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The Most Versatile VoIP Provider: FREE PORTING

Introducing Incredible PBX 11 & Incredible Fax for Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 2.11

In celebration of the start of Nerd Vittles 9th Year, it seemed only fitting to introduce a terrific new VoIP product that takes advantage of the latest and greatest feature sets in both Asterisk® and FreePBX®. For years, bleeding edge Asterisk software was more blood than most folks could tolerate. But we’ve been pleasantly surprised. Asterisk 11 is a different beast. For a new release, it has less bugs and more new features than we’ve ever previously seen. And even the beta releases of FreePBX 2.11 are much improved with major plumbing changes that make for a much flexible and feature-rich product. So we started with the new Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 2.11 platform and built what we believe is the ultimate turnkey PBX solution. Incredible PBX™ 11 gives you the best of all worlds plus all of the very best, preconfigured Asterisk applications we could find. And the installer together with all of the apps are pure open source so you can learn how to build a system like this for yourself if that happens to be your thing. Installation is a breeze. Set up a new 32-bit PBX in a Flash™ 2.0.6.3 server with PIAF-Green and FreePBX 2.11, download the Incredible PBX 11 installer, and five minutes later you’re ready to begin your VoIP adventure. And it’s all FREE!

News Flash: And now Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax are available for the $35 Raspberry Pi.

So what’s new? Dozens of upgraded Asterisk Apps. 9-Layer Security. 20 Preconfigured VoIP Provider Trunks. 1-Click Installers for Asterisk.everything. Certified Asterisk support. All-new Google Voice connectivity with Asterisk Motif. Voice-enabled SMS messaging and script-based SMS message blasting. Incredible PBX Automatic Update Utility. Incredible Fax™ 11 delivers free faxing with HylaFax™ and AvantFax®. Incredible PBX and Incredible Fax are now GPL2-licensed.

The Incredible PBX 11 Inventory. For those that have never heard of The Incredible PBX, here’s the current 11.0 feature set in addition to the base install of PBX in a Flash with the CentOS 6.3, Asterisk 11, FreePBX 2.11, and Apache, SendMail, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, IPtables Linux firewall, Fail2Ban, and WebMin. Incredible Fax, NeoRouter and PPTP VPNs, and all sorts of backup solutions are still just one command away and may be installed using the scripts included with Incredible PBX 11 and PBX in a Flash. Type help-pbx and browse /root for dozens of one-click install scripts.

And then there’s the Incredible Freebie! As they say, "Never look a gift horse in the mouth." What began as a kludgey, dual-call, dual-provider Google Voice implementation to take advantage of Google’s free PSTN calling in the U.S. and Canada with Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6 is now a zippy-quick, Gtalk-based calling platform that rivals the best SIP-to-SIP calls on the planet. The Incredible PBX Google Voice implementation provides virtually instantaneous PSTN connections to almost anybody, anywhere. Trust us! Except for the price which is still free, you’ll never know you weren’t connected via Ma Bell’s overpriced long-distance lines and neither will the Little Mrs.

To get started, download the latest 32-bit PBX in a Flash 2.0.6.3 ISO from SourceForge, burn to then boot from the PIAF2 CD, choose the PIAF-Green option to load Asterisk 11, and pick FreePBX 2.11 when prompted. Take a look at the PIAF Quick Start Guide for step-by-step installation instructions. Once the PIAF2 install is completed, just download and run the new Incredible PBX 11 installer.

A Few Words About Security. Thanks to its Zero Internet Footprint™ design, Incredible PBX is different. It remains the most secure Asterisk-based PBX around. What this means is The Incredible PBX has been engineered to sit safely behind a NAT-based, hardware firewall with no Internet port exposure to your actual server. For those needing remote telephone support, Incredible PBX loads Travelin’ Man 2 and 3 for you so your IPtables Linux Firewall can be either self-managed by end-users or set up with predefined IP addresses and FQDNs for all of your remote sites. Read about this Asterisk SIP vulnerability. Then you’ll understand why WhiteList-based server security has become absolutely essential. WhiteList Security means only those devices with a registered IP address in your WhiteList can get to your server’s resources. To everyone else, your server doesn’t even exist. Their only way to connect to you is with a POTS telephone and your published phone number.

For those with multiple servers to interconnect, we’ve provided one-click installers for not one but two VPN solutions: NeoRouter and PPTP. Suffice it to say, Incredible PBX has Security in Spades™: customized IPtables Linux Firewall, Fail2Ban tweaked for Asterisk security monitoring, FreePBX Extension Lockdown by IP address, randomized FreePBX extension passwords, Travelin’ Man 2 and 3 WhiteList Security, multiple VPN solutions for encrypted server-to-server communications, plus a bottom-up design focused on flawless operation behind a hardware-based firewall. You won’t find a more secure Personal Branch Exchange™ at any price.

Here’s the Incredible PBX 9-Layer Security Model:

書呆子Vittles: Did we mention that all of this telephone goodness is still absolutely FREE!

Prerequisites. Here’s what we recommend to get started properly:

We’ve shifted gears on our recommended Atom platform for PIAF2 after excellent results with both the single-core and dual-core Atom kits manufactured by Foxconn (pictured on the left below). That’s the dLink Gaming Router on the right. Seems kinda silly to spend twice as much for a machine that you can build yourself in under 5 minutes. Basically you remove four screws, insert a Phillips screwdriver in one of the holes and gently pry the cover away from the box. Then you pop off the back by inserting a small flat-blade screwdriver, remove four more screws, slide in a solid-state drive (SSD) and a 4GB stick of notebook computer RAM, and you’re done in a couple minutes. Replace the screws and the cover, and you have a perfect PIAF2 platform with terrific performance and no moving parts for about $200. The link above will take you to the PIAF Forum thread for these machines. They go on sale almost weekly. See the right column of Nerd Vittles (just below our tweets) for this week’s special at Amazon. The dual-core Atom box typically is under $150. It could easily handle an office with 50+ employees sitting on a bookshelf with an Internet connection (wired or wireless!). No noise. Very little heat. Low power requirements. Perfect!

Installing Incredible PBX 11. The installation process is simple. Here are the 3 Easy Steps to Free Calling, and The Incredible PBX will be ready to receive and make free U.S./Canada calls immediately:

1. Install PIAF-Green with FreePBX 2.11 using 32-bit PIAF2 ISO or PIAF-Green VM
2. Run Incredible PBX 4 installer
3. Configure Google Voice and a softphone or SIP phone

Configuring Google Voice. If you plan to use Google Voice, you’ll need a dedicated Google Voice account to support Incredible PBX 11. If you want to use the inbound fax capabilities of Incredible Fax 11, then you’ll need an additional Google Voice line that can be routed to the FAX custom destination using FreePBX. The more obscure the username (with some embedded numbers), the better off you will be. This will keep folks from bombarding you with unsolicited Gtalk chat messages, and who knows what nefarious scheme will be discovered using Google messaging six months from now. So keep this account a secret!

We’ve tested this extensively using an existing Gmail account, and inbound calling is just not reliable. The reason seems to be that Google always chooses Gmail chat as the inbound call destination if there are multiple registrations from the same IP address. So, be reasonable. Do it our way! Set up a dedicated Gmail and Google Voice account, and use it exclusively with Incredible PBX 11. It’s free at least through 2013. Google Voice no longer is by invitation only so, if you’re in the U.S. or have a friend that is, head over to the Google Voice site and register.

You must choose a telephone number (aka DID) for your new account, or Google Voice calling will not work… in either direction. Google used to permit outbound Gtalk calls using a fake CallerID, but that obviously led to abuse so it’s over! You also have to tie your Google Voice account to at least one working phone number as part of the initial setup process. Your cellphone number will work just fine. Don’t skip this step either. Just enter the provided 2-digit confirmation code when you tell Google to place the test call to the phone number you entered. Once the number is registered, you can disable it if you’d like in Settings, Voice Setting, Phones. But…

IMPORTANT: Be sure to enable the Google Chat option as one of your phone destinations in Settings, Voice Setting, Phones. That’s the destination we need for The Incredible PBX to work its magic! Otherwise, all inbound and outbound calls will fail. If you don’t see this option, you may need to call up Gmail and enable Google Chat there first. Then go back to the Google Voice Settings.

While you’re still in Google Voice Settings, click on the Calls tab. Make sure your settings match these:

  • Call ScreeningOFF
  • Call PresentationOFF
  • Caller ID (In)Display Caller’s Number
  • Caller ID (Out)Don’t Change Anything
  • Do Not DisturbOFF
  • Call Options (Enable Recording)OFF
  • Global Spam FilteringON

Click Save Changes once you adjust your settings. Under the Voicemail tab, plug in your email address so you get notified of new voicemails. Down the road, receipt of a Google Voice voicemail will be a big hint that something has come unglued on your PBX.

Incredible PBX 11 Installation. Log into your server as root and issue the following commands to run The Incredible PBX 4 installer:

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx11.gz
gunzip incrediblepbx11.gz
chmod +x incrediblepbx11
./incrediblepbx11

Now have a quick cup of coffee while the installer works its magic. While you’re waiting just make sure that you’ve heeded our advice and installed your server behind a hardware-based firewall. No ports need to be opened on your firewall to support Incredible PBX. Leave it that way!

One final word of caution is in order regardless of your choice of providers: Do NOT use special characters in any provider passwords, or nothing will work!

FINAL STEPS. Once the Incredible PBX install completes, there are two optional steps for those that will have remote phones or users outside your firewall. Install both Travelin’ Man 2 and 3 for an ultra-secure system.

Logging in to FreePBX 2.11. Using a web browser, you access the FreePBX GUI by pointing your browser to the IP address of Incredible PBX. Click on the Users tab. It will change to Admin. Now click the FreePBX Admin button. When prompted for a username, it’s maint. When prompted for the password, it’s whatever you set up as your maint password when you installed PBX in a Flash. If you forget it, you can always reset it by logging into your server as root and running passwd-master.

Configuring Google Voice Trunks in FreePBX. All trunk configurations now are managed within FreePBX, including Google Voice. This makes it easy to customize your Incredible PBX to meet your specific needs. If you plan to use Google Voice, here’s how to quickly configure one or more Google Voice trunks within FreePBX. After logging into FreePBX with your browser, click the Connectivity tab and choose Google Voice/Motif. To Add a new Google Voice account, just fill out the form. Do NOT check the third box or incoming calls will never ring!

While you’re still in FreePBX, choose Applications, Extensions, and click on the 701 extension. Write down your extension and voicemail passwords. You’ll need them to configure a phone in a minute.

IMPORTANT LAST STEP: Google Voice will not work unless you restart Asterisk from the Linux command line at this juncture. Using SSH, log into your server as root and issue the following command: amportal restart.

Incredible Fax 11 Installation. If you want the added convenience of having your Incredible PBX double as a free fax machine, run /root/incrediblefax11.sh after the Incredible PBX 4 install completes. Plug in your email address for delivery of incoming faxes and enter your home area code when prompted. For every other prompt, just press the Enter key. If you’d like to also add the optional OCR utility, just choose it when prompted. For complete documentation, see this Nerd Vittles article. Don’t forget that a REBOOT OF YOUR SERVER is required when the install is finished, or faxing won’t work! Then log in through the PIAF GUI using maint:password. You’ll find the AvantFax GUI on the Admin menu.

Also be sure to set up a second, dedicated Google Voice number if you want support for inbound faxing. Once the Google Voice credentials are configured in FreePBX for the additional Google Voice line, simply add an Inbound Route for this DID to point to the Custom Destination: Fax (Hylafax). This comes preconfigured with Incredible PBX 11.

Eliminating Audio and DTMF Problems. You can avoid one-way audio on calls and touchtones that don’t work with these simple settings in FreePBX: Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. Just plug in your public IP address and your private IP subnet. Then set ULAW as the only Audio Codec.

Setting Up a Desktop Softphone. PBX in a Flash supports all kinds of telephones, but we’ll start with the easy (free) one today. You can move on to "real phones" once you’re smitten with the VoIP bug. For today, you’ll need to download a softphone to your desktop PC or Mac.

The easiest way to get started is to set up a YATE softphone on your Desktop computer. Versions are available at no cost for Macs, PCs, and Linux machines. Just download the appropriate one and install it from this link. Once installed, it’s a simple matter to plug in your extension credentials and start making calls. Run the application and choose Settings -> Accounts and click the New button. Fill in the blanks using the IP address of your server, 201 for your account name, and whatever password you created for the extension. Click OK.

Once you are registered to extension 201, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place your first call. It’s that easy!

Incredible PBX Test Flight. The proof is in the pudding as they say. So let’s try two simple tests. First, let’s place an outbound call. Using the softphone, dial your 10-digit cellphone number. Google Voice should transparently connect you. Answer the call and make sure you can send and receive voice on both phones. Second, from another phone, call the Google Voice number that you’ve dedicated to The Incredible PBX. Your softphone should begin ringing shortly. The call will be answered by the Nerd Vittles sample IVR. You can explore all of the preconfigured options at your leisure.

Learn First. Explore Second. Even though the installation process has been completed, we strongly recommend you do some reading before you begin your VoIP adventure. VoIP PBX systems have become a favorite target of the hackers and crackers around the world and, unless you have an unlimited bank account, you need to take some time learning where the minefields are in today’s VoIP world. Start by reading our Primer on Asterisk Security. We’ve secured all of your passwords except your root password and your passwd-master password. We’re assuming you’ve put very secure passwords on those accounts as if your phone bill depended upon it. It does! There’s loads of additional documentation on the PBX in a Flash documentation web site.

Incredible PBX 11 Automatic Update Utility. With Incredible PBX 11, we are introducing a new automatic update utility to assist in keep your system current and secure. It runs each time you log into your server as root. The first ten updates are at no cost. You then can elect to continue the service by subscribing to the update service which is available for a modest $20 for calendar year 2013. Whether you subscribe or not, new releases of PBX in a Flash and Incredible PBX will always be free! This simply is a way for us to recover our costs in providing a service that many of our users have asked for. We hope you like it.

