http://news.techeye.net/security/nsa-hopes-us-people-cant-add-up

[WM: Not a biker, but couldn't agree more. Not a prettier spot in the country than the Waynesville area.]

Why the need to have open ports to pbx server ???

The best option is to setup a light vpn server and connect by vpn to home router/pbx server instead of get a few ports opened at router.

Openvpn works very good in raspberry pi with low resources, poptop also works great but the encryptation is very poor.

It would be nice to see PBX in a Flash with an addon for VPN server, to create and manage vpn accounts.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=20916

[WM: Huh? Where have you been? We've supported VPNs as far back as the Hamachi days. Currently we recommend NeoRouter and PPTP VPNs as the easiest to set up. But OpenVPN has been documented as well for years. We also have a stand-alone VPN in a Flash server that can be installed from any of the PIAF2 ISOs. And Incredible PBX includes turnkey NeoRouter and PPTP VPNs out of the box. Finally, Incredible PBX for Raspberry Pi supports NeoRouter and PPTP VPNs as well. Either can be configured in less than 5 minutes.]

What could really help you guys out as KrzyKat alludes to is some limits on campaign spending and contributions (we have some REALLY strict rules about that with some SERIOUS fines; some people have recently received a couple).

America needs to "stick its nose in everyone’s business" because otherwise you get Hitler. We can’t have that again. But probably it could be a bit more consensus driven than it has been over the last 15 or 20 years.

We do have school shootings and nut jobs up here; not as often but remember we have 1/10th the population. But the body counts are lower because we don’t allow assault rifles. Google Montreal Massacre for one of the worst examples.

Anyway, what I would hope (but expect won’t happen) is that America could become the leaders in intellectual cultural and constitutional construction you’re capable of being. By that I mean you’d evaluate lots of constitutional options, and come up with something of a consensus of what’s REALLY important and build on that to create something relevant and with the correct checks and balances.

We also need to end the marriage tax holiday, and all marriage benefits. Marriage itself is a religious institution and should be left alone as a religious right. But the privileges afforded to those who get married should cease, as partnerships between m/f become less common. People should pursue typical legal counsel for any needs.
Also, the need for a "spousal" benefits ceases with both individuals working. As well this would end discrimination of some based upon their preferences.

Discussing changes to the United States constitution is like discussing changes to the weather – you can talk about it all you want but it is very unlikely anyone will be able to change it in the foreseeable future.

I wish I were wrong, and would love to be proven wrong in this case. But, do you know of anyone that is making a serious effort to collect and curate the best ideas on how to change the Constitution? As far as I know, no one is even making a serious effort. A good first step would be to set up a web site or some other mechanism to collect serious ideas for constitutional reform, and I don’t think anyone has set out to do that.

One reason our constitution no longer works is because it is so old and in no way representative of the values of people today. The people have one set of values, the constitution quite another. Given how fast the world is changing, it would be as if the people of 1776 were using laws that were written for ancient Sumerian or Egyptian societies. We are a different breed of people now, with different values, yet are legislators are still working with laws that were written when riding on a horse was the fastest way to get from place to place, when people died at a much younger age, when slavery and racial discrimination were common, when women were expected to marry, stay home and raise kids and keep their mouths shut, and when guns had to be fired one shot at a time and after taking that shot you had to stop and reload your powder and bullet. It was a time when agriculture, logging and furs were main drivers of an economy. It was a time when a newspaper was the primary form of mass communications, and there were no wire services, so no way to conduct a mass media campaign. I could go on but the point is that the world back then in no way resembles the world we have today, yet we are trying to interpret laws written for that era as though they will still work in this era.

But the reason I think it doesn’t happen is because everyone is afraid of what a new constitution might be like. We fear, probably with considerable justification, that the special interests and big corporations that manipulate our laws and legal system today would just love the opportunity to help craft a new constitution. And you know they would use every bit of propaganda and mind manipulation at their disposal to get what they want. If you think our constitution couldn’t be worse, think about what it would be like if the corporations, special interests, and fundamentalist religious zealots got together and tried to craft one that would make them all the rulers of their respective domains.

Not to mention that our founding fathers deliberately made the constitution extremely difficult to change. Of course that does not stop the lawmakers and especially the courts from making defacto changes by passing laws that modify the meaning or intent. But far too often such modifications only benefit the rich and powerful.

