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CallerID Superfecta 2.2.2: International CNAM Directories

Unlike Willie Nelson, we’ve always nurtured our software projects hoping some would grow up to be cowboys. Thanks to Tony Shiffer, Jeremy Jacobs, and a whole host of new contributors (Patrick, Zorka, Nixi, UKstevef, and others), nothing even comes close to the success that CallerID Superfecta has enjoyed. What began as Asterisk® CallerID lookups from three sources with the original CallerID Trifecta four short years ago now provides an astonishing 27 CallerID lookup sources from around the world in the latest CallerID Superfecta 2.2.2. And the real beauty of this new beast is the utility permitting new lookup sources to be added without any further software modifications. That’s the tip of the iceberg.

For those that are new VoIP telephony, a brief history lesson will get you up to speed. When you make a phone call, telephone providers have traditionally passed your CallerID number to the receiving carrier while throwing your CallerID name in the bit bucket. The duty fell on the receiving carrier to look up your name in its directory and associate it with the CallerID number for delivery to the receiving telephone. If this sounds absolutely crazy, you’d be right. Who is in a better position to know the name of the calling party: the company initiating the call or the company receiving the call? Duh! That, of course, ignores the fact that the Bell System in particular was in monopoly preservation mode. Since they initially owned both companies, it really didn’t matter. Well, it does today and government regulators for some reason have completely missed this last vestige of the Good Old Boys telephone network. Does it make any sense that over half the phones in the world are mobile phones and you never know who’s calling? </rant>

When VoIP telephony came along, we obviously had to do something about that. Thus was born the CallerID Trifecta, an Asterisk/FreePBX tool allowing you to associate names with phone numbers using your computer and publicly available resources on the Internet. Version 2.2.1 introduced worldwide CallerID lookups. Unfortunately, there was a big gotcha. Some names in other countries use special non-ASCII characters, and delivery of those characters to some telephones sent the phones into the ozone. Not exactly our problem (HINT!), but folks did still want their phones to work. ๐Ÿ™„ CallerID Superfecta 2.2.2 fixes that by adjusting special characters to pure ASCII until the phone manufacturers catch up with the times.

The CallerID Superfecta Design. As originally implemented, CallerID Superfecta let you choose one or more lookup sources for incoming CallerID numbers. When an inbound call arrived, the sources were queried in a specified order, and the first source that provided a matching CallerID name won. The CNAM search result was returned to Asterisk for display on your phone instruments, and the lookup procedure ended. The problem with the original design was that newer and better lookup providers continued to appear so the hard-coded search order wasn’t necessarily ideal for every user or organization, and the providers kept changing formats to make lookups more challenging. In addition, when you receive a call from another country, it made little sense to look up that number in directories in which it obviously would not appear. CallerID Superfecta 2.2.2 fixes that with its new CallerID Schemes support. This lets you tailor CallerID lookups based upon dial strings just as you would do with FreePBX inbound and outbound routes.

What Else Is New? For openers there are a number of new lookup sources as well as some tweaks to older sources that stamped out a few (more) bugs from our previous, sloppy code. ๐Ÿ™‚ You’ll also note there’s a new checkbox to Check for New Lookup Sources Online. This lets you easily import all the new lookup sources as they are added to the repository. The web user interface (UI) for FreePBX also has been reworked. You can prioritize the lookups in the order that best meets your needs, and you can tailor lookup sources to match specific CallerID number sequences. There’s also a debug function built directly into the web user interface. By entering a telephone number in the debug field and pressing the debug button on the form, the results from your selected lookup sources together with the latency of each enabled data source can be displayed on the form for you to review. This debug function greatly enhances troubleshooting while serving as a terrific tool to assist you in fine tuning which providers to actually enable and in what order. Providers who canโ€™t be reached, or who perform too slowly, or who provide lousy results can be turned off completely or moved to the bottom of the search order. Finally, CallerID Superfecta 2.2.2 introduces prefix code hooks. This gives developers the ability to trigger an additional outside process when the Caller ID function is initiated. For example, this feature might be used in a call center to allow the system to automatically perform an ODBC query and bring up a customer record for use by a customer service representative.

Installing CallerID Superfecta 2.2.2 Installation or upgrade should be a snap on any of the FreePBX-based Asterisk aggregations including PBX in a Flash, trixbox, and Elastix. First, using a browser on your desktop PC, download CallerID Superfecta 2.2.2 from the Superfecta repository. Do not decompress the .tgz archive. Second, open FreePBX with your browser and choose Admin, Module Admin, Upload Module. Browse and select the superfecta-2.x.x.tgz module from your desktop and click the Upload button. When the upload completes, click local module administration. Scroll down and click CID Superfecta. Click the Install or Upgrade radio button depending upon whether you have previously installed the Superfecta FreePBX module. Click Process, Confirm, Return to install the new module. Reload the Asterisk dialplan when prompted.