Choosing VoIP Providers. Nothing beats free when it comes to long distance calls. But nothing lasts forever. And, in the VoIP World, redundancy is dirt cheap. So we strongly recommend you set up another account with Vitelity using our special link below. This gives your PBX a secondary way to communicate with every telephone in the world, and it also gets you a second real phone number for your new system… so that people can call you. Here’s how it works. You pay Vitelity a deposit for phone service. They then will bill you $3.99 a month for your new phone number. This $3.99 also covers the cost of unlimited inbound calls (two at a time) delivered to your PBX for the month. For outbound calls, you pay by the minute and the cost is determined by where you’re calling. If you’re in the U.S., outbound calls to anywhere in the U.S. are a little over a penny a minute. If you change your mind about Vitelity and want a refund of the balance in your account, all you have to do is ask. The trunks for Vitelity already are preconfigured with The Incredible PBX. Just insert your credentials using FreePBX and uncheck the Disable Trunk checkbox. Then add the Vitelity trunk as the third destination for your default outbound route. That’s it. Congratulations! You now have a totally redundant phone system.

Incredible PBX includes preconfigured trunk setups for all of your favorite trunk providers. Just plug in your credentials and activate the trunks you need. In less than a minute, you’re done. Here’s the Incredible PBX Top 20 Trunk List with some reasons why these providers made our short list:

  • AxVoice ($14.99/mo. Business Plan; $16.58/mo. Unlimited Calls to 45 Countries)
  • CallCentric (Good International Calling Rates)
  • DIDforSale (20 channels per DID; unlimited DID calls for $8.99/mo.)
  • ENUM
  • FlowRoute (Good International Calling Rates)
  • FreeNum
  • Future-Nine (Supports CallerID Spoofing)
  • Google Voice (Free DIDs and free U.S./Canada calling)
  • IPkall (Free SIP/IAX DIDs)
  • Les.net (Supports CallerID Spoofing; very low rates)
  • LocalPhone (Dirt-cheap DIDs and calling rates worldwide; Free iNum DID)
  • Simon Telephonics (Free SIP-to-GoogleVoice Gateway)
  • SIPgate (Free residential DIDs sometimes)
  • Skype (Free Skype-to-Skype calls worldwide)
  • Teliax (Unlimited inbound DID $5/mo.)
  • Vitelity (Our supporter and the Best in the Business!)
  • VoIPms (CallerID spoofing; Free iNum calling; Very low rates)
  • VoIPMyWay (Residential Unlimited: $15.50/mo. Business Unlimited: $40/mo.)
  • VoIPStreet (Free DID)

Configuring Email. You’re going to want to be notified when updates are available for FreePBX, and you may also want notifications when new voicemails arrive. Everything already is set up for you except actually entering your email notification address. Using a web browser, open the FreePBX GUI by pointing your browser to the IP address of your Incredible PBX. Then click Administration and choose FreePBX. To set your email address for FreePBX updates, go to Admin -> Module Admin and click on the shield on the right margin. To configure emails to notify you of incoming voicemails, go to Applications -> Extensions -> 701 and scroll to the bottom of the screen. Then follow your nose. Be sure to reload FreePBX when prompted after saving your changes.

A Final Word About Security. In case you couldn’t tell, security matters to us, and it should matter to you. Not only is the safety of your system at stake but also your wallet and the safety of other folks’ systems. Unless you subscribe to the new Automatic Update Utility, our only means of alerting you to security issues which arise is through the RSS Feed that we maintain for the PBX in a Flash project. This feed is prominently displayed in the web GUI which you can access with any browser pointed to the IP address of your server. Check It Daily! Or add our RSS Feed to your favorite RSS Reader. We also recommend you follow @NerdUno on Twitter. We’ll keep you entertained and provide immediate notification of security problems that we hear about. Finally, visit the PIAF Forums regularly. You’ll be surprised what you can learn in 10 minutes of browsing. Be safe!

Kicking the Tires. OK. That’s enough tutorial for today. Let’s play. Using your new softphone, begin your adventure by dialing these extensions:

  • D-E-M-O – Incredible PBX Demo (running on your PBX)
  • Z-I-P – Enter a five digit zip code for any U.S. weather report
  • T-I-D-E – Get today’s tides and lunar schedule for any U.S. port
  • 4-1-1 – Phonebook lookup/dialer with AsteriDex
  • C-O-N-F – Set up a MeetMe Conference on the fly (PIN: 1234)
  • 1-2-3 – Schedule regular/recurring reminder (PW: 12345678)
  • 2-2-2 – ODBC/Timeclock Lookup Demo (Empl No: 12345)
  • 2-2-3 – ODBC/AsteriDex Lookup Demo (Code: AME)
  • 3-3-3 – Look up a definition for any word or term
  • 9-4-9 – Weather forecast for any city in the world
  • 9-5-0 – Retrieve stock report by stock symbol
  • 9-5-1 – Latest Google News headlines
  • Dial *68 – Schedule a hotel-style wakeup call from any extension

Don’t forget to List Yourself in Directory Assistance so everyone can find you by dialing 411. And add your new number to the Do Not Call Registry to block telemarketing calls. Or just call 888-382-1222 from your new number. Enjoy!

Originally published: Saturday, January 19, 2013


Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! In fact, there is a thread dedicated to support of Incredible PBX 11. Please have a look and post your support questions there. Unlike some forums, ours is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus and thousands of ordinary users just like you. You won’t have to wait long for an answer to your question.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


whos.amung.us If you’re wondering what your fellow man is reading on Nerd Vittles these days, wonder no more. Visit our new whos.amung.us statistical web site and check out what’s happening. It’s a terrific resource both for us and for you.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

The Amazing $35 Raspberry Pi: And Now It’s a Fax Machine

It was just a matter of time but David Cuthbert finally tamed HylaFax for the Raspberry Pi. So today we’re pleased to introduce Incredible PBX 3.7 incorporating his masterpiece, the born-again Incredible Fax. You still get all the terrific features of Incredible PBX 3.5 plus a whopper bonus, free faxing with any 512MB Raspberry Pi. Notice we said a 512MB Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, the 256MB boards just don’t have the necessary memory to run Asterisk, Apache, MySQL, PHP, an SMTP mail server, and FreePBX plus IAXmodem, HylaFax, and all the image conversion utilities needed to support integrated faxing with document conversion to and from PDFs. Keep in mind we’re talking about doing this on a $35 computer without a hiccup with simultaneous voice and fax communications. Scary indeed!

07/01/2019 NEWS FLASH: Just released Incredible PBX LITE for the Raspberry Pi 2, 3, and 4 featuring Raspbian 10 Buster. Tutorial here.

For those with a 256MB Raspberry Pi, not to worry. Incredible PBX 3.7 installs just fine, and you get the full Incredible PBX 3.5 feature set minus faxing. With a 512MB Raspberry Pi, here are the 5 Simple Steps to activate Incredible Fax:

  1. Download and Install Incredible PBX 3.7 or 3.11
  2. Run the /root/fax-enable Script to Automatically Configure HylaFax
  3. Using FreePBX, Add a Dedicated DID and Inbound Route to Handle Incoming Faxes
  4. Install Any Desktop HylaFax Client to Send Faxes via Print-to-Fax using any PDF
  5. Reboot Your Server and Enjoy

The question we’ve heard a lot from our pioneers is whether to upgrade from Incredible PBX 3.5 and, if so, how? And the answer is that it depends. If you’re like us and only send a couple of faxes a week, then moving to 3.7 as an all-in-one platform makes perfect sense. If, on the other hand, you send dozens of faxes all day long or send lengthy fax documents which consume a lot of processing resources, then our best advice is buy another Pi and dedicate it to faxing. Be advised that the default setup (/etc/hylafax/config.ttyIAX0-ttyIAX3) sets MaxRecvPages to 25. You can change this to meet your own requirements.

1. Download and Install Incredible PBX 3.7 or 3.11

What to Buy. Here’s everything you need to get started.1 The case is optional. Yes, you can run the Raspberry Pi sitting on your desk with no case. It’s only 5 volts. WiFi is also optional. There’s a 10/100 port on the Raspberry Pi that gives you all the networking you need. Here are the links to buy the pieces. You also need a CAT5 cable and either a spare PC or Mac with Putty or SSH and a pair of earbuds or an HDMI cable to connect to a TV or monitor and a USB keyboard.

Setting Up Google Voice. If you want free calling in the U.S. and Canada, then you’ll need a Google Voice account, and you’ll need one dedicated to Incredible Pi, or it won’t work. Log out after setting up the new Google Voice account!

  • Register for Google Voice account (no funky characters in your password!)
  • Enable Google Chat as Phone Destination
  • Configure Google Voice Calls Settings:
    • Call ScreeningOFF
    • Call PresentationOFF
    • Caller ID (In)Display Caller’s Number
    • Caller ID (Out)Don’t Change Anything
    • Do Not DisturbOFF
    • Call Options (Enable Recording)OFF
    • Global Spam FilteringON

  • Place test call in and out using GMail Call Phone

Baking Your Incredible Pi. The disk drive for the Raspberry Pi is an SD card. So what you need to do is download Incredible Pi and copy the image onto an SDHC card. Mac and Linux installers are included. For Windows, just use Win32 Disk Imager. Here are the steps:

  1. Download the Incredible Pi package
  2. Decompress the tarball: tar zxvf incrediblepi-version.tar.gz
  3. Copy .img file to SDHC using image utility or script
  4. Insert SDHC card into Raspberry Pi
  5. Boot the Raspberry Pi from Incredible Pi SDHC card

Your First Bite of Incredible Pi. If you’re not using a monitor and keyboard, you can use SSH to gain root access to Incredible Pi. And you can use any web browser on your private network to access your server. There are a couple of hurdles. First, you need the network address of your new server. And, second you need an SSH client. With Incredible PBX 3.3 and beyond, you needn’t worry about the IP address. You now can access your server via SSH by logging in like this: root@incrediblepbx.local. And browser access to your server is available at the following address: http://incrediblepbx.local. You still can plug in some earbuds when the bootup process begins and listen for the Incredible Pi to tell you its IP address when the boot procedure completes (about 90 seconds). Then you can use that IP address instead of incrediblepbx.local. Version 3.3 and beyond also include a Java-based SSH client in the FreePBX web GUI: Admin -> Java SSH.

Here’s everything you need to know about security for Incredible Pi:

1. ALWAYS RUN INCREDIBLE PI BEHIND A SECURE HARDWARE-BASED FIREWALL/ROUTER
2. NEVER EXPOSE ANY INCREDIBLE PI PORTS DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET
3. NEVER MAP INBOUND INTERNET PORTS FROM YOUR FIREWALL TO INCREDIBLE PI

Initial Setup. There also are a few setup steps to complete once your Incredible Pi finishes the bootup process. When you first login (username: root  password: raspberry), you’ll be prompted to change your root password and to set your default time zone. If you’re using either a wired network or an open WiFi network, then everything just works. If you’re using secured WiFi, then you’ll need to plug in your credentials in /etc/wpa.conf and reboot. The wired network always takes precedence so unplug the cable if you want WiFi to be your primary network. Next, run /root/update-my-pi to bring your server up to current specs. Finally, now’s the time to repartition your SD card if you’re using a card larger than 4GB. With the addition of faxing, a 4GB card is 80% full before your first call. While you’re at it, bump up the performance of your Raspberry Pi by 50% by setting the overclocking to turbo mode. It works great for us. YMMV! The key is a rock-solid power adapter such as the one we’ve recommended. Just run raspi-config and follow your nose.

Accessing Incredible Pi By GUI. You don’t have to be a Linux guru to use Incredible Pi. In fact, we’re just about finished with the Linux command prompt, but stay logged in until we finish the steps below. Most of your configuration of the PBX will be performed using the FreePBX® Web GUI. You also can access SSH through the FreePBX interface.

If you’re new to Asterisk® and FreePBX, here’s the one paragraph primer on what needs to happen before you can make free calls with Google Voice. You’ll obviously need a free Google Voice account. This gets you a phone number for people to call you and a vehicle to place calls to plain old telephones throughout the U.S. and Canada at no cost. You’ll also need a softphone or SIP phone to actually place and receive calls. YATE makes a free softphone for PCs, Macs, and Linux machines so download your favorite and install it on your desktop. Phones connect to extensions in FreePBX to work with Incredible Pi. Extensions talk to trunks (like Google Voice) to make and receive calls. FreePBX uses outbound routes to direct outgoing calls from extensions to trunks, and FreePBX uses inbound routes to route incoming calls from trunks to extensions to make your phones ring. In a nutshell, that’s how a PBX works. There are lots of bells and whistles that you can explore down the road.

Let’s get started. Using a browser, enter the IP address of your server or just use incrediblepbx.local as the address. Choose FreePBX Administration. When prompted for a username and password, use admin for both. Here are the six steps you need to complete before making your first free call:

  1. Change FreePBX admin Password and Default Email
  2. Add Google Voice Account credentials
  3. Set Destination for Incoming Calls
  4. Change Extension 701 Passwords
  5. Eliminate Audio and DTMF Problems
  6. Install and Register a Softphone to Extension 701

1. Changing FreePBX admin Password and Default Email. From the main FreePBX GUI, click Admin => Administrators. Click on admin user in the far-right column. Enter a new Password and click Submit Changes button. Then click the Apply Config button. Next, set your default email address at the bottom of Settings -> General Settings. Repeat the procedure above to save your entry.

2. Activating a Google Voice Trunk. To create a Trunk in FreePBX to handle calls to and from Google Voice, you’ll need three pieces of information from the Google Voice account you set up above: the 10-digit Google Voice phone number, your Google Voice account name, and your Google Voice password. Choose Other -> Google Voice from the FreePBX GUI. The following blank form will appear:

Fill in the blanks with your information and check all 3 boxes. If your Google Voice account name ends in @gmail.com, you can leave that out. Otherwise, include the full email address. Then click Submit Changes and Apply Config.

There’s one more step or your Google Voice account won’t work reliably with Incredible Pi! From the Linux command prompt while logged into your server as root, restart Asterisk: amportal restart

3. Setting a Destination for Incoming Calls. Now that you’ve created your Google Voice Trunk, we need to tell FreePBX how to process inbound calls when someone dials your Google Voice number. There are any number of choices. You could simply ring an extension. Or you could ring multiple extensions by first creating a Ring Group which is just a list of extension numbers. Or you could direct incoming calls to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system (we’ve actually set one up for you to play with).

By default, Incredible Pi is configured to route all incoming calls to a demo IVR that shows off some of the applications that come with Incredible Pi. You can change whenever you like by choosing Connectivity -> Inbound Routes -> Default. In the Set Destination section of the form, change the target to Extensions and then select 701 from the list. Then click Submit and Apply Config.