Some things to consider: We do not live in a democracy, but a republic. Many people don’t understand the difference, and any teacher that teaches that we live in a democracy should be fired on the spot. In the past it was impractical to have true democracy, where every citizen had the opportunity to vote on every issue. But with modern technology, there is no longer such a high barrier to that. What if we actually tried true democracy, where we cut out the senators and congressmen and actually let people directly vote on the issues that matter to them? Would that work or would it result in an even more chaotic mess than we have now?

Our voting system is quite possibly one of the worst methods ever devised. For a partial explanation, watch CGPGrey’s videos dealing with the subject of voting at http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/ , particularly the first one on "The Problems with First Past the Post Voting"

The concept of "intellectual property" may have seemed like a good idea when the country was founded, but it could now be argued that patents and copyrights do more to retard progress than advance it. It was an artificial concept to begin with, so maybe we should throw those laws our altogether, but if not, at the very least they need serious reform so as to return to the original intent of advancing progress, and not just creating monopolies and businesses that make their livings by gouging and suing customers and other businesses.

Our education system is in serious need of reform. Kids and families go into debt to go to college, and often that college education does not significantly improve their chances for career advancement. And aren’t there better ways to learn then being lectured by a teacher or professor?

One of the amendments to the current constitution was meant to protect the free exercise of religion, and that’s good, but does it also mean that churches should be exempt from paying taxes on property they own, or that "ministers" should be able to flout many of the laws that apply to the rest of us, or that a particular religion should be able to have its moral standards enacted as the law of the land? Some of the happiest nations in the world (the Scandinavian countries) are also among the least religious, yet they still permit freedom of worship. Why do the fundamentalist religious types have so much influence AND get away with not paying taxes or having to obey certain other laws, e.g. zoning laws?

Then there are our wacky laws about drugs. By any measure, alcohol is much worse than marijuana, especially if you are driving a car, not that you should drive under the influence of either. But yet alcohol consumption is revered as almost a rite of passage for young people while using marijuana can get you serious prison time, at taxpayer expense, and a record that follows you the rest of your life. And with respect to other drugs, if it’s offered by a pharmaceutical company at an outrageous charge to consumers, then it’s okay, but if it doesn’t come from big pharma then it’s bad and in many cases you can be arrested for possessing or using it. And while on the subject, shouldn’t affordable healthcare and medication be a right for all people, rich or poor? Most other developed countries seem to think so, why don’t we? Oh, right, because there’s big money to be made by gouging people in the medical offices, hospital, and pharmacies. To bad if people end up destitute because they had the misfortune to get sick.

And then there are guns. Few people want nutcases running around with automatic weapons, yet our courts and legislators seem to think that our constitution protects that, and don’t they love those campaign contributions from the gun and ammunition manufacturers. The rest of the world thinks we are absolutely insane. They have sane gun control in Canada, and people are still able to go hunting, and guns and ammunition are sold there, yet you almost never hear of a school shooting or some nutjob firing at people from a tower up there.

Speaking of Canada, we could do a lot worse than simply adopt their constitution. I don’t know if this is true, or the actual details, but I once heard that the reason Fox News doesn’t operate in Canada is because there is some kind of prohibition against lying on the airwaves. Imagine if we had that in the Unites States, actual laws against lying to the public with some real teeth in them. For example, supposed that politicians could be barred from holding or running for public office if they were convicted of lying to the media or the public. Suppose broadcasters could lose their licenses if they knowingly and deliberately broadcast untrue news. Yes we consider freedom of speech a core value, but should that also carry with it a freedom to lie with impunity?

There are probably many other things that need reform, and those need to be discussed also. But my feeling is that we are now at a kind of tipping point. For so many years, the majority of people trusted the government, and it was considered "unpatriotic" to say the government was in the wrong (those of us that lived through the VietNam War era know how heated those types of conversations could get). But lately, there has been a real change in people’s attitudes. I think almost everyone realize that our government has become corrupt, and in some ways, almost as bad as the old soviet-style governments we used to pretend to hate so much. Since 9/11 our freedoms have been taken away; you can’t even cross the border into our friendly neighbor to the north Canada and then come back without a lot of hassle. Just ask the people living in Derby Line, Vermont – put that into Google or YouTube. Prior to 9/11 you could cross and come back with just photo ID. What next, something akin to an "iron curtain", for all practical purposes, between the U.S. and the rest of the world?