Configuring CallerID Superfecta 2.2.2. There really are only two steps to bring CallerID Superfecta on line. First , we’ll configure the lookup sources and search order of the lookups. And then, for each inbound route on your Asterisk system, we’ll tell FreePBX to use CallerID Superfecta as the CallerID lookup source.



To configure CallerID Superfecta, click Admin, Setup, CID Superfecta in FreePBX. If you’re using PBX in a Flash or trixbox, be sure to insert the UserName maint and your FreePBX maint password in the fields provided under General Options. Then choose the Services you’d like to use for queries by clicking on the corresponding Enabled buttons. For those in the U.S., if you’re unfamiliar with previous versions of the product, we’d recommend you start with Addresses, White Pages, Yellow Pages, Any Who, and Telco Data. If you use the Asterisk Phonebook, AsteriDex, or SugarCRM, enable those options as well. Our rule of thumb in prioritizing the searches is to move your personal directories (Asterisk Phonebook, AsteriDex, and SugarCRM) to the top of the list. For the remaining choices, we recommend you start with the following search order: Addresses, White Pages, Yellow Pages, Any Who, and then Telco Data. Telco Data normally returns only the city and state of the caller, not the caller’s name. Who Called requires registration. Once you get everything squared away, click the Save button. Then key in a few known phone numbers in the Debug section of the form and click the Debug button to make sure everything is working as you expected. Take note of the retrieval times and the results and adjust the search order to meet your needs. Remember, the first match on a name using the search sources from top to bottom wins. The other search sources are never consulted for this number.

For additional configuration options and tips on configuring SugarCRM, see this thread on the PBX in a Flash Forum.

Once you’re satisfied with your lookup sources and the search order, the only remaining step is to designate CID Superfecta as the CallerID lookup source in your inbound routes. For each inbound route on which you want CallerID lookups performed, click Admin, Setup, Inbound Routes and choose the desired route from the column of routes on the right margin. Scroll to the CID Lookup Source section of the form and choose CID Superfecta from the dropdown box. Click Submit, Apply Config Changes, Continue to save your entry.

Adding Support for More Countries. So… here’s the challenge. We need to finish the rest of the world. If your country is not yet supported in the following list of directories, do us all a favor and post a comment with a good Internet source for reverse name directory lookups in your area of the globe. This means you can plug in a phone number and the directory will return the name of the person or business associated with that number. Even if you’re not a programmer, providing this information will assist greatly in making even more sources available to everyone down the road. Here’s the list as it stands today:

Adding Your Number to Directories. We know some of you are wondering how to get your VoIP number or Google Voice number added to the phone directories. It’s easy at least in the United States! Just go to www.listyourself.net and sign up. Enjoy!


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15 Comments

  1. For some reason, I cannot have CID Superfecta Cache Results to AstDB. I select the check box, but when I click Submit, it un-checks itself! This has been the case for some time now. How do I get caching to work again?
    Thanks

  2. CanPagesCa does not appear to be working properly. A search in asterisk returns no results, but a search on the website is successful.

    Another vote for 411.ca too.

    It would be nice to see Australia and the UK too, but I believe Reverse lookups are illegal there.

  3. Here is a source for Austrian reverse lookups:

    Go to http://www.herold.at/telefonbuch/erweiterte-suche/ and fill in the "Telefonnummer" field with the number you are trying to look up, either in national format 0XXXXXXX or in one of two international formats 00CCCXXXXXXX or +CCCXXXXXXXX then click "Finden" on the right.

    If found, this will return the name of the party in the bottom right quadrant of the screen, below the pale grey words "Redaktionelle Eintraege" and a . The name is actually a link leading to a more complete record for the party.

    The returned web page will have the number in the URL; but simply putting the number in the URL and hitting ENTER will NOT find that party. However, if you call such a URL from wget it will work, but if you call it in the same browser window as a previous search it will not.

  4. Note for elastix users.
    Turn off rewrite for /admin/modules/superfecta/ in /etc/httpd/conf.d/elastix.conf
    Also if you want to use the trunk provided lookup add (N/A) to you keywords to ignore.

  5. How do i make this work on asterisk 1.6.2 without FreePBX?

    Thanks and keep up the good work!

    [WM: Beats me. Short answer is you probably don’t. It’s been rewritten specifically for use with FreePBX.]

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