4. Changing Extension Passwords. From the main FreePBX GUI, choose Applications -> Extensions. Then click on 701 in the Extension List on the right side of your display. You’ll see a form that looks like this:

For now, we only need to make a few changes. First, you need a very secure password for both the extension itself and your voicemail account for this extension. The extension secret needs to be a combination of letters and numbers. The Voicemail Password needs to be all numbers, preferably six or more. Replace the existing 1234secret and 1234 with your own (very secure) entries. You also need to lock down this extension so that it is only accessible from devices on your private LAN. You do that with the deny and permit entries which currently are filled with zeroes. Leave the deny entry the way it is which tells Incredible Pi to block everybody except those allowed in the permit entry below. For the permit, we need the first three octets of your private LAN address, e.g. if your LAN is 192.168.0.something then the permit entry will be 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0.

Finally, you need to plug in your actual email address in the Voicemail section so that voicemails can be delivered to you when someone leaves a message. You can also include a pager email address if you want a text message alert with incoming voicemails. If you want the voicemails to automatically be deleted from the server after they are emailed to you (a good idea considering the disk storage limitations of an SDHC card), change the Delete Voicemail option from No to Yes. That’s it. Now save your settings by clicking the Submit button. Then reload the dialplan by clicking on the red prompt when it appears.

In case you’re curious, unless you’ve chosen to automatically delete voicemails after emailing them, you can retrieve your voicemails by dialing *98701 from any extension on your phone system. You’ll be prompted to enter the voicemail password you set up. In addition to managing your voicemails, you’ll also be given the opportunity to either return the call to the number of the person that called or to transfer the voicemail to another extension’s voicemail box. And you can always leave a voicemail for someone by dialing their extension number preceded by an asterisk, e.g. *701 would let someone leave you a voicemail without actually calling you.

5. Eliminating Audio and DTMF Problems. You can avoid one-way audio on calls and touchtones that don’t work with these simple settings in FreePBX: Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. Just plug in your public IP address and your private IP subnet. Then set ULAW as the only Audio Codec.

6. Setting Up a Desktop Softphone. Incredible Pi supports all kinds of telephones, but we’ll start with the easy (free) one today. You can move on to "real phones" once you’re smitten with the VoIP bug. For today, you’ll need to download a softphone to your desktop PC or Mac.

As we mentioned, the easiest way to get started with Incredible Pi is to set up a YATE softphone on your Desktop computer. Versions are available at no cost for Macs, PCs, and Linux machines. Just download the appropriate one and install it from this link. Once installed, it’s a simple matter to plug in your extension 701 credentials and start making calls. Run the application and choose Settings -> Accounts and click the New button. Fill in the blanks using the IP address of Incredible Pi, 701 for your account name, and whatever password you created for the extension. Click OK.

Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place your first call. It’s that easy!

Monitoring Call Progress with Asterisk. That about covers the basics. We’ll leave you with a tip on how to monitor what’s happening with your PBX. There are several good tools within the FreePBX GUI. You’ll find them under the Reports tab. In addition, Asterisk has its own Command Line Interface (CLI) that is accessible from the Linux command prompt. Just execute the following command while logged in as root: asterisk -rvvvvvvvvvv.

Activating SAMBA for Windows Networking. SAMBA is included for transparent access using the Windows Networking Protocol from PCs, Macs, and other Linux machines. As delivered, SAMBA is deactivated. For obvious reasons, we recommend you never activate root login access to SAMBA without a very secure password. If you wish to enable SAMBA on your server, here are the steps while logged in as root:

  • 1. Set SAMBA password for user root: smbpasswd -a root
  • 2. Change Windows workgroup from WORKGROUP, if needed: nano -w /etc/samba/smb.conf
  • 3. Manually start SAMBA from command prompt: service samba start
  • 4. If desired, set SAMBA to start on boot: rcconf and activate SAMBA option

If you’d like to update your status application to display SAMBA status instead of WLan1, here are the steps:
cd /usr/local/sbin
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/sambastatus.tgz
tar zxvf sambastatus.tgz
rm sambastatus.tgz

Activating the PPTP VPN Client. If you’ve followed the Nerd Vittles tutorial and previously set up a PPTP VPN Server for your devices, then it’s pretty simple to add Incredible Pi to the mix by activating its PPTP VPN client. You’ll need the FQDN or public IP address of your VPN server as well as a username and password for VPN access to your VPN server. Once you have those in hand, log into Incredible Pi as root.

Lest we forget to mention, you cannot log into your PPTP server from an IP address on the same private LAN so you’d only use the PPTP VPN when your Incredible Pi is at a remote location.

Edit the connection template: nano -w /etc/ppp/peers/my-pptp-server. Insert the following text and replace myfqdn.org with the FQDN of your PPTP server, replace myname with your PPTP username, and replace mypassword with your PPTP password. Then save the file: Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter.

To test it, issue the following command: /etc/init.d/pptp start. When you run ifconfig, you should now see a ppp0 entry:

ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

Remember, it won’t show an IP address if the Raspberry Pi and your PPTP VPN Server are on the same subnet (like ours). Once you install your Raspberry Pi in a remote location, you now can access it at the first IP address in your reserved PPTP IP address pool.

To permanently activate the PPTP VPN client on your Incredible Pi server, run rcconf. Scroll to the bottom of the list and highlight pptp. Press the space bar to select it for automatic startup when you boot your server. Then tab to OK and press Enter.

Shutting Down Your Server. Last but not least, never just pull the plug when you want to shut down your server, or you may end up with corrupted MySQL databases. Then nothing will run. Instead, log into your server as root, and issue the following command: shutdown -h now.

2. Run fax-enable Script to Configure HylaFax

To automatically configure Incredible Fax with HylaFax, log into your server as root with the root password you initially set up for your server. Before running the fax-enable script in the /root folder, make sure you have the following pieces of information:

  • DID Number to Receive Inbound Fax Calls (HINT: Google Voice works great!)
  • Your Country Code (Default is 1 for U.S.)
  • Your Local Area Code (Default is 843, our area code)
  • Long Distance Dial Prefix (Default is 1)
  • International Prefix (Default is 011)
  • Email Address to Receive Incoming Faxes in PDF Format
  • Fax Identifier to Attach to Outbound Faxes (Default is IncredibleFax)

Now run the script: /root/fax-enable. Fill in the blanks. And, this is important. Double-check your entries very carefully to make sure there are no typos. Once you press Enter to activate HylaFax, you’ll have to manually edit the files in /etc/hylafax to make corrections. With the exception of your incoming fax email address, the rest of the settings are stored in config.ttyIAX0, config.ttyIAX1, config.ttyIAX2, and config.ttyIAX3. Email address is stored in FaxDispatch.

3. Configuring FreePBX for Incredible Fax

Adding a Dedicated Google Voice Trunk for Incoming Faxes. As noted, you need a dedicated DID to support incoming fax calls since the system has no way to detect a fax. The easiest solution is to add an additional Google Voice trunk to your server and dedicate it to handling incoming faxes. You can also use a DID from a SIP provider of your choice; however, some support analog faxing better than others. And some don’t support fax transmissions at all. To add an additional Google Voice trunk, open FreePBX with your browser and choose Other -> Google Voice. Fill in the blanks with your Google Voice number and account credentials. Check off the three checkboxes, and save your settings. Click the Red reload button when prompted.

Adding an Inbound Route for Incoming Faxes. We don’t want Incredible Fax to use your default inbound route for incoming faxes, or it would simply ring a telephone or IVR. Instead, we want to create a new route just for incoming faxes. While still in FreePBX, choose Connectivity -> Inbound Routes -> Add Incoming Route. Fill in the blanks as shown below using the 10-digit DID of your dedicated fax number. Click Submit and Reload when prompted.

4. Installing a Desktop HylaFax Client to Send Faxes

You can skip this step if you only want to receive faxes at the email address you set up with fax-enable. If you want to be able to send faxes as well, then you’ll need to install a free or commercially available HylaFax client on your desktop machine. Here’s the complete list of HylaFax clients. Regardless of the client you choose, you’ll need to enter the credentials for your HylaFax server. This includes the IP address of Incredible PBX on your private LAN, your username (root), and your root password. For a free Windows client, we recommend WinPrint. For Mac machines, use Fax90. Both of these clients are so-called Print-to-Fax applications. This means you first must convert whatever document you wish to send into a PDF document. Then call it up on your screen and "print" the file to the Fax Device that was installed as part of the HylaFax client setup. It sounds harder than it really is. Free PDF conversion tools are available for Windows machines, and Macs include a PDF export utility as part of the operating system itself. HylaFax clients also are available for Linux machines and Android devices, but not the iJunk. Google is your friend. 🙂

5. Reboot and Enjoy!

Last, but not least, you’ll need to reboot your server before any of this will work. If you have a keyboard plugged into your Raspberry Pi, then press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart your server. If not, log in as root and type: reboot. Happy Faxing!

Originally published: Monday, December 3, 2012



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. Many of our purchase links refer users to Amazon when we find their prices are competitive for the recommended products. Nerd Vittles receives a small referral fee from Amazon to help cover the costs of our blog. We never recommend particular products solely to generate Amazon commissions. However, when pricing is comparable or availability is favorable, we support Amazon because Amazon supports us. []

Black Friday Deals: Buyers’ Guide to VoIP and Mobile Stocking Stuffers for 2012

Tech toys continue to proliferate and, to get you in the Christmas spirit, we thought we would run down our short list of Must Have’s for 2012 so that you’ll be prepared for your Black Friday shopping spree. It’s just 10 days away!

Cell Phone Paradise

In the smartphone category, the iPhone 5 ranks up there as one of the most disappointing offerings of the year in our book. Apple continues to force obsolescence with a new nano SIM card and an all-new dock connector that only supports USB 2.0. Near Field Communication (NFC) is nowhere to be found. Did we mention the endless LITIGATION that seems to have replaced INNOVATION at Apple? Before you buy from Apple, ask yourself if you really want to encourage this type of corporate behavior. It’s ruining software development, and spare us the B.S. about Apple inventing all of this stuff. They didn’t!

Three out of four new cellphones reportedly are Android phones. There are lots of reasons why. We’ve been a huge fan of Samsung’s Galaxy S III as the best cellphone on the market… until we tried the new Galaxy Note II. We had planned to do a full-fledged review of the device until we read AnandTech’s writeup. It covers everything you’d ever want to know. What can we say? Easily rooted. A 5.5 inch diagonal screen with 1280×720 resolution leaves everything else in the dust. Add Android Jelly Bean with a quad-core processor and support for Samsung’s S-Pen, two fantastic cameras, a replaceable battery, 64GB microSD card support, an 11.78 watt-hour battery, cellular support for category 3 LTE FDD and TDD, Release 9 DC-HSPA+, GSM/EDGE, and TD-SCDMA along with onboard gpsOneGen 8A GNSS, and it’s damn close to perfect. It brings you the best of all possible non-proprietary worlds. And, yes, it still fits comfortably in your jeans pocket. Honest, you will love The Phablet, and it’s available with free 2-day shipping using Amazon Prime.1 Or check out the Black Friday deals.

Best Cell Phone Plans

The United States cellphone provider market continues to be dominated by the Bell sisters, AT&T and Verizon, with Sprint and T-Mobile competing in the also-ran category. The good news is there now are some terrific cellphone pay-as-you-go bargains using three of the four major providers. Monthly pricing of these plans is typically 50 to 75% less than comparable plan offerings from AT&T and Verizon. Here are our favorites.

Straight Talk Unlimited. Straight Talk in conjunction with WalMart offers a $45 monthly plan ($495 a year) with unlimited talk, text, and web access. Buy a SIM for $9.99 and a refill card, port your number, and you’ll be up and running in about an hour. Better yet, buy them together and use coupon code SIMSAVE, and the SIM card is free with free shipping as well. It uses the identical AT&T network infrastructure as AT&T, and Straight Talk SIMs are interchangeable using any existing AT&T cellphone. On an Android phone, the feature set is identical to what you’d get with an AT&T plan. On an iPhone, you lose Visual Voicemail. If the phone is not jailbroken, you may lose multimedia messaging (MMS). For configuration details, see this post. Also available for T-Mobile, if you prefer. No tethering!

T-Mobile Unlimited Data Plan. T-Mobile in conjunction with WalMart offers a pay-as-you-go plan with 100 voice minutes, unlimited texting, and unlimited data (5GB at 4G speed and 2G speed thereafter) for $30 a month. Extra voice minutes are 10¢. It’s not only an amazing deal, but the fine print doesn’t seem to preclude tethering. You can use it with any T-Mobile phone including all of Google’s Android phones. For tethering support, any rootable Android phone works as well as the unmodified $349 Galaxy Nexus 4 purchased directly from Google starting today at noon Eastern time. The Nexus 4 gives you 4G performance over HSPA+, but no LTE radio support! Today’s AnandTech review here. If you don’t care about tethering but want 4G performance, then take a look at the $175 Samsung T679 available at WalMart. Beware: Most AT&T GSM phones will also work with T-Mobile, but you’ll only get 2G data performance because of the different radio frequencies used by AT&T and T-Mobile for 3G and 4G service.

If you have T-Mobile coverage in your area or if you spend a lot of time on the interstates and want network coverage for your laptops while you’re on the move, this is the plan for you. We call it the Stealth Plan because neither WalMart nor T-Mobile says much about it. It’s only available when you first sign up for service with your newly purchased T-Mobile SIM. Despite lots of chatter to the contrary, this plan is available (but unadvertised) by purchasing a 99¢ SIM directly from T-Mobile. Trust us. You’re only risking a buck. But, beware, if you ever switch to a different plan (or if you sign up for the wrong $30 plan originally… T-Mobile and WalMart both push a lousy plan that includes 1500 talk minutes with 30MB of data for the same $30), you can never go back to the good plan without purchasing another T-Mobile SIM. To activate your T-Mobile SIM once you have your T-Mobile phone in hand, go here. Remember. Make your initial selection carefully. To buy $30 refills, here’s the link.