And finally, one big question that needs to be asked, though it won’t set well with some – why is it that the United States always has to stick its nose into everyone else’s affairs? The American people almost never want war, and typically some type of incident or provocation needs to occur for the American people to even support a war, and then much later we find out it was a "false flag" or contrived incident to begin with, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or maybe an outright lie. Maybe in any type of new constitution, there should be a much higher bar to the United Stares entering a conflict that has not touched American soil. My own feeling is that if we’d keep our nose out of other countries’ business, we wouldn’t be a target for every terrorist in the world. Maybe they would go pick on someone else if we left them alone, and we hardly come off as the good guys when we are bombing relatively defenseless nations and killing innocent civilians.

Anyway, sorry this is so long, but this is a dialog someone should be having. I may not be right about everything I’ve written here but I think it is a discussion worth having, and as far as I can tell, there are no serious efforts to give the people – and by that I mean real people, not corporations – a voice in how their country should be governed.

[WM: You're right. It's moved to the Module Admin screen. Sorry.]

Free doesn’t mean its wholly without cost.

2. Do you sell the pi setup?

[WM: External FXO adapters are supported. Incredible Pi is licensed for use at no cost.]

We’re actually talking two separate issues here, which is whether Google Voice will discontinue XMPP access to Google Voice, which they might but I still doubt it will happen anytime soon, and whether they will discontinue Google Voice altogether, which I very much doubt. So in my opinion, there is no need to run out and port a number away from Google Voice, since you will very likely be able to at least forward your Google Voice calls to another number, though at some point you may no longer be able to send your Google Voice calls to a Google Talk destination. But when that day arrives, you will have the ability to forward your calls to a regular phone number while you consider what other options you wish to take. Remember that Google has already said that Google Voice would be free through 2013, so that rather implies they aren’t planning on shutting it down.

If Google does drop the ability to use XMPP then it may still be possible to place and receive Google Voice calls by reverting back to an older method, as discussed in the thread at http://pbxinaflash.com/community/index.php?threads/old-fashioned-google-voice-calls.12620/

I’m sorry to disagree with you, Ward, but I just think that now is not the time to panic. If I were a gambler I’d bet the farm on the fact that Google Voice will be around at least until the end of this year, and that if Google ever does decide to discontinue it they will give users at least a couple months’ notice. The XMPP thing I am not quite so confident about, but if that should happen I have a fallback method ready to go.

I also think Google may live to regret pulling the plug on XMPP – it sort of blows apart "Don’t be evil", doesn’t it? For a company that wants to be big in all things technology, they seem to be trying their best to burn through all the goodwill they have generated over the years. The wi-fi snooping thing, where Google Street View cars were capturing bits of people’s wi-fi connections as they drove by, was my first indication that Google’s moral compass may have gone a bit askew. So it’s not that I think them incapable of pulling the plug on Google Voice someday, but I just don’t believe that will happen until at least the end of the year.

[WM: Incredible Pi works with any SIP or IAX provider in addition to Google Voice.]

(begin quote)
Installing from the Subversion repo (http://docs.yate.ro/wiki/Compiling_and_installing_Yate_from_SVN) is the best way to update. Later, when the programmers update the code, all you have to do is go back into the source directory, type "svn up" then make clean ; make ; make install-noapi.

Installing a new version won’t overwrite your config files. I believe there was a change to the ysipchan.conf if you customized the listen port. It used to go in the [listener general] section and now it just goes in the [general] section.
(end quote)

I took Bill’s advice and only had a couple of issues. The first was that when I tried to restart Yate it exited with an error:

./yate error while loading shared libraries: libyate.so.4.3.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The fix for that was to do this:

echo "/usr/local/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf
ldconfig

Then I found that when one of my users placed a call using a softphone he did not hear ringback tone. His softphone displayed a message saying "early media" but that was all. Bill Simon also had a solution for that:

(begin quote)
On my Yate 4.3.1 installation, I have the following in regexroute.conf to get rid of the early media offer and send straight SIP 180s for ringing:

in the [extra] section, add: call.ringing=10

below the [extra] section, add a new section:

[call.ringing]
.*=;earlymedia=no

Then reload (connect to rmanager with "telnet localhost 5038″ or restart yate) and you should have ringing.
(end quote)

So with Bill’s help (thank you, Bill!) I was able to upgrade Yate and keep everything working. I wanted to pass this information along, since that thread is no longer accessible.

