24

By default OpenWRT runs a telnet server until a password has been set at which point it switches to an ssh server.

telnet 192.168.1.1 login as root passwd

The network configuration is stored in /etc/config/network mine looks like this…

# Copyright (C) 2006 OpenWrt.org config interface loopback option ifname lo option proto static option ipaddr 127.0.0.1 option netmask 255.0.0.0 config interface lan option ifname eth0 option type bridge option proto static option ipaddr 192.168.0.30 option netmask 255.255.255.0 option gateway 192.168.0.1 option dns 192.168.0.1

A restart will set the device to it’s new IP
reboot

now to update the ipkg repositories and get some packages installed

The file /etc/ipkg.conf has a list of repositories in it. I use :

src release http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.07/atheros-2.6/packages src packages http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/packages/mips src extras http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.07/packages/mips dest root / dest ram /tmp

To get asterisk installed, use the following ipkg commands
ipkg update ipkg upgrade ipkg install asterisk ipkg install asterisk-sounds

/etc/init.d/asterisk enable /etc/init.d/asterisk start

All that remains is to configure trunks and extensions. Which will be in a later post. Configuration files for asterisk are located in /etc/asterisk

EDIT: Asterisk will fail to start when trying to load the zaptel channel driver. we don’t need this, so add the following to /etc/asterisk/modules.conf

noload => chan_zap.so ; Don't load zaptel

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Urrrrrrgh

loom — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:00:49 +0000

Two days to go before I have to spend 20,000 hours on a plane, and I’m getting a cold. It isn’t The Flu, this is an important distinction. I am not getting the flu.
We went shopping this morning, just some last minute things, Australia/US power adapter and a USB flash card reader. I also got a 4GB SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash card for the DSLR.

And most importantly, a box of Codral Cold & Flu tablets, for the Cold that I’m getting, since I am not getting the Flu.

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So this is it

Gallery2 Integration

loom — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:30:37 +0000

So Yay!

My gallery2 gallery is “integrated” with WordPress. Which means that those pictures on the right of the page are grabbed straight from the gallery. Apparently, I can also stick a picture in here

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So this is it

So this is it

loom — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 04:38:24 +0000

I’ve had to push myself to start a new blog for the HOPE conference, I’m not sure why, but it seems like a good way to keep a record of where my head is while I’m there.

Since I have a LiveJournal and Blogger Account that I don’t use, I started thinking about why I’d bother setting up another blog - which I probably wouldn’t use either. I don’t like the fact that my other blogs are hosted somewhere else by someone else, someone who could quite arbitrarily cancel them, change them or even decide that my thoughts are not appropriate for their service. So it had to be a blog that is hosted on my infrastructure, or at least infrastructure that I am paying for.

So what blog software to use? It had to be open source, easy to use, easy to set up and generally not have me screaming at it whenever I wanted to do something. After much consideration (at least 5 minutes) it came down to a choice between b2evolution and WordPress. WordPress won, so I installed it, easy, less than ten minutes.

It failed the 5 minute test - anything bad in the first 5 minutes and I switch to option 2. Can you believe that it has virtually no built in plugin search, download and install capability? I have to ftp the what to the where and do thingamy to the file, then refresh the page to make it work, then click activate? Fuck Off!

So bye bye WordPress, hello b2evolution.

It failed the 5 minute test too. Ugly ugly ugly default admin interface. Not intuitive. Menus don’t work in opera. I couldn’t even find the bit where I get to change the theme to something prettier.

Back to WordPress, which at least looked pretty enough. So I decide to search the online pluginny stuff.. First I tried PlugInstaller, which I installed. I tried to use it to install another plugin, which it couldn’t. So maybe it was a bad plugin, maybe I’d done something wrong, try again with a different plugin. Some crazy message about no files in the plugin directory…

Move on to One Click Plugin Updater - this one works. I still have to go and search through 2500 plugins to find what I want, but at least I can install them fairly easily now.

So anyway, welcome to what is my first and quite possibly last post on my new Blog….

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Machines (Virtual)

loom — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 01:58:00 +0000

You’d think that making a virtual machine these days would be easy. I already use VMWare to run a XP machine for testing. But like everything else, I prefer to avoid proprietary technology - even if it is free.

So what are the alternatives?

Well XEN is supposed to be the next big thing, except I don’t have a processor that supports Intel Virtual Technology - or whatever it’s called. So I can’t virtualise without running a modified OS.

Run VMWare and XEN I hear you say; I considered it, but I can’t build the kernel monitor modules while XEn is running.

Getting Xen runnning was an interesting exercise, I think it’s time to move onto QEMU and see how I go there.

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It begins…

loom — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 05:34:00 +0000

Yesterday, I bought a Linksys PAP2T 2 port analogue telephone adapter. It is the beginning of my asterisk box. Now to build the box itself. at the moment, I’m planning to build it on a VM, since I imagine that 2 extensions and a couple of trunks can’t be that resource hungry. I’ll probably end up being proven wrong.

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Excitement

loom — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 08:59:00 +0000

I got a call from the camera shop today. I didn’t actually answer it, so I didn’t actually speak to anyone. I did get very excited when I realised I had missed a call, and then recognised the phone number. You see I’m waiting for my new camera to arrive. I bought my minolta system about 8 years ago, and have been waiting for a digital SLR which will use my lenses since digital SLR’s became a decent thing to have. They’ve finally done it.

Anyway, back to the phone call. I listened to my voicemail with much anticipation, only to discover that in fact, the shop had recieved a camera which was their demo model, and would I like to come in and play with it while waiting for mine to arrive…..

Sad again.

I won’t start to sing the praises of the 7D yet, I haven’t used it, in fact I haven’t seen one, but according to minolta it does lots of cool stuff.

More to come.

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