Virgin Mobile (not quite) Unlimited Plan. If you have good Sprint coverage, would like to use an iPhone with or without tethering, and don’t mind data limits then the Virgin Mobile Plan isn’t too bad. $35 a month gets you 300 minutes, unlimited messaging, and 2.5GB of data. For $15 more, you get 3.5GB of data with tethering. $10 more gets you 1200 talk minutes a month while $20 more gets you unlimited talk. It’s been reported that the Virgin Mobile iPhone 4S will be available in Target stores for $500 with a free $100 Target gift card beginning at 9 p.m. on Nov. 22.

VoIP Desktop Phone of the Year


It was just a matter of time until someone produced a reasonably priced, rock-solid SIP desktop phone based upon Android. The combination provides the best of both worlds with SIP access to your favorite Asterisk® server or Incredible PBX for the Raspberry Pi plus Skype, Google Voice, Microsoft Lync, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Angry Birds without leaving your chair. Meet the $200 Grandstream GXP-2200. We got to spend some time with it at AstriCon 2012 a few weeks ago. With support for six lines, five-way conference calls, HD audio, Bluetooth, integrated PoE, and VPNs of many flavors, the GXP2200 takes top honors as our VoIP Desktop Phone of the Year. It’s still in limited supply but should be available everywhere soon.

Thanksgiving Update: Since we originally published this article, Grandstream has released a firmware update that resolved virtually all outstanding issues. The Google Play Store now is available which means many Android apps you previously have purchased can now be installed on the GXP2200 at no cost. Skype with incoming video now works well. There’s no outbound video because there is no camera built into the phone. Not sure whether a USB camera would solve that as we haven’t tested it (yet). GrooVe IP can be installed from the Play Store for plug-and-play Google Voice calling. That gives you the "VoIP Big Three" on a single desktop phone: SIP, Skype, and Google Voice. AsteriDex also can be used from the phone’s browser to provide click-to-dial calling with any SIP trunk you’ve set up on the phone. The PBX in a Flash RSS Security Feed can also be installed on the desktop of this phone. With the $5 IP Cam Viewer app, you can use your phone to monitor dozens of IP cameras in your organization or anywhere around the globe. In short, we can find nothing not to like about this phone! For up-to-the-minute news updates, visit the PIAF Forum.

Hosted VoIP Provider of the Year

We’re delighted that one of our corporate sponsors is the hands-down winner of Hosted VoIP Provider of the Year. With your choice of servers throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, not only is RentPBX’s service and support second to none, but their $14.99 a month pricing for cloud-based hosting of PBX in a Flash is in a league of its own. Be sure to use coupon code PIAF2012 for your first hosted PBX order to take advantage of this special pricing.

VoIP Computer of the Year

No surprise here. The $35 Raspberry Pi now with 512MB RAM takes top honors. Add a power supply, plug into your LAN, burn Incredible PBX 3.5 to an SD card, and boot to a near perfect (free) VoIP platform with Google Voice, SIP support, unlimited extensions with voicemail, IVR support, text-to-speech and speech-to-text functionality. Take our 35 apps for a spin, and you’ll agree the choice is a No Brainer. And this week you can add free fax support to the already incredible feature set. Review the Quick Start Guide and then the Fab 35 Apps Tutorial. Then finish off your adventure by Interconnecting Raspberry Pi devices in less than 5 minutes. If money is no object and you want one in two days, take a look at the Amazon ad in the right column which provides a good refresher in the law of supply and demand.

Our runner-up for best all-purpose VoIP computer remains the Foxconn NT535 Dual-Core Atom machine which is back on sale for $154.99 at Amazon today with free 2-day shipping with Amazon Prime. Details in our previous article.

VoIP Tablet of the Year

C|Net has done a great Roundup of the 7-Inchers. Jokes aside and absent special requirements, Google’s Nexus 7 is the clear winner. You get an open platform, easily rootable, state-of-the-art quad-core tablet running the latest version of Android. And it supports every VoIP requirement you can dream up: Google Voice, SIP, Skype, and VPN support. The 16MB version is available for $199 directly from Google, WalMart, or Staples. That’s over $100 less than the comparable, but inferior, iPad Mini. Because the iPad Mini lacks GPS support in the WiFi model, turn-by-turn navigation is out of the equation. At least for us, it is one of the major must-have features for any tablet device.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Originally published: Tuesday, November 13, 2012  



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. Some of our purchase links refer users to Amazon when we find their prices are competitive for the recommended products. Nerd Vittles receives a small referral fee from Amazon to help cover the costs of our blog. We never recommend particular products solely to generate Amazon commissions. However, when pricing is comparable or availability is favorable, we support Amazon because Amazon supports us. []

VoIP on Steroids: Introducing Incredible PBX 3.7 for the $35 Raspberry Pi

We feel like a kid in a candy store with our new $35 Raspberry Pi® Model B. Imagine squeezing a 700 mHz ARM processor with 512MB of RAM, 2 USB ports, a 10/100 Ethernet port, an HDMI port, composite video, a separate audio jack, an SDHC card slot, and a micro USB port onto a motherboard the size of a credit card with a total weight of 1.6 ounces and a typical power draw of 3.5 watts. Thanks to Gernot and his Asterisk for Raspberry Pi project, a full LAMP stack with Asterisk® and FreePBX® gave us a head start on turning the Raspberry Pi into yet another Incredible PBX™ platform complete with free Google Voice™ calling through 2013.1
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07/01/2019 NEWS FLASH: Just released Incredible PBX LITE for the Raspberry Pi 2, 3, and 4 featuring Raspbian 10 Buster. Tutorial here.

Trust us when we say the performance of this $35 computer is nothing short of amazing. Can it do everything a $200 dual-core Atom PC can do? No. Can it do 90% of everything for someone whose requirements do not exceed a few simultaneous calls at a time but still wants a full-blown PBX for call routing, voicemail, IVRs, music on hold, and text-to-speech and speech-to-text apps for a home, a SOHO office, a Little League team, or a dorm room? Absolutely. We’re now at the two-month mark with this project, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation already has released a 512MB version of the computer at the same price AND new firmware that autodetects the proper memory setup depending upon whether you have a 256MB or 512MB Pi. Version 3.5 and beyond incorporates the new firmware into Incredible PBX.

The honeymoon isn’t over yet. Incredible Pi™ 3.5 featured the very latest Debian 7 firmware specifically tailored for the Raspberry Pi™ from its developers. You can read all about it here. Is it better? Can you spell ROCKET SHIP? With a reliable power supply, you now can overclock the Raspberry Pi and join the 1GHz Club. That represents a 50% performance improvement. And doubling the RAM to 512MB now makes the Raspberry Pi a near perfect VoIP platform. Better yet, the Raspbian kernel handles management of the overclocking so you never have to confront Fried Raspberry Pi. When the CPU temperature gets too high, the kernel will throttle things back to avoid a disaster. And version 3.7 adds Incredible Fax to the platform for those with a 512MB Raspberry Pi. The complete tutorial is available here.

Eben Upton Visits Charleston. The developer of the Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton, and his lovely wife, Liz, made a brief appearance in Our Town last Thursday night. Makelab Charleston, in cooperation with the College of Charleston and the Lowcountry Graduate Center, hosted the event. With an SRO crowd, we all got to hear the Raspberry Pi story first hand. If you missed the presentation, you missed a real treat.

What’s New in Incredible PBX 3.x. For those of you already running a previous version, here’s a quick thumbnail of the other new features in addition to overclocking. We’ve tried to mimic as much of the previous builds as possible. But keep in mind that this is a new creation from the ground up because there was no migration path from Debian Squeeze and Wheezy to Raspbian. But we keep good notes, and Gernot did much of the heavy lifting. 😉

SECURITY ALERT: Incredible PBX 3.7 addresses a serious security flaw in prior versions of Asterisk. With the exception of the new Asterisk release incorporated into this release, the functionality is identical to Incredible PBX 3.6.

Incredible PBX 3.5 and beyond added automatic detection and support of 512MB Raspberry Pi devices without touching anything. And the latest version 3.7 adds an awesome fax server to Incredible PBX for those with a 512MB board. The complete tutorial is available here. update-my-pi in the /root folder of your server helps to safeguard your system by bringing it up to date with the latest fixes and enhancements. After running it the first time, it gets run automatically whenever you log in as root. For the safety of your server, don’t disable it! It’s free for the first ten updates, and then it’s just $20 a year. We have to eat, too. If you are philosophically opposed to ever spending a dime to support the open source movement, then feel free to load the latest version of Incredible PBX at no cost whenever you like. It will always be free! Then you can restore your settings using the backup and restore feature built into FreePBX.

To enable overclocking at your own risk, run: raspi-config. Overclocking works for us. YMMV! The key is a good power supply. If you’re using an SD card larger than 4GB, version 3.3 and beyond now can resize your partitions on the fly. Just choose the option in raspi-config and reboot. Even though the kernel now monitors CPU temperature and manages overclocking, it’s always nice to see for yourself. To monitor the CPU temperature, just run the status program which provides a current snapshot anytime. Temperature data now is provided on the FreePBX Dashboard as well.

There’s more good news. Networking is much more stable; however, we’ve dropped support for the TP-Link WiFi adapters. If you still have one of these, see the setup instructions in the PIAF Forum. Otherwise you’ll need the recommended AirLink 101 N-150 if you want WiFi capability. In the 3.3 release and beyond, your server will automatically attempt to connect to any open WiFi network that it can find. We’ve also added two scripts in /root to let you restart either your wired or wireless network and designate it as the primary network: restart-eth0 and restart-wlan0. Time zone management was also a bit of mess with multiple file settings required to support both Linux and PHP. In the 3.3 update and beyond, you’ll be prompted to select your timezone when you first log in as root. The setup script will automatically apply your entry in all the right places. We’ve also replaced SendMail with Exim to simplify the process of using an SMTP mail gateway such as Gmail. We’ve documented the procedure for making the change here.

As part of the 3.x migration, we’ve also eliminated the pi user account. Everything you need to do to configure Incredible PBX requires root permission. So goodbye sudo. Only the root user account is included, and the default password is raspberry. Change the password when you first log in. New SSH and DUNDI keys now are automatically generated when you first boot your server. The FreePBX Backup and Restore Utility is included in this new build. AsteriDex SpeedDials have been fixed. Enter 3-digit Dial Codes in AsteriDex, and you can call by dialing 00nnn. In the latest update, Telephone Reminders again work.

X Windows is included in this build. This won’t work with SSH. For a demo slideshow, plug in a real monitor and log in as root. In the /root folder, enter the command: startx. To end the slideshow, press ESCape. To disable the slideshow: mv .xinitrc xinitrc. To add photos, copy .jpg images into /root/slideshow. No mouse is required for the slideshow but, if you run X Windows natively, you’ll need a USB mouse. The SMS Blasting app in /root now supports phone numbers (which use SMS) and email addresses (which use SendMail).

Last but not least, a sophisticated Conference Bridge has been added to Incredible PBX 3.x releases. If you route one of your inbound DIDs to the predefined IVR, users can press 0 and enter 1234 for the conference PIN to join the conference. Local extensions simply dial C-O-N-F. We’ve already tested a 9-person conference call with excellent results. But don’t take our word for it. Try it for yourself. Just call our demo Raspberry Pi AutoAttendant and take the Conference Bridge and a handful of other Incredible PBX™ apps for a test drive:

And here’s what the conference call looked like in the FreePBX Dashboard:

So you don’t have to jump around between articles, we’ve put together this Quick Start Guide that tells you everything you need to know to get up and running in about an hour. Most of that time will be consumed copying the Incredible Pi image to an SD card. So there’s plenty of time for lunch during the hour. Once your system is running and you’ve completed the setup steps below, then jump over to the application tutorial which explains how to use every one of the 35 Incredible PBX Apps for the $35 Raspberry Pi.

What to Buy. Here’s everything you need to get started.2 The case is optional. Yes, you can run the Raspberry Pi sitting on your desk with no case. It’s only 5 volts. WiFi is also optional. There’s a 10/100 port on the Raspberry Pi that gives you all the networking you need. Here are the links to buy the pieces. You also need a CAT5 cable and either a spare PC or Mac with Putty or SSH and a pair of earbuds or an HDMI cable to connect to a TV or monitor and a USB keyboard.

Setting Up Google Voice. If you want free calling in the U.S. and Canada, then you’ll need a Google Voice account, and you’ll need one dedicated to Incredible Pi, or it won’t work. Log out after setting up the new Google Voice account!

  • Register for Google Voice account (no funky characters in your password!)
  • Enable Google Chat as Phone Destination
  • Configure Google Voice Calls Settings:
    • Call ScreeningOFF
    • Call PresentationOFF
    • Caller ID (In)Display Caller’s Number
    • Caller ID (Out)Don’t Change Anything
    • Do Not DisturbOFF
    • Call Options (Enable Recording)OFF
    • Global Spam FilteringON

  • Place test call in and out using GMail Call Phone

Baking Your Incredible Pi. The disk drive for the Raspberry Pi is an SD card. So what you need to do is download Incredible Pi and copy the image onto an SDHC card. Mac and Linux installers are included. For Windows, just use Win32 Disk Imager. Here are the steps:

  1. Download the Incredible Pi package
  2. Decompress the tarball: tar zxvf incrediblepi-version.tar.gz
  3. Copy .img file to SDHC using image utility or script
  4. Insert SDHC card into Raspberry Pi
  5. Boot the Raspberry Pi from Incredible Pi SDHC card

Your First Bite of Incredible Pi. If you’re not using a monitor and keyboard, you can use SSH to gain root access to Incredible Pi. And you can use any web browser on your private network to access your server. There are a couple of hurdles. First, you need the network address of your new server. And, second you need an SSH client. With Incredible PBX 3.3 and beyond, you needn’t worry about the IP address. You now can access your server via SSH by logging in like this: root@incrediblepbx.local. And browser access to your server is available at the following address: http://incrediblepbx.local. You still can plug in some earbuds when the bootup process begins and listen for the Incredible Pi to tell you its IP address when the boot procedure completes (about 90 seconds). Then you can use that IP address instead of incrediblepbx.local. The latest releases of Incredible PBX also include a Java-based SSH client in the FreePBX web GUI: Admin -> Java SSH.

