1. both me and my wife, be able to make calls simultaneously thru the asterisk server
2. both me and my wife, be able to receive calls simultaneously thru the asterisk server
3. be able to transfer calls between each other

—

-What plans do you recommend me going for?
-how many lines do I need to accomplish this?

Right now i’m using vonage in my house -thru this website i’ve learned how GREAT they are, so i’m itching to dump them ASAP!

Thanks a bunch in advance

[WM: #1: Dump Verizon! #2: D-Link DGL-4300 Gaming Router which lets you access your site and some other port and then it remaps the traffic to port 80 inside. Also great for VoIP. #3: Adjust Apache config for some other port and access your site on that new port. ]

[WM: First, be sure you are forwarding port 80 to the TrixBox internal IP address. Next, change the default port for your router’s web interface. It always takes precedence.]

[WM: Connecting Asterisk box to hub behind a single router will work just fine since the hub uses the same subnet.]

[WM: Sorry but two routers compounds your problems. You might try posting on the trixbox forums, but I doubt you’ll get much of a response. Getting SIP to work reliably behind one router is hard enough. Adding a second one just makes it a nightmare. Why not hang the Asterisk box off the router closest to the public side of the Internet and avoid the problem?]

[WM: Sounds like a bad ISO image. After the initial reboot, there is a lengthy installation process during which Asterisk is actually compiled from source. If you didn’t see this happen after you removed the CD and your system rebooted, then there’s definitely a problem with the image or the CD. Take a look at the TrixBox forums. There also are a couple of quirky motherboards that have problems with this version of Linux, but there is a workaround.]

http://asterisktutorials.com/videos/idefisk/idefisk.html

hope this save you some time.

[WM: #1. Yes. #2. Not trixbox but perhaps some trimmed downed version of Linux and Asterisk. Take a look at this article.]

i added:

fromuser=username
sendrpid=yes

it worked ok and i was able to make outgoing calls.

[WM: On some TelaSIP systems, these are required now. Thanks for the tip.]

http://www.futurephone.com/

http://www.freecallstomexico.com/faqs.html

http://www.callchinaforfree.com/countrydetails.html

[WM: Just use our PBX-in-a-Flash script, and it gets installed and working automatically with TrixBox 1.2.3. You then have to choose the services you wish to activate by editing the calleridname.agi script (it’s about line 10-13). For more details, review this article.]

[WM: That’s what PBX-in-a-Flash was designed to do.]

Thanks to Bryan Pendleton (as usual) for making available the torrent feed for this image.

If you’re unfamiliar with using BitTorrent, you can download the image (561 MB) from the usual places:

Bubba’s PBX4Pros Web Site

VMwarez.com (coming soon!)

Nerd Vittles

Until recently, the only sure-fire way to make sure VMware kept the same time as your hardware clock was to use a cron job which polled a time server for the correct time and then reset the VMware/Linux clock every few minutes. That’s been fixed, and here’s how to patch the boot loader to fix it. But, first, while running WebMin, disable the time-setting cron job. From the main WebMin menu, choose Hardware->System Clock. In about the middle of the page is an option to Synchronize (the time) on Schedule. Just set it to No and Save your change. Now go to the command prompt on your server and make certain you are logged in as root. Edit the boot loader (nano -w /boot/grub/grub.conf) and move down to line 16 which begins with the word "kernel." Edit that line so that it looks like the following and save your change (Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter). Then reboot your system (shutdown -r now). HINT: Everything after "noapic" is new stuff to be added, and it all must be appended to the end of the existing line.

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-34.0.2.EL ro root=LABEL=/ acpi=off noapic nosmp nolapic clock=pit


http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Routing+calls+using+a+free+international+calling+service
or
http://michigantelephone.mi.org/blog/2006/10/two-step-dialing-with-freepbx-trixbox.html

(Impatient folks may want to skip down to the "Step" headings). Please note that this method was only developed less than 24 hours ago so it may not work for everyone, but comments can be left at the sites above (or here, if you will allow them) to report success or failure.

The one thing I would caution folks is not to go "hog wild and pig crazy" with these services because no matter what YOU are paying for the call to Iowa, if anything, your VoIP provider or their "downstream" provider (whatever company sends calls to the PSTN) is probably paying a lot more on a per-minute basis. My guess is that the terminating charges on these Iowa numbers are probably 5 to 10 times higher than calls to numbers served by the incumbent local phone companies in most large major cities. So if people start racking up huge numbers of minutes-of-use on calls to these numbers, I can see where that could potentially make good or bad things happen. Good would be if some VoIP providers finally decide to offer "free" calling to low-cost international points, rather than forcing customers to seek alternate ways to make such calls. Very good would be if this is the thing that finally causes the FCC to force reform of the ridiculous inter-company compensation scheme we have in the United States (I keep hoping we’ll move back to "bill and keep", which served the phone companies for decades until the incumbents started getting greedy. But, I’m not holding my breath).

On the other hand, bad would be if your VoIP provider decides they no longer want you as a customer, or if they start blocking calls to certain Iowa numbers (or just block the passing of post-connect touch tones). I don’t think most companies are going to object if you make a 20 minute call once a month (particularly as long as their "downstream" providers charge them a uniform termination rate for U.S. calls) but I will just bet that if people start collectively racking up millions of minutes per month to these services, and long distance, cell and VoIP companies start taking a bath on these calls, something will change – and my bet is that any such change will not favor customers, at least in the short term. But I do hope that some VoIP companies will decide that if they can complete calls to international points as cheaply as to the U.S., maybe they ought to stop charging per-minute rates for those calls (above and beyond what they charge for domestic calls, if anything), particularly if it drives their customers to use services such as these.

On another topic – if someone is running a previous version of Trixbox, is it safe right now to use the trixbox-update.sh update script? And also, is it safe to install the Asterisk upgrade that plugs the security hole? I recall that some time back you gave instructions on how to upgrade Asterisk on an Asterisk@Home installation, and I’m just wondering if that’s something that should be done now (using the updated files, of course). Of course, I realize it’s a lot easier to just add the line in /etc/asterisk/modules.conf but wonder if maybe it’s time to do an Asterisk upgrade, and a Trixbox update?

[WM: Thanks for your post. For those that can’t quite figure out how all this free international calling works, here’s our best guess. The theory is that numbers in this rural Iowa area code have termination charges (the fee your provider pays when you call one of these numbers) that are considerably higher than the going rates elsewhere in the U.S. Whether that’s 3¢ per minute or 10¢ per minute is unclear from what we’ve read. In any case, the differential compared to going rates to call elsewhere including over 50 countries around the world theoretically makes it a profit center for the local Iowa phone company even when they "give" you a free connection to a phone in these distant lands (which costs them less than 2¢ per minute). Thus, they theoretically charge your carrier 10¢ per minute while the international call costs them 2¢. The problem is that someone has to pay these termination charges and when 10 million calls a month to rural Iowa start showing up on Verizon’s and Sprint’s radar, you can bet they will do something about it. So … as with other telecom freebies, enjoy it while it lasts. But don’t expect it to last forever. As for whether it’s safe to upgrade to the latest version of Asterisk either manually or through the update scripts, we’re gonna pass for the time being. There’s a simple patch to plug the security hole, and it’s taken months to get a stable version of TrixBox. Let’s at least enjoy it for a few weeks.]

[WM: Interesting. Ampersand + trade + semicolon is the correct HTML reference for an unregistered trademark. But I won’t use it again in a headline.]

[WM: Looks to me like Firefox doesn’t know how to handle either an apostrophe or a trademark symbol in the title. I’d recommend you report it to Firefox as a bug. It works just fine in NetNewsWire.]