Nerd Vittles – Page 54 – Ward Mundy's Technobabblelog

Meet the Goophone: It Walks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck For Under $100

Friday, November 8, 2013 / 6 Comments on Meet the Goophone: It Walks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck For Under $100

If you didn’t cheat and hover over the images above, then you’d be wrong if you guessed that you now can buy Apple’s shiny, new iPhone® 5c for less than $100. From first-hand experience, I can tell you that the price of the 32GB model without a contract remains $649. You can add another $50 for tax in most states. And you can add another $99 for AppleCare® and another $79 each time your daughter drops the phone on the pavement. No, my friends, this is not an iPhone 5c. It’s the Goophone i5c from DHgate.com and many others brought to you by some enterprising neighbors of the fine folks that manufacture phones for Apple® and Samsung® (among others) in China. As the back of the phone says: "Designed by Goophone in California. Assembled in China." Sound familiar? Not sure Goophone spent much time in California, but the phones are most definitely "assembled" in China. Total delivered price from DHgate: $89.99. While we had little clue about the similarities when we ordered the phone, with the exception of the Goophone logo emblazoned on the back of the phone and the prominent Goophone boot logo, you’d be hard-pressed to distinguish one duck from the other. My daughter’s iPhone 5c happens to be pink. So that helped with telling them apart.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, lots. Let’s see. The potential patent, trademark, and copyright issues look like something a sadistic law professor might cook up for a bar exam. However, neither the International Trade Commission nor any American court has (yet) blocked the import of these phones so technically the manufacturer is entitled to the same presumptions as any other merchant. And proliferation of these phones in the United States is the least of Apple’s problems. Remember, Apple has been counting on the huge Chinese market as the Second Coming for iPhone sales. Considering the i5c was available before the iPhone 5c ever shipped, it seems fairly likely that there also may be a technology leak somewhere in someone’s pipeline. Let’s guess where that might be. What should be equally troubling to Apple is that someone could look at your $700 phone and build a perfectly functioning replica for under $40. Did we mention the build quality? It’s similar. Let’s leave it at that. In short, the Goophone knock off appears to be much what Apple claimed in court that Samsung was doing. It just didn’t happen to turn out that way in some of the Samsung litigation. But, as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. It turns out that the Goophone may actually be a better mousetrap than the iPhone especially when it comes to overall performance and battery life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F73sMmb6CS0

We’re not going to get into the morality or legality of buying stuff like this especially with Festivus just around the corner. So sort that out for yourself. Start with this New York Times article and then do some reading on the Freakonomics web site if you’re really curious. Suffice it to say there’s a major difference between a counterfeit and a knockoff. Counterfeit goods are those with someone else’s brand name splattered across the item. Think pocketbooks hidden in the blankets on the street corners around Times Square in New York. Most of these phones are clearly labeled with their own unique brand names. Examining the devices up close or after turning them on would explicitly tell any buyer that Goophones aren’t made or designed by Apple. All of the hardware and most of the software on the inside of the phone is different as well. So we believe the phones rise to the level of a knockoff which keeps buyers out of hot water. Keep in mind we’re talking about buying a phone, not selling one. Don’t even think about reselling them!

To borrow an expression from NASA: "Cupertino. We’ve got a problem." Before you get too mad at the Chinese, keep in mind that there’s plenty of blame to go around. Apple, for one, chose to make their phones in China to save money. While we were writing this article, Google® ads were popping up all over the place for these phones. And, of course, AT&T® and T-Mobile® are perfectly willing to sell you a nano SIM to use in your Goophone even though they could easily block the devices. The parcel delivery companies are more than happy to bring these phones into the U.S. by the boatload. And finally there’s this little tidbit in the New York Times article referenced above: "Customs in the United States will allow travelers to bring [in] one counterfeit good per category." Think of it as the "One-Bite Rule" for humans. We’re confident that Apple can muster adequate legal talent to attempt to shut down the import of these phones if they chose to do so. But, so far, that hasn’t happened. There may be a reason. Ironically, Ubergizmo reports that Goophone actually owns the patent in China and is threatening to sue Apple if the iPhone 5 is released in that country. It seems Goophone beat Apple to the Chinese patent office. So this could get interesting.