Here’s everything you need to know about security for Incredible Pi:

1. ALWAYS RUN INCREDIBLE PI BEHIND A SECURE HARDWARE-BASED FIREWALL/ROUTER
2. NEVER EXPOSE ANY INCREDIBLE PI PORTS DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET
3. NEVER MAP INBOUND INTERNET PORTS FROM YOUR FIREWALL TO INCREDIBLE PI

Initial Setup. There also are a few setup steps to complete once your Incredible Pi finishes the bootup process. When you first login (username: root  password: raspberry), you’ll be prompted to change your root password and to set your default time zone. If you’re using either a wired network or an open WiFi network, then everything just works. If you’re using secured WiFi, then you’ll need to plug in your credentials in /etc/wpa.conf and reboot. The wired network always takes precedence so unplug the cable if you want WiFi to be your primary network. Next, run /root/update-my-pi to bring your server up to current specs. Finally, now’s the time to repartition your SD card if you’re using a card larger than 4GB. While you’re at it, bump up the performance of your Raspberry Pi by 50% by setting the overclocking to turbo mode. It works great for us. YMMV! The key is a rock-solid power adapter such as the one we’ve recommended. Just run raspi-config and follow your nose.

Accessing Incredible Pi By GUI. You don’t have to be a Linux guru to use Incredible Pi. In fact, we’re just about finished with the Linux command prompt, but stay logged in until we finish the steps below. Most of your configuration of the PBX will be performed using the FreePBX® Web GUI. You also can access SSH through the FreePBX interface.

If you’re new to Asterisk® and FreePBX, here’s the one paragraph primer on what needs to happen before you can make free calls with Google Voice. You’ll obviously need a free Google Voice account. This gets you a phone number for people to call you and a vehicle to place calls to plain old telephones throughout the U.S. and Canada at no cost. You’ll also need a softphone or SIP phone to actually place and receive calls. YATE makes a free softphone for PCs, Macs, and Linux machines so download your favorite and install it on your desktop. Phones connect to extensions in FreePBX to work with Incredible Pi. Extensions talk to trunks (like Google Voice) to make and receive calls. FreePBX uses outbound routes to direct outgoing calls from extensions to trunks, and FreePBX uses inbound routes to route incoming calls from trunks to extensions to make your phones ring. In a nutshell, that’s how a PBX works. There are lots of bells and whistles that you can explore down the road.

Let’s get started. Using a browser, enter the IP address of your server or just use incrediblepbx.local as the address. Choose FreePBX Administration. When prompted for a username and password, use admin for both. Here are the six steps you need to complete before making your first free call:

  1. Change FreePBX admin Password and Default Email
  2. Add Google Voice Account credentials
  3. Set Destination for Incoming Calls
  4. Change Extension 701 Passwords
  5. Eliminate Audio and DTMF Problems
  6. Install and Register a Softphone to Extension 701

1. Changing FreePBX admin Password and Default Email. From the main FreePBX GUI, click Admin => Administrators. Click on admin user in the far-right column. Enter a new Password and click Submit Changes button. Then click the Apply Config button. Next, set your default email address at the bottom of Settings -> General Settings. Repeat the procedure above to save your entry.

2. Activating a Google Voice Trunk. To create a Trunk in FreePBX to handle calls to and from Google Voice, you’ll need three pieces of information from the Google Voice account you set up above: the 10-digit Google Voice phone number, your Google Voice account name, and your Google Voice password. Choose Other -> Google Voice from the FreePBX GUI. The following blank form will appear:

Fill in the blanks with your information and check all 3 boxes. If your Google Voice account name ends in @gmail.com, you can leave that out. Otherwise, include the full email address. Then click Submit Changes and Apply Config.

There’s one more step or your Google Voice account won’t work reliably with Incredible Pi! From the Linux command prompt while logged into your server as root, restart Asterisk: amportal restart

3. Setting a Destination for Incoming Calls. Now that you’ve created your Google Voice Trunk, we need to tell FreePBX how to process inbound calls when someone dials your Google Voice number. There are any number of choices. You could simply ring an extension. Or you could ring multiple extensions by first creating a Ring Group which is just a list of extension numbers. Or you could direct incoming calls to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system (we’ve actually set one up for you to play with).

By default, Incredible Pi is configured to route all incoming calls to a demo IVR that shows off some of the applications that come with Incredible Pi. You can change whenever you like by choosing Connectivity -> Inbound Routes -> Default. In the Set Destination section of the form, change the target to Extensions and then select 701 from the list. Then click Submit and Apply Config.

4. Changing Extension Passwords. From the main FreePBX GUI, choose Applications -> Extensions. Then click on 701 in the Extension List on the right side of your display. You’ll see a form that looks like this:

For now, we only need to make a few changes. First, you need a very secure password for both the extension itself and your voicemail account for this extension. The extension secret needs to be a combination of letters and numbers. The Voicemail Password needs to be all numbers, preferably six or more. Replace the existing 1234secret and 1234 with your own (very secure) entries. You also need to lock down this extension so that it is only accessible from devices on your private LAN. You do that with the deny and permit entries which currently are filled with zeroes. Leave the deny entry the way it is which tells Incredible Pi to block everybody except those allowed in the permit entry below. For the permit, we need the first three octets of your private LAN address, e.g. if your LAN is 192.168.0.something then the permit entry will be 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0.

Finally, you need to plug in your actual email address in the Voicemail section so that voicemails can be delivered to you when someone leaves a message. You can also include a pager email address if you want a text message alert with incoming voicemails. If you want the voicemails to automatically be deleted from the server after they are emailed to you (a good idea considering the disk storage limitations of an SDHC card), change the Delete Voicemail option from No to Yes. That’s it. Now save your settings by clicking the Submit button. Then reload the dialplan by clicking on the red prompt when it appears.

In case you’re curious, unless you’ve chosen to automatically delete voicemails after emailing them, you can retrieve your voicemails by dialing *98701 from any extension on your phone system. You’ll be prompted to enter the voicemail password you set up. In addition to managing your voicemails, you’ll also be given the opportunity to either return the call to the number of the person that called or to transfer the voicemail to another extension’s voicemail box. And you can always leave a voicemail for someone by dialing their extension number preceded by an asterisk, e.g. *701 would let someone leave you a voicemail without actually calling you.

5. Eliminating Audio and DTMF Problems. You can avoid one-way audio on calls and touchtones that don’t work with these simple settings in FreePBX: Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. Just plug in your public IP address and your private IP subnet. Then set ULAW as the only Audio Codec.

6. Setting Up a Desktop Softphone. Incredible Pi supports all kinds of telephones, but we’ll start with the easy (free) one today. You can move on to "real phones" once you’re smitten with the VoIP bug. For today, you’ll need to download a softphone to your desktop PC or Mac.

As we mentioned, the easiest way to get started with Incredible Pi is to set up a YATE softphone on your Desktop computer. Versions are available at no cost for Macs, PCs, and Linux machines. Just download the appropriate one and install it from this link. Once installed, it’s a simple matter to plug in your extension 701 credentials and start making calls. Run the application and choose Settings -> Accounts and click the New button. Fill in the blanks using the IP address of Incredible Pi, 701 for your account name, and whatever password you created for the extension. Click OK.

Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place your first call. It’s that easy!

Monitoring Call Progress with Asterisk. That about covers the basics. We’ll leave you with a tip on how to monitor what’s happening with your PBX. There are several good tools within the FreePBX GUI. You’ll find them under the Reports tab. In addition, Asterisk has its own Command Line Interface (CLI) that is accessible from the Linux command prompt. Just execute the following command while logged in as root: asterisk -rvvvvvvvvvv.

Activating SAMBA for Windows Networking. SAMBA is included for transparent access using the Windows Networking Protocol from PCs, Macs, and other Linux machines. As delivered, SAMBA is deactivated. For obvious reasons, we recommend you never activate root login access to SAMBA without a very secure password. If you wish to enable SAMBA on your server, here are the steps while logged in as root:

  • 1. Set SAMBA password for user root: smbpasswd -a root
  • 2. Change Windows workgroup from WORKGROUP, if needed: nano -w /etc/samba/smb.conf
  • 3. Manually start SAMBA from command prompt: service samba start
  • 4. If desired, set SAMBA to start on boot: rcconf and activate SAMBA option

If you’d like to update your status application to display SAMBA status instead of WLan1, here are the steps:
cd /usr/local/sbin
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/sambastatus.tgz
tar zxvf sambastatus.tgz
rm sambastatus.tgz

Activating the PPTP VPN Client. If you’ve followed the Nerd Vittles tutorial and previously set up a PPTP VPN Server for your devices, then it’s pretty simple to add Incredible Pi to the mix by activating its PPTP VPN client. You’ll need the FQDN or public IP address of your VPN server as well as a username and password for VPN access to your VPN server. Once you have those in hand, log into Incredible Pi as root.

Lest we forget to mention, you cannot log into your PPTP server from an IP address on the same private LAN so you’d only use the PPTP VPN when your Incredible Pi is at a remote location.

Edit the connection template: nano -w /etc/ppp/peers/my-pptp-server. Insert the following text and replace myfqdn.org with the FQDN of your PPTP server, replace myname with your PPTP username, and replace mypassword with your PPTP password. Then save the file: Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter.

To test it, issue the following command: /etc/init.d/pptp start. When you run ifconfig, you should now see a ppp0 entry:

ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

Remember, it won’t show an IP address if the Raspberry Pi and your PPTP VPN Server are on the same subnet (like ours). Once you install your Raspberry Pi in a remote location, you now can access it at the first IP address in your reserved PPTP IP address pool.

To permanently activate the PPTP VPN client on your Incredible Pi server, run rcconf. Scroll to the bottom of the list and highlight pptp. Press the space bar to select it for automatic startup when you boot your server. Then tab to OK and press Enter.

Shutting Down Your Server. Last but not least, never just pull the plug when you want to shut down your server, or you may end up with corrupted MySQL databases. Then nothing will run. Instead, log into your server as root, and issue the following command: shutdown -h now. Enjoy!

3.7 Update: Activating Incredible Fax. With a 512MB Raspberry Pi, here are the 5 Simple Steps to activate Incredible Fax. The complete tutorial is available here.

  1. Download and Install Incredible PBX 3.7
  2. Run the /root/fax-enable Script to Automatically Configure HylaFax
  3. Using FreePBX, Add Additional, Dedicated DID and Inbound Route to Handle Incoming Faxes
  4. Install Any Desktop HylaFax Client to Send Faxes via Print-to-Fax using any PDF
  5. Reboot Your Server and Enjoy

Where To Go Next. Once you’ve done a little exploring, take a few minutes to read the complete tutorial on all 35 Incredible PBX applications for Raspberry Pi. A few require a bit of configuration before you start using them. And then you’ll want to explore Interconnecting Asterisk Servers with Incredible PBX and the Raspberry Pi. Enjoy!


Don’t forget to List Yourself in Directory Assistance so everyone can find you by dialing 411. And add your new number to the Do Not Call Registry to block telemarketing calls. Or just call 888-382-1222 from your new number.

Originally published: Tuesday, September 25, 2012  Updated: Sunday, October 21, 2012  Updated: Tuesday, November 27, 2012


Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! In fact, there is a thread dedicated to support of Incredible Pi. Please have a look and post your support questions there. Unlike some forums, ours is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus and thousands of ordinary users just like you. You won’t have to wait long for an answer to your question.

Bug Fixes. A few bugs are to be expected. If you’re using Incredible Pi, please review these on the PIAF Forum.


Astricon 2012. Astricon 2012 will be in Atlanta at the Sheraton beginning October 23 through October 25. We hope to see many of you there. We called Atlanta home for over 25 years so we’d love to show you around. Be sure to tug on my sleeve and mention you’d like a free PIAF Thumb Drive. We’ll have a bunch of them to pass out to our loyal supporters. Nerd Vittles readers also can save 20% on your registration by using coupon code: AC12VIT.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


whos.amung.us If you’re wondering what your fellow man is reading on Nerd Vittles these days, wonder no more. Visit our new whos.amung.us statistical web site and check out what’s happening. It’s a terrific resource both for us and for you.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. Google Voice calling is free throughout the United States and Canada at least through the end 0f 2012. Extensions typically have been announced during the last week of December each year… but nothing lasts forever. []
  2. Many of our purchase links refer users to Amazon when we find their prices are competitive for the recommended products. Nerd Vittles receives a small referral fee from Amazon to help cover the costs of our blog. We never recommend particular products solely to generate Amazon commissions. However, when pricing is comparable or availability is favorable, we support Amazon because Amazon supports us. []

What’s As Good As a $35 Raspberry Pi? How About 35 Free Incredible PBX Apps

We spent a lot of time building Incredible PBX™ for Raspberry Pi™. But, what many developers forget to do is to answer the question: What Can It Do? Today we’ll walk you through all 35 Incredible PBX applications that we’ve managed to squeeze onto the $35 Raspberry Pi. And, you don’t have to pick Raspberry Pi or Incredible Pi™. It’s $35 for the hardware AND this ginormous collection of free software. Our special thanks goes out to the dozens of developers that have spent years building all of these terrific applications. If you’re just getting started, you’ll want to begin by reviewing our Version 3.7 Quick Start Guide or the just released Version 3.11 Quick Start Guide.

Once you have Incredible PBX 3.7 or 3.11 installed and running, read on to learn what you can do with your new toy. Here’s a quick thumbnail. In addition to free Google Voice calling in the U.S. and Canada, Incredible Pi supports 5+ simultaneous calls which is more than ample for most homes and small businesses. And you get virtually everything that a full-blown PBX offers: voicemail, music on hold, call forwarding and follow-me, IVRs and AutoAttendants, call blacklists, and even a preconfigured, rock-solid Linux firewall with IP address whitelisting. But, what separates Incredible PBX from the pack is its 35 bundled, preconfigured applications. You’d be hard pressed to add them to any commercial PBX without also giving them your new car. So, from A to Z, meet the Incredible PBX “Fab 35” for the $35 Raspberry Pi

Call our demo Raspberry Pi (1-843-284-6844) and take it for a spin to judge the quality for yourself.

1. AsteriDex. A MySQL-based address book that can be managed inside the FreePBX® GUI: Other -> AsteriDex. Can be used for CallerID lookups with CallerID Superfecta, e.g. unpublished cell phone numbers of your friends. Can be used for Speed Dials by embedding 3-digit Dial Codes in each entry. Dial 00 + 3 digits to connect. Use 000 with Incredible PBX 3.11. Can be used for Speech-to-Text Calling by Name. Dial 411, say the name of an entry in your AsteriDex database, and press pound (#). Or access AsteriDex with a browser and click on any entry to place a call after designating an extension on your system to handle calls placed with AsteriDex. Click-to-Dial Bug Fix for 3.3 here. No patch required with 3.5 or later releases.