[WM: If you're using an FQDN for your main IP address and it is not a static IP address, then use add-fqdn to add the same FQDN so that it will be picked up by ipchecker when it runs.]

When I install the Pi it works just fine, run the updates via terminal and still work, run the updates from the freepbx gui and CPU goes straight to 100% usage. No calls are being placed, system is overcloked. What can I do? Thank u a lot!

[WM: Burn a new image, keep the Pi behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet exposure, and stop upgrading. ]

As Ward alluded to while we have a few constant supporters of the project (Such as RentPBX yah! and OpenVox yah!) we need a steady source of funds to help prevent this from occurring again. I am constantly amazed how many commercial users rely on our *FREE* services but fail to send us a few bucks for every install or heck every other install.

I remember when we needed to replace the 2 primary development machines and 2 supporters stepped up and literally fedexed us a couple of machines. Tony from our "competition" sent us an uber server when we needed to replace our project/compiler server that generates ALL of the programs and ISO’s

I just finished upgrading to the latest version of Asterisk 11/1.8 and it is available now.

Tom

aka Darmock

I personally get tired of trying to find the funds to keep the lights on…….

[WM: Whiskey!]

I am sure I am not the only one feeling that way. When everything comes back (hopefully, with minimum damage) – maybe similar "premium" or "contributing" status on the board could be instantiated. As opposed to "guru" that is earned

[WM: Sad to say, you get what you pay for. We're the only non-commercial group still in existence in the VoIP space. And the "contributions" can be counted on your two hands each year.]

[WM: May be that your DNS cache has not yet refreshed. Worked for me.]

I imagine it looses you the opportunity to monitor installations quite so closely, and to slip-stream bug fixes into already-released products, but consider the goodwill folks will feel at not being quite so blatantly tethered to your servers.

[WM: Blatant tethering is probably here to stay. The problem with the all-in-one approach is that you end up having to put out monthly ISOs, and we're not going to get back in that business. Sorry.]

I know there have been cries of "get thee to the cloud!" — as if it were simply a forklift upgrade to cloud-ify something as complex as the PiaF discussion fora. On the other hand, though, it seems to me the cloud would make a perfect home for the gigabytes of code and executable that make up a PiaF payload. At the very least, there should be an inclusive offline loader available for each significant PiaF release.

For some reason, no one ever wants to hire me to work on something I know anything about, and this current project (which also had me looking into biometric access control methodologies and solar plant management systems) is no exception. Accordingly, for every hour that goes toward choosing and implementing a solution, I typically spend two questioning my sanity and second- [and third-] [and fourth-]guessing my choices. I looked into 32 different ITSPs before selecting one; I researched a ridiculous number of hosted and on-site PBX offerings (months later, Shoretel is *still* calling); and once I’d settled on the best approach to take, I evaluated every major, and quite a few of the minor, value-added packagings of Asterisk currently available. As a result, I can say with complete confidence the trifecta of Asterisk, FreePBX, and PiaF/Incredible PBX is far and away the best possible solution for this client. And I still do — this current installation glitch notwithstanding. Its just that, without the glitch, your story would be that much more compelling….

Thanks.

[WM: We're testing the restored .org site as we speak. Once it's working, installs will be fine. The ISO will switch to the .net site for files when it can't find them on .com. You're more than welcome to try a new install now. Feedback (good or bad) is most appreciated.]

Love the Incredible PBX on Raspberry Pi. Weird thing. I recently attempted to install a plugin (Paging and Intercom) and ever since, the Asterisk server would crash about 5 minutes into reload. Attempting to do an "amportal restart" would never yield in a graceful restart, always with a count down to 0. I am going to reimage the SDcard inthe hopes that a fresh install will resolve issues, but going forward, do you have any tips on where I would begin looking for the possible cause? Running asterisk -rvvvvvvv yielded no log to the console window.