2. Asterisk Info. Accessible in FreePBX GUI: Reports -> Asterisk Info. Displays Asterisk® SIP, IAX, and Google Voice/Jabber Connections, Registrations, Active Channels, Peers, and much more.

3. Blacklist. Block Annoying Callers, Ex-Spouses, and Anonymous Callers by simply entering the numbers to block and checking the Block Anonymous box. Accessible in FreePBX GUI: Admin -> Blacklist.

4. CallerID Superfecta. Open-source app that provides CallerID name lookups from dozens of sources. Accessible in FreePBX GUI: Other -> CID Superfecta. Choose Default setup. Then choose the desired lookup sources. Select the order of the lookups. First hit wins. Also includes testing facility to assist in choosing quickest and best lookup sources.

5. CallWho. Speech-to-Text Dialing in conjunction with AsteriDex database. Dial 411 and say the name of the person or company to call. Press pound (#). Looks up names by firstname, lastname AND lastname, firstname. For certain names like Katherine, you may need to add duplicate AsteriDex entry for Catherine since CallWho uses soundex codes for lookups. Watch Asterisk CLI to see what CallWho thinks you said. Then make appropriate additions to AsteriDex.

6. CDR Reports. Call Detail Reports of various flavors to show incoming and outgoing calls from Incredible PBX. Accessible in FreePBX GUI: Reports -> CDR Reports. Includes Boolean searches, call graphs, and CSV data exports.

7. Config Edit. A web-based editor to manage Asterisk configuration files that are "safe" to edit and won’t be overwritten by FreePBX reloads. You still need to be very careful. Accessible in FreePBX GUI: Other -> Config Edit.

8. Email and TTS Announcements of IP Addresses. For those lacking a monitor, you now can totally manage Incredible Pi using a web browser from any PC or Mac. But, to access Incredible Pi via SSH (#16 below), you’ll need to know the DHCP-assigned IP address. We provide two ways to obtain it. First, you can plug in a set of earbuds when you boot Incredible Pi, and the system will tell you its IP address at the end of the boot process. With version 3.x, you can carefully edit1 /etc/init.d/freepbx and uncomment line 70 after inserting your actual email address.

There’s another little trick you might want to try. Beginning with the 3.x releases, you can take advantage of Bonjour to access your server via SSH using root@incrediblepbx.local. It also works with a browser to access the FreePBX GUI: http://incrediblepbx.local. So you no longer need an IP address to gain access.

9. Feature Codes. Incredible Pi includes an expandable and tailorable list of Feature Codes that can be used from phones connected as extensions on your system. The 50 predefined Feature Codes are accessible in the FreePBX GUI: Admin -> Feature Codes. Here’s the default list:

10. Follow Me and VmX Locater™. Two very sophisticated FreePBX call forwarding applications that provide enormous flexibility in determining how incoming calls to various extensions should be routed. It is accessible in the FreePBX GUI: Applications -> Follow Me and also through the ARI interface on the web page at the IP address of your server. Here’s a link to the complete tutorial.

11. Gmail SMTP Relay. If your ISP blocks downstream mail servers, it means your server won’t be able to send email messages directly to recipients. Not to worry! Just run the /root/use-gmail-smtp-relay script to reconfigure SendMail to use any Gmail account as an SMTP relay host. Thank you, Comcast!

12. Google News by Phone. Need a quick news update? Pick up any phone on your system and dial 951. Or you can offer it to callers by leaving nv-ivr as the default inbound route for your Google Voice trunks. Choose 1 from IVR menu.

13. Google Stocks by Phone. Keep up with your favorite stocks. Dial 950 and say the name of the company you’d like to track. For best results, use phonetic words for the stock symbol letters. For example, Apple would be Alpha, Alpha, Papa, Lima. Also works from the IVR menu. Just press 3.

14.Hotel-Style Wakeup Calls. Works exactly like the wakeup calls in your favorite hotel. Pick up any phone on your system and dial *68. Includes snooze. Configuration available through FreePBX GUI: Other -> Wake Up Calls to let you schedule wake up calls for others using designated extensions.

15. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System. A full-featured, menu-driven IVR editor is included in FreePBX: Applications -> IVR. We’ve included a sample to get you started. Just click on nv-ivr to display its settings. You can delete and add options to your IVRs in seconds. The sound file that you play to introduce your IVR need not include all the available choices. We call this a Stealth AutoAttendant because callers need not know that an IVR is even available. Here’s how we’ve actually reconfigured the demo IVR that you can reach by dialing 1-843-284-6844. You’ll note that some of the IVR selections have been removed, and a 0 option has been added to access the new Conference Bridge in version 3.3 and beyond.

16. JAVA SSH Web Client. No external SSH app is required to access your server. You can log into your Incredible PBX 3.7 server via SSH from within the FreePBX GUI: Admin -> Java SSH. Disregard the maint login instructions. That’s for PBX in a Flash servers.

17. Music on Hold Management. You can easily manage your Music on Hold collection within the FreePBX GUI: Settings -> Music on Hold. MP3 files are not recommended on the Raspberry Pi because of performance issues. So use WAV files with Sample Rate: 8 KHz, Bit Depth: 8 bits, and Channels: 1. Here’s how to convert any MP3 file to WAV for use with Asterisk: sox sample.mp3 -c 1 -r 8000 sample.wav.

18. phpMyAdmin. Manage all of your MySQL databases from within the FreePBX GUI: Other -> phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin is one of the best database management tools in the business.

19. PPTP Virtual Private Networking. Quickly enable the PPTP VPN client on Incredible Pi to securely access all of the resources on any existing PPTP VPN. To set up a PPTP VPN, read the Nerd Vittles tutorial. To enable the Incredible Pi PPTP VPN client, edit /etc/ppp/peers/my-pptp-server and insert your credentials. Run rcconf as root and activate pptp and pppd-dns. Then reboot.

20. Reminder Scheduling by Phone or Web. Telephone Reminders are awesome even if we did write it. To schedule a reminder or recurring reminder, pick up any phone and dial 123. You can also schedule and manage reminders within the FreePBX GUI: Other -> Reminders. A password can be added by uncommenting the 123,n,Authenticate line and changing the default entry in /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf. Bug Fix for 3.3 here. No patch required with 3.7.

21. Ring Groups. Ring Groups allow you to Ring a Group of extensions by dialing a certain number. You also can specify a Destination when nobody answers, e.g. an IVR or a voicemail account. Add, Delete, and Manage Ring Group entries within the FreePBX GUI: Applications -> Ring Groups.

22. SAMBA Windows Networking. If you’re a Microsoft Windows fan and use Windows Networking, it’s easy to add Incredible Pi as a note on your network. While logged into your server as root, set up a SAMBA password for user root: smbpasswd -a root. Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and set the appropriate Windows workgroup. Run rcconf as root and activate samba. Then reboot.

23. SMS Dictator. Pick up any phone and dial 767 (S-M-S). Dictate an SMS message to deliver. When prompted, say the name of someone in your AsteriDex database whose phone number has SMS capability. Before this will work, edit /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf and add your Google Voice credentials (GVACCT and GVPASS) in ext. 767.

24. SMS Message Blasting. Send out SMS messages to a group of individuals with this handy script. Log into your server as root. Edit /root/smsmsg.txt and insert the SMS message you wish to send. Edit /root/smslist.txt and add either phone numbers or email addresses with (optional) names of the recipients. Run the script to send the messages via SMS for phone numbers or via SendMail for email entries: /root/smsblast.

25. Speed Dial with AsteriDex (00+). Assign a 3-digit Dial Code in AsteriDex for each of your contacts, e.g. the telephone keypad numbers matching the first three letters in a contact’s name like 263 for American Airlines. Then, to call that contact with Speed Dial, dial 00263 using any phone.

26. Stealth AutoAttendant. Create a generic recording to thank callers for contacting you: Admin -> System Recordings. Or just use our generic welcoming message: nv-GenericWelcome. Create an IVR using one of these recordings as your Announcement message. Create an IVR menu of features on your PBX that you want to enable for "those in the know." Make this IVR the Inbound Route destination for one or more of your Trunks.

27. Status Reporting for FreePBX. Within the FreePBX GUI, you can get a real-time display of how your server is functioning: Reports -> FreePBX System Status.

28. Status Reporting for Incredible PBX. Whenever you log into your server, you’ll get a status snapshot of how your server is functioning. You also can run it at any time with the command: status. Check it regularly. Clean out your mail often by typing: mail. Check the size of your log files: ls -all /var/log. And be alert to low memory or disk conditions. Memory can usually be restored to sane levels by clearing the cache: /root/clear-cache.

29. System Recordings. FreePBX includes a facility to create recordings and integrate them into the FreePBX GUI: Admin -> System Recordings. You can either import a recording or create a new one by selecting an extension on your system and then by dialing *77 from that extension.

30. Time of Day. We’ve added a Time of Day feature that mimics the old Ma Bell system. From the default IVR, choose option 4. You can integrate this into your IVRs by adding Custom Destination -> Time as an IVR option.

31. Travelin’ Man 3 WhiteLists. We strongly recommend that you always run Incredible PBX behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet port exposure to your server. But, for those with telephones at remote sites, we appreciate that sometimes this isn’t always possible. So your server includes a preconfigured Linux firewall, iptables, that is preconfigured to block access except for private (non-routable) networks and trusted VoIP providers. You can add additional safe IP addresses and FQDNs using the Travelin’ Man 3 tools included in the /root directory. Before using any of these tools, please read the Travelin’ Man 3 tutorial.

32. Voicemail Delivery by Phone or Email. FreePBX includes all of the necessary tools to let you manage voicemail on your server. For each FreePBX extension, you can determine whether to enable voicemail and specify notification options as well as how the voicemails can be retrieved, either by phone (*98), email, or text message. You can also specify whether incoming voicemails should be deleted after sending them to an email address. You obviously would want to test this throughly before implementing it to make certain the voicemails arrive reliably.

33. Weather by Zip Code (NOAA). Get the latest weather forecast for almost any zip code in the United States courtesy of the National Weather Service. Dial 947 (Z-I-P) and key in the 5-digit zip code desired.

34. Worldwide Weather by Phone (Weather Underground). You’ll need a free Weather Underground API key to use this one. Once you have it, insert it on line 21 of nv-weather-wunderground.php in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin. Now you can get what we think are the best worldwide weather forecasts in the business. Dial 949 and say the name of the city and state or, for worldwide weather forecasts, say the name of the city and country.

35. Worldwide Weather by Phone (Yahoo). Get the latest weather forecast for almost any city in the world. Dial 948 and say the name of the city and state or, for worldwide weather forecasts, say the name of the city and country. Also works from the IVR menu. Just press 2.

36. BONUS: Conference Bridge. If you’ve installed version 3.3 or later, there’s an awesome bonus application, a full-featured Conference Bridge. We’ve tested it with up to 9 callers chatting away. If you have the Internet bandwidth (100K per caller) to support it, you’re in for quite a treat. Just point a trunk at nv-ivr and tell callers to call the number and press zero to join the conference. Then enter 1234 when prompted for the conference PIN. For phones connected directly to Incredible PBX, just dial C-O-N-F to join the conference. Complete details are available in the 3.7 Quick Start Guide.

37. BONUS 3.2 App: SysInfo. The popular SysInfo application has been added in FreePBX Reports.

38. BONUS 3.2 App: Bluetooth Proximity Detection. The modules and code required to support Bluetooth Proximity Detection and forward your calls to your cell when you’re away has been added. Read the documentation. Insert your credentials in /etc/proximity. Then activate the proximity monitor by uncommenting the command in /etc/crontab.

39. Interconnecting Asterisk Servers with Incredible PBX and the Raspberry Pi.

40. Incredible Fax for 512MB Raspberry Pi. The complete tutorial is available here.

41. Just Released: Incredible PBX 3.11. Complete tutorial available here.

Whew. Enjoy!

Originally published: Monday, September 17, 2012


Astricon 2012. Astricon 2012 will be in Atlanta at the Sheraton beginning October 23 through October 25. We hope to see many of you there. We called Atlanta home for over 25 years so we’d love to show you around. Be sure to tug on my sleeve and mention you’d like a free PIAF Thumb Drive. We’ll have a bunch of them to pass out to our loyal supporters. Nerd Vittles readers also can save 20% on your registration by using coupon code: AC12VIT.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


whos.amung.us If you’re wondering what your fellow man is reading on Nerd Vittles these days, wonder no more. Visit our new whos.amung.us statistical web site and check out what’s happening. It’s a terrific resource both for us and for you.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

  1. To configure some of the Incredible PBX apps, you are instructed to edit a specific config file. Some of these files are not accessible using Config Edit. This is our shorthand way of saying: (1) log into your server via SSH as root using your root password and (2) edit the specified file using a text editor, e.g. nano -w filename and (3) save your changes to the file: Ctrl-X, Y, then Enter and (4) logout of your server. []

AstriCon 2012: Digium at the Crossroads

We’ve just returned from AstriCon 2012 in Atlanta. What a show! Not only were the exhibits plentiful and eye-opening for the breadth of coverage that Asterisk® has garnered, but the dozens of sessions on virtually every facet of Asterisk were first-class. If you haven’t been, I would encourage you to clear your calendar for a few days next October. Mark Spencer was a proud papa as, indeed, he should be.

There’s been a good bit of turnover at Digium® in the past year, and it was great to finally put names with faces. The new blood is a welcome addition. To a person, they were professional, personable, and all about making Asterisk a better product. They fully appreciate that Asterisk’s future success hinges on broader community participation. David Duffett became the Community Director last June and wasted little time mending fences. Not only did he reach out to those of us that package Asterisk distributions (PBX in a Flash, Elastix, and FreePBX® Distro to name a few), but he also put together the first (ever) face-to-face meeting between the distribution players and the Asterisk developers. It was time well spent and provided all of us a better appreciation for the challenges in managing a project as complex as Asterisk. Matt Jordan, who now heads up the open source development group, has broad experience from the commercial sector, and it showed. It was crystal clear that the days of the core development train wrecks that blew everyone’s Asterisk dialplans out of the water were little more than a historical footnote.

While there is a core development team that extends beyond Digium, make no mistake. Where Digium goes, so goes Asterisk. When you peel away the management, marketing, and support layers at Digium, what struck me was how thin these folks really are spread. While there are upwards of 100 employees at Digium, the staff is fairly evenly split between two organizational units, Asterisk and Switchvox. The staff is also divided geographically with the Switchvox team still operating out of California while the Digium headquarters remains in Huntsville, Alabama. Our educated guess is about 10% of that staff is actually dedicated to software development. You may recall driving down the highway and seeing a road construction crew of 10 people where only one guy had a shovel. Digium clearly isn’t that model. Management, sales, and support really matter in the software and hardware development business. It’s the way every successful technology business operates… if you want to survive. Infrastructure matters! Insofar as Asterisk is concerned, it reinforces the critical necessity of focus and prioritizing objectives.

With that in mind, Digium has made what we believe was a wise decision in scrapping the Asterisk SCF project. You may recall this was the engineering effort to build a fully-redundant Asterisk platform so that, when one server failed, another took over without missing a beat. Out of a million Asterisk production servers, the question becomes how many sites really need this level of redundancy if a spare server is sitting in the rack. Suffice it to say, SCF was consuming enormous programming resources for a project with must-have appeal to an infinitesimally small segment of Asterisk’s installed base. The good news is that it frees more programmers to work directly on Asterisk 11 and 12 while bringing some of the SCF technology into the main Asterisk project. Think SIP!

And, speaking of Asterisk 11 and 12, Asterisk 11 is officially on the street. As with Asterisk 1.8, it’s another release with long-term support. The good news for us is that Jingle, Jabber, and Gtalk have been reworked into a new, integrated channel driver: chan_motif. And it works! Full support for Google Voice in FreePBX will be available very, very soon. In fact, Andrew Nagy had it humming along while we were at AstriCon.

More good news from AstriCon 2012 was the arrival of Digium’s Application Development Toolkit for Digium Phones. As promised, this new firmware lets developers build customized JavaScript applications to run on the Digium Phones themselves. Digium has even built several samples to get everyone started. We were lucky enough to snag one of the new phones during the random drawing so we’ll build you a couple of additional apps in coming weeks just for fun.

Last, but not least, on the hardware front… Raspberry Pi’s were everywhere. The recent addition of a 512MB Raspberry Pi at the same $35 price point is going to make this device a real contender in the SOHO Asterisk market. We actually had ours running with a Verizon MiFi device during the show. You could make calls, play an IVR, and get a weather report in the basement of a hotel in downtown Atlanta. Impressive! So get yours ordered and come join the party.

Finally, a word about the AstriCon audience. It looked to us to be a crowd of close to 1,000 people. We spoke to dozens and dozens of in-house developers both from large corporations as well as Asterisk support organizations that maintain thousands of Asterisk servers throughout the world. We were impressed by the scope and sheer magnitude of this untapped expertise with a treasure trove of Asterisk code. If it were somehow made available to the community, it instantly could propel Asterisk to the next plateau without Digium having to lift a finger. Now all we need to do is figure out how to harness that talent pool and their code for the benefit of everyone that depends upon Asterisk to meet their communications needs. Happy Halloween!

Originally published: Wednesday, October 31, 2012  



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


whos.amung.us If you’re wondering what your fellow man is reading on Nerd Vittles these days, wonder no more. Visit our new whos.amung.us statistical web site and check out what’s happening. It’s a terrific resource both for us and for you.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

Practicing Safe SIP: Adding SIP URI Connectivity with a Zero Internet Footprint

PBX in a Flash™ has a long (safe) history in the VoIP community, and the major reason is that we constantly preach never directly exposing any ports on your Asterisk® server to the Internet without implementing a WhiteList of safe IP addresses. This Zero Internet Footprint™ design keeps everybody out except a trusted, defined group on your WhiteList. For everyone else, they never see your server. So how do you receive calls? You do it with phone numbers (DIDs) tied to registered Google Voice, SIP, and IAX trunks from reputable providers. Because these trunks have constant registrations with safe service providers on the Internet, calls to these DIDs can flow in and out of your server without exposing your server directly to the Internet.

The drawback of this design is that it rules out inbound SIP URI calls to your server, and these calls typically are free. If you do a lot of international business or have family in far away places, that matters. Using a SIP proxy with Asterisk means anybody with a SIP telephone or a SIP-enabled web app anywhere in the world can punch in a SIP URI such as 1234567@nerdvittles.com, and your phones start ringing.

Practice Safe SIP! Today we’ll show you how easy it is to set up a hybrid SIP URI facility for your server while totally preserving your server’s Zero Internet Footprint. It’s not quite free, but it’s close. If paying 6¢ an hour for incoming calls is too rich for your blood, then stop reading now. For us, it’s a small price to pay to sleep well and avoid a $100,000 phone bill because someone hacked your server through an anonymous SIP attack in the middle of the night. There’s more good news. You may not even be charged the 6¢ an hour tariff.

How It Works. Today’s design works like this. We’ll set up an account with VoIP.ms and then create a standard SIP subaccount. As part of that setup, you can create a random extension on their server and tie that extension to a SIP URI for your subaccount. On our server, we’ll create a new SIP trunk and register to the voip.ms SIP subaccount we just created. This gets us a safe tunnel to make and receive calls using this trunk OR the SIP URI we just created. With this 2-layer SIP design, we’re basically using voip.ms as our anonymous SIP firewall. They get to worry about anonymous SIP attacks, and we pay them 6¢ an hour for inbound SIP URI calls that they pass along and we choose to answer.

There are also some collateral benefits using the hybrid SIP URI approach. First, it means that, instead of paying $1 a month and a penny a minute for calls using an actual DID from voip.ms, you now can take advantage of IPkall’s free DIDs in Washington state. By signing up for one of these, you now have a regular phone number that people can call to reach your server without your having to pay a monthly fee for the DID. In this cellphone era, it doesn’t much matter what the area code of your number happens to be since nationwide cellphone calls are all priced the same. The only cost to you is 6¢ an hour for the inbound calls. Oddly enough, VoIP.ms hasn’t been charging for the calls at least during the last couple weeks of our testing. Don’t count on it forever, but it is good to see they are at least considering a different pricing structure for SIP URI calls.

There’s a security advantage with hybrid SIP URIs as well. By never activating auto-replenishment on a VoIP provider account, your maximum financial exposure if something goes horribly wrong is limited to the prepay balance in your account. Finally, for those that want multiple SIP URIs and multiple DIDs, nothing precludes your repeating this drill. Just add another subaccount to your voip.ms account. So let’s get started.

VoIP.ms Setup. Register for a new account at VoIP.ms if you don’t already have one. This gets you an account with an account number such as 1234567. Don’t ever use your main account. Instead, create a subaccount:

Create a username for this subaccount. It will be your account number, an underscore, and a name of your choosing (up to 12 characters). Make up a very secure password. These are the two pieces you will need to create a SIP trunk on your server so write them down. Leave CallerID Number blank. We can handle that on your Asterisk server. Be sure to select Asterisk for the Device Type. The remaining entries at the top of the form are self-explanatory. Just make your settings match ours.

The bottom section of the form needs to be filled out to create a SIP URI. Make up an extension number for this subaccount, 1010 in our example. Ignore the leading 10 which is only used to make calls between voip.ms subaccounts. This would mean your SIP URI for this subaccount is 12345671010@atlanta.voip.ms where 1234567 is your account number, 1010 is your extension, and atlanta.voip.ms is one of the voip.ms POPs. For the list of available POPs, go to Main Menu -> Account Settings -> Default DID Routing in your Customer Portal. Click Create Account when you’re finished and wait a minute for your settings to propagate to all of the voip.ms servers.

FreePBX 2.10 Setup. Using a web browser, log into FreePBX® on your server. We’ll need to create three items to get everything working. First, we’ll add a new SIP trunk with your voip.ms credentials. Second, we’ll add an Inbound Route to process incoming calls. Third, we’ll add an Outbound Route so that you can make calls using your voip.ms trunk.

  1. Connectivity -> Trunks -> Add SIP Trunk
  2. Connectivity -> Inbound Routes -> Add Incoming Route
  3. Connectivity -> Outbound Routes -> Add Route

Adding VoIP.ms SIP Trunk. While logged into FreePBX 2.10, choose Connectivity -> Trunks -> Add SIP Trunk. Fill out the form like this using your correct subacctname, subacctpassword, desired VoIP.ms host, and whatever 10-digit number you’d like your server to use to identify inbound calls from this VoIP.ms subaccount (12345671010 in the example below). If you plan to use this trunk for outbound calls, enter a CallerID number. Legally, it must be a number that you own, i.e. don’t use the White House number or you may get a call you don’t want. Also be aware that for outbound calls, VoIP.ms rejects 10-digit numbers so you must prepend a 1 to 10-digit calls destined for the U.S. and Canada.

  1. Trunk Name: VoIPms
  2. Outbound Caller ID: any number you own
  3. Dial Pattern: Prepend: 1  Match Pattern: NXXNXXXXXX
  4. Trunk Name: voipms
  5. Trunk Details:
    • canreinvite=nonat
    • nat=yes
    • context=from-trunk
    • host=atlanta.voip.ms
    • secret=yourpassword
    • type=friend
    • username=1234567_subacctname
    • disallow=all
    • allow=ulaw
    • fromuser=1234567_subacctname
    • trustrpid=yes
    • sendrpid=yes
    • insecure=port,invite
    • qualify=yes
  6. Register String: 1234567_subacctname:yourpassword@atlanta.voip.ms/12345671010

Finally, in Settings:SIP Settings, add the following entry at the bottom in the Other SIP Settings field: match_auth_username=yes. Save your changes and reload your dialplan when prompted.

Adding VoIP.ms Inbound Route. While logged into FreePBX 2.10, choose Connectivity -> Inbound Routes -> Add Incoming Route. The only trick to this is the DID Number you enter must match the 10-digit number you chose for the end of the SIP registration string in the last step. The numbers really don’t matter, but they must match because this is what FreePBX uses to identify calls as originating from this SIP Trunk. You use the Inbound Route to tell FreePBX how to route the incoming calls once they hit your PBX. For example, you could ring an extension, a ring group, or route the call to an IVR where the caller was given a list of choices from which to pick their own call routing option. Don’t put your CallerID Number in here or only calls from your number would be accepted! Here’s a typical setup to route the calls to an IVR. Leave the other options at their defaults.

  1. Description: VoIPms
  2. DID Number: 12345671010
  3. CallerID Number: leave blank
  4. CID Source: Caller ID Superfecta
  5. Destination:
    • IVR: nv-ivr

Adding VoIP.ms Outbound Route. How you set up the Outbound Route to handle outgoing calls depends upon what you already have in place. Unless you don’t already have outbound trunks on your PBX, our recommendation is to add a prefix to force certain calls to go out through your VoIP.ms trunk. For example, a caller might dial 9-1-404-555-1212 or 9-404-555-1212 to force the call out through VoIP.ms. We’ll strip off the 9 before passing the number to VoIP.ms, and our Trunk setup will take care of adding the 1 if only 10-digits are dialed. Here’s how to set that up. While logged into FreePBX 2.10, choose Connectivity -> Outbound Routes -> Add Route.

  1. Route Name: VoIPms
  2. Dial Pattern: Prefix: 9  Match Pattern: NXXNXXXXXX
  3. Trunk Sequence: 0 VoIPms

If you have a default Outbound Route that already uses another Trunk such as Google Voice or Vitelity, then you can add a little redundancy to your system by adding VoIPms as an additional option at the end of the Default Trunk Sequence. Then, if the primary outbound route is out of service, the calls will automatically be routed out through VoIP.ms.

Adding an IPkall DID for Your SIP URI. We’ve now completed all the steps necessary to receive incoming SIP URI calls using our example VoIP.ms SIP URI: 12345671010@atlanta.voip.ms. Anyone in the world can dial that SIP URI from a SIP phone, and the calls will be answered by our sample IVR, nv-ivr. But suppose we’d also like folks to be able to pick up a Plain Old Telephone and call us using VoIP.ms to route the incoming call through our SIP URI at the 6¢ per hour calling rate. Here’s the easy way to do it. Just sign up for a free DID at www.ipkall.com. After choosing an area code for your free number, you’ll be prompted for the following information. Here’s what you’d enter using today’s example:

  • SIP Phone Number: 12345671010
  • SIP Proxy: atlanta.voip.ms
  • Email Address: your-email-address
  • Password: some-password-to-get-back-into-your-account

Once you’ve completed the form, submit it and wait for your new phone number to be delivered in your email. You should get it within a couple minutes so check your spam folder if you don’t see it. Congratulations! You’ve done everything you need to do for anyone to call you using either your SIP URI or your new DID number from IPkall.

It’s worth noting that IPkall recycles DIDs that aren’t used for 30 days. If you use Incredible PBX, the easiest way to assure that you don’t lose your number is to set up a recurring Telephone Reminder that calls your own number once a week.

Free iNum DID. There’s another important benefit from signing up for a VoIP.ms account. You’re also eligible for a free iNum DID. This lets people around the world call you by dialing a local number in most countries. And iNum calls are always free with Google Voice. You can read all about how it works and how to set up your free iNum DID in this Nerd Vittles article.

Test Drive. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. So we invite you to take our SIP URI, iNum DID, and IPkall DID for a test drive. They’re all running on a $35 Raspberry Pi with Incredible PBX 3.3 with its Applications AutoAttendant. You can try a news, weather, or stock report as well as checking the current East Coast time. Or you can try a text-to-speech call from the AsteriDex phone book by choosing option 5 and saying one of the airlines in the default install, e.g. American Airlines. Enjoy!

  • SIP URI: 10159521010@raspi.mundy.org
  • iNum DID: 883510009901997
  • IPkall DID: 1-425-998-2778
  • GVoice DID: 1-843-284-6844

Don’t forget to List Yourself in Directory Assistance so everyone can find you by dialing 411. And add your new number to the Do Not Call Registry to block telemarketing calls. Or just call 888-382-1222 from your new number.

Originally published: Thursday, 10/11/12


Astricon 2012. Astricon 2012 will be in Atlanta at the Sheraton beginning October 23 through October 25. We hope to see many of you there. We called Atlanta home for over 25 years so we’d love to show you around. Be sure to tug on my sleeve and mention you’d like a free PIAF Thumb Drive. We’ll have a bunch of them to pass out to our loyal supporters. Nerd Vittles readers also can save 20% on your registration by using coupon code: AC12VIT.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


whos.amung.us If you’re wondering what your fellow man is reading on Nerd Vittles these days, wonder no more. Visit our new whos.amung.us statistical web site and check out what’s happening. It’s a terrific resource both for us and for you.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

Time to Celebrate: Incredible PBX for Raspberry Pi Turns 21

If you had asked us a year ago whether it was possible to run a full-featured PBX on a computer the size of a credit card, we would have laughed and told you to move along. Well, that was then. In the last 21 days, we’ve not only gotten through the proof-of-concept phase of porting Incredible PBX to the Raspberry Pi but, thanks to a lot of hard work from Gernot and his Asterisk® for Raspberry Pi™ project, we now have an incredibly powerful PBX alternative for home and SOHO users with free calling in the U.S. and Canada and a price tag of $50 with the hardware. To celebrate the 21st birthday of Incredible PBX for the Raspberry Pi (that’s days not years), today we introduce two very refined editions of Incredible Pi for both the Debian 6 "Squeeze" and Debian 7 "Wheezy" platforms. For the pioneers, there’s version 2.0 with Wheezy. For those that like stable, we’ve got 1.7 on Squeeze. The feature set is identical. And you can’t beat the price. They’re both FREE!

Call our Raspberry Pi (1-843-284-6844) and check out the Incredible Pi Smörgåsbord for yourself.

New Incredible Pi Tutorials: 35 Free Incredible PBX Apps for the $35 Raspberry Pi and Version 3.1 Quick Start Guide

We’ve written some very detailed documentation for Incredible Pi, and you can read it at your leisure. Today, we wanted to put together an abbreviated tutorial for those that just want to get a barebones system up and running in about an hour. Most of that time will be consumed copying the Incredible Pi image to an SD card. So there’s plenty of time for lunch during the hour. If you prefer detail, then have at it. For everyone else, keep reading.

What to Buy. Here’s everything you need to get started. The case is optional. Yes, you can run the Raspberry Pi sitting on your desk with no case. It’s only 5 volts. WiFi is also optional. There’s a 10/100 port on the Raspberry Pi that gives you all the networking you need. Here are the links to buy the pieces. You also need a CAT5 cable and either a spare PC or Mac with Putty or SSH and a pair of earbuds or an HDMI cable to connect to a TV or monitor and a USB keyboard.

Setting Up Google Voice. If you want free calling in the U.S. and Canada, then you’ll need a Google Voice account, and you’ll need one dedicated to Incredible Pi, or it won’t work. Log out after setting up the new Google Voice account!

  • Register for Google Voice account (no funky characters in your password!)
  • Enable Google Chat as Phone Destination
  • Configure Google Voice Calls Settings:
    • Call ScreeningOFF
    • Call PresentationOFF
    • Caller ID (In)Display Caller’s Number
    • Caller ID (Out)Don’t Change Anything
    • Do Not DisturbOFF
    • Call Options (Enable Recording)OFF
    • Global Spam FilteringON

  • Place test call in and out using GMail Call Phone

Baking Your Incredible Pi. The disk drive for the Raspberry Pi is an SD card. So what you need to do is download Incredible Pi and copy the image onto an SDHC card. Mac and Linux installers are included. For Windows, just use Win32 Disk Imager. Here are the steps:

  1. Download the Incredible Pi package
  2. Decompress the tarball: tar zxvf incrediblepi-version.tar.gz
  3. Copy .img file to SDHC using image utility or script
  4. Insert SDHC card into Raspberry Pi
  5. Boot the Raspberry Pi from Incredible Pi SDHC card

HINT: While you’re waiting, you can read about all the latest changes and additions to Incredible Pi 2.1 here.

Your First Bite of Incredible Pi. If you’re not using a monitor and will be using SSH to access Incredible Pi, then you need to plug in some earbuds when the bootup process begins. Listen for the Incredible Pi to tell you its IP address when the boot procedure completes. Then login to that IP address with SSH as outlined below.

Here’s everything you need to know about security for Incredible Pi:

1. ALWAYS RUN INCREDIBLE PI BEHIND A SECURE HARDWARE-BASED FIREWALL/ROUTER
2. NEVER EXPOSE ANY INCREDIBLE PI PORTS DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET
3. NEVER MAP INBOUND INTERNET PORTS FROM YOUR FIREWALL TO INCREDIBLE PI

There also are a few setup steps to complete once your Incredible Pi finishes the bootup process:

  • Login to Incredible Piusername: pi   pw: raspberry
  • Change password for pipasswd
  • Change password for rootsudo passwd root
  • Logout as user pilogout
  • Login as root userusername: root    pw:your-new-password
  • Set Linux timezonedpkg-reconfigure tzdata
  • Set PHP timezonenano -w /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini (Ctl-W, Ctl-T, 876)
  • Restart web serverservice apache2 restart
  • Replace SSH keysrm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_* && dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server
  • Set Up WiFi Credentials (optional)nano -w /etc/wpa.conf
  • Set Primary and (optional) Secondary NICnano -w /etc/pbx/.nic
  • Reboot Your Serverreboot

Accessing Incredible Pi By GUI. You don’t have to be a Linux guru to use Incredible Pi. In fact, we’re just about finished with the Linux command prompt, but stay logged in until we finish the steps below. Most of your configuration of the PBX will be performed using the FreePBX® Web GUI.

If you’re new to Asterisk and FreePBX, here’s the one paragraph primer on what needs to happen before you can make free calls with Google Voice. You’ll obviously need a free Google Voice account. This gets you a phone number for people to call you and a vehicle to place calls to plain old telephones throughout the U.S. and Canada at no cost. You’ll also need a softphone or SIP phone to actually place and receive calls. YATE makes a free softphone for PCs, Macs, and Linux machines so download your favorite and install it on your desktop. Phones connect to extensions in FreePBX to work with Incredible Pi. Extensions talk to trunks (like Google Voice) to make and receive calls. FreePBX uses outbound routes to direct outgoing calls from extensions to trunks, and FreePBX uses inbound routes to route incoming calls from trunks to extensions to make your phones ring. In a nutshell, that’s how a PBX works. There are lots of bells and whistles that you can explore down the road.

Let’s get started. Using a browser, enter the IP address of your server. Choose FreePBX Administration. When prompted for a username and password, use admin for both. Here are the six steps you need to complete before making your first free call:

  1. Change FreePBX admin Password and Default Email
  2. Add Google Voice Account credentials
  3. Set Destination for Incoming Calls
  4. Change Extension 701 Passwords
  5. Eliminate Audio and DTMF Problems
  6. Install and Register a Softphone to Extension 701

1. Changing FreePBX admin Password and Default Email. From the main FreePBX GUI, click Admin => Administrators. Click on admin user in the far-right column. Enter a new Password and click Submit Changes button. Then click the Apply Config button. Next, set your default email address at the bottom of Settings -> General Settings. Repeat the procedure above to save your entry.

2. Activating a Google Voice Trunk. To create a Trunk in FreePBX to handle calls to and from Google Voice, you’ll need three pieces of information from the Google Voice account you set up above: the 10-digit Google Voice phone number, your Google Voice account name, and your Google Voice password. Choose Other -> Google Voice from the FreePBX GUI. The following blank form will appear:

Fill in the blanks with your information and check all 3 boxes. If your Google Voice account name ends in @gmail.com, you can leave that out. Otherwise, include the full email address. Then click Submit Changes and Apply Config.

There’s one more step or your Google Voice account won’t work reliably with Incredible Pi! From the Linux command prompt while logged into your server as root, restart Asterisk: amportal restart

3. Setting a Destination for Incoming Calls. Now that you’ve created your Google Voice Trunk, we need to tell FreePBX how to process inbound calls when someone dials your Google Voice number. There are any number of choices. You could simply ring an extension. Or you could ring multiple extensions by first creating a Ring Group which is just a list of extension numbers. Or you could direct incoming calls to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system (we’ve actually set one up for you to play with).

By default, Incredible Pi is configured to route all incoming calls to a demo IVR that shows off some of the applications that come with Incredible Pi. You can change whenever you like by choosing Connectivity -> Inbound Routes -> Default. In the Set Destination section of the form, change the target to Extensions and then select 701 from the list. Then click Submit and Apply Config.

4. Changing Extension Passwords. From the main FreePBX GUI, choose Applications -> Extensions. Then click on 701 in the Extension List on the right side of your display. You’ll see a form that looks like this:

For now, we only need to make a few changes. First, you need a very secure password for both the extension itself and your voicemail account for this extension. The extension secret needs to be a combination of letters and numbers. The Voicemail Password needs to be all numbers, preferably six or more. Replace the existing 1234secret and 1234 with your own (very secure) entries. You also need to lock down this extension so that it is only accessible from devices on your private LAN. You do that with the deny and permit entries which currently are filled with zeroes. Leave the deny entry the way it is which tells Incredible Pi to block everybody except those allowed in the permit entry below. For the permit, we need the first three octets of your private LAN address, e.g. if your LAN is 192.168.0.something then the permit entry will be 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0.

Finally, you need to plug in your actual email address in the Voicemail section so that voicemails can be delivered to you when someone leaves a message. You can also include a pager email address if you want a text message alert with incoming voicemails. If you want the voicemails to automatically be deleted from the server after they are emailed to you (a good idea considering the disk storage limitations of an SDHC card), change the Delete Voicemail option from No to Yes. That’s it. Now save your settings by clicking the Submit button. Then reload the dialplan by clicking on the red prompt when it appears.

In case you’re curious, unless you’ve chosen to automatically delete voicemails after emailing them, you can retrieve your voicemails by dialing *98701 from any extension on your phone system. You’ll be prompted to enter the voicemail password you set up. In addition to managing your voicemails, you’ll also be given the opportunity to either return the call to the number of the person that called or to transfer the voicemail to another extension’s voicemail box. And you can always leave a voicemail for someone by dialing their extension number preceded by an asterisk, e.g. *701 would let someone leave you a voicemail without actually calling you.

5. Eliminating Audio and DTMF Problems. You can avoid one-way audio on calls and touchtones that don’t work with these simple settings in FreePBX: Settings -> Asterisk SIP Settings. Just plug in your public IP address and your private IP subnet. Then set ULAW as the only Audio Codec.

6. Setting Up a Desktop Softphone. Incredible Pi supports all kinds of telephones, but we’ll start with the easy (free) one today. You can move on to "real phones" once you’re smitten with the VoIP bug. For today, you’ll need to download a softphone to your desktop PC or Mac.

As we mentioned, the easiest way to get started with Incredible Pi is to set up a YATE softphone on your Desktop computer. Versions are available at no cost for Macs, PCs, and Linux machines. Just download the appropriate one and install it from this link. Once installed, it’s a simple matter to plug in your extension 701 credentials and start making calls. Run the application and choose Settings -> Accounts and click the New button. Fill in the blanks using the IP address of Incredible Pi, 701 for your account name, and whatever password you created for the extension. Click OK.

Once you are registered to extension 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place your first call. It’s that easy!

Monitoring Call Progress with Asterisk. That about covers the basics. We’ll leave you with a tip on how to monitor what’s happening with your PBX. There are several good tools within the FreePBX GUI. You’ll find them under the Reports tab. In addition, Asterisk has its own Command Line Interface (CLI) that is accessible from the Linux command prompt. Just execute the following command while logged in as root: asterisk -rvvvvvvvvvv.

Once you’ve done some exploring, take a few minutes to read the more detailed Nerd Vittles tutorials on Incredible Pi and Incredible PBX. We now have a complete tutorial on all 35 Incredible PBX applications that are included in the build. Take a quick look at your convenience. Enjoy!


Don’t forget to List Yourself in Directory Assistance so everyone can find you by dialing 411. And add your new number to the Do Not Call Registry to block telemarketing calls. Or just call 888-382-1222 from your new number.

Originally published: Tuesday, September 11, 2012


Support Issues. With any application as sophisticated as this one, you’re bound to have questions. Blog comments are a terrible place to handle support issues although we welcome general comments about our articles and software. If you have particular support issues, we encourage you to get actively involved in the PBX in a Flash Forums. It’s the best Asterisk tech support site in the business, and it’s all free! In fact, there is a thread dedicated to support of Incredible Pi. Please have a look and post your support questions there. Unlike some forums, ours is extremely friendly and is supported by literally hundreds of Asterisk gurus and thousands of ordinary users just like you. You won’t have to wait long for an answer to your question.

Bug Fixes. A few bugs are to be expected. If you’re using Incredible Pi, please review these on the PIAF Forum at your convenience.


Astricon 2012. Astricon 2012 will be in Atlanta at the Sheraton beginning October 23 through October 25. We hope to see many of you there. We called Atlanta home for over 25 years so we’d love to show you around. Be sure to tug on my sleeve and mention you’d like a free PIAF Thumb Drive. We’ll have a bunch of them to pass out to our loyal supporters. Nerd Vittles readers also can save 20% on your registration by using coupon code: AC12VIT.



Need help with Asterisk? Visit the PBX in a Flash Forum.


whos.amung.us If you’re wondering what your fellow man is reading on Nerd Vittles these days, wonder no more. Visit our new whos.amung.us statistical web site and check out what’s happening. It’s a terrific resource both for us and for you.


 

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors


FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

BOGO Bonaza: Enjoy state-of-the-art VoIP service with a $10 credit and half-price SIP service on up to $500 of Skyetel trunking with free number porting when you fund your Skyetel account. No limits on number of simultaneous calls. Quadruple data center redundancy. $25 monthly minimum spend required. Tutorial and sign up details are here.

The lynchpin of Incredible PBX 2020 and beyond is ClearlyIP components which bring management of FreePBX modules and SIP phone integration to a level never before available with any other Asterisk distribution. And now you can configure and reconfigure your new Incredible PBX phones from the convenience of the Incredible PBX GUI.

VitalPBX is perhaps the fastest-growing PBX offering based upon Asterisk with an installed presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. VitalPBX has generously provided a customized White Label version of Incredible PBX tailored for use with all Incredible PBX and VitalPBX custom applications. Follow this link for a free test drive!
 

Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 



Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…