We actually ordered the i5c and paid a little more to see if the entire operation was fraudulent. From the photos on the web site, the phone looked similar to both the iPhone and a number of Android® phones. But that could be said of hundreds of phones now on the market. A price point of under $100 was our primary consideration since performance and feature set now are fairly standard on many of the Android phones. This phone just happened to be the cheapest.

The good news is the merchant we chose was legitimate albeit a little slow on delivery (but this particular phone had just been released). Of course, you have no idea what is hidden under the covers, and that applies to the hardware and software. There is no guarantee that the phone won’t explode from a sub-par battery. In fact, there is no guarantee, period. The New York Times reports that the typical manufacturing cost for one of these phones is under $40. If you like the NSA snooping on you, then consider the possibilities where all the software in these phones is produced in China. Our takeaway from the experiment was this. The Goophone certainly proves just how inexpensive it is to manufacture a high-quality phone in China when some of the design work appears to have been done elsewhere. 😉

Since we had the phone, a quick review of its capabilities seemed to be in order. Hardware-wise, it appears to be an excellent phone. We would hasten to add that we would never, ever put our trusted credentials for any account in a knockoff phone from China. Nor would we plug it in without being in the room to monitor its condition. At least on the unit we received, the phone easily lasted all day with moderate use, and it never displayed any signs of overheating. After 8 hours, the Goophone showed 85% battery remaining. As delivered, none of the Google apps were available. Nor could they be loaded. That included the Play Store®, Gmail®, and Google Maps®. There also was plenty of Chinese sprinkled throughout the menus just to keep things interesting. GizmoChina reported that a new ROM supporting Google apps and English has been released, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But the screenshots of the phone above demonstrate what was possible even with the Chinese model and no Play Store.

As you can see below, the Goophone takes magnificent photos even in panorama mode. The side of our neighbor’s home is one of my favorite places to test new cameras because of the difficult morning light situation. With a little cropping and applying a touch of saturation in Photoshop® Elements (about a 10-second task), the end result is pretty spectacular. The displayed image is roughly 20% of the original size of the photograph.

While the phone’s icons may look familiar, this is a pure Android Jelly Bean OS running on a 1.2GHz dual-core MediaTek MT6572 processor with 512MB RAM, 4GB ROM (only about 1GB available), and an 8GB internal SD card. It has an 8 megapixel back camera and a 2 megapixel front camera and supports WiFi and 2G/3G GSM cellular connections. Bluetooth® worked reliably and paired easily with a Jambox®. Both AT&T/StraightTalk® and T-Mobile GSM SIMs were plug-and-play although StraightTalk would require modification of the proxy address just as it would on a standard iPhone or Android device. For experimenters, T-Mobile’s $2/day pay-as-you-go plan was just about right. It provided unlimited calling, texting, and 2G web access which is more than ample for most of the things you’d want to do with a phone like this. For teenagers on a tight budget, it’s pretty close to the best of all worlds. When coupled with a $45/month StraightTalk SIM on the AT&T network, you get a feature-packed phone that looks like a Mercedes® with a price tag like a Volkswagen®. And, for less than the cost of an AppleCare contract, you can buy a spare.

Rooting the device was easy. The YouTube® video above explains the procedure. And the necessary drivers for Windows® are included in the Samsung USB Drivers Collection for Windows. You also need the MT6577 USB VCOM Drivers to load new ROMs.

We apparently got an early release of the phone because much of the user interface was in Chinese and, as we noted, none of the Google apps worked. So the most difficult part for us was finding the .apk Android apps since Google’s Play Store wasn’t available. If you have another rooted Android phone, the simple solution is to grab them from a Titanium Backup. HINT: The filenames end in .apk. Be careful downloading .apk files from strange web sites. That’s about as safe as loading your bank credentials into a Chinese knockoff. All of the apps pictured in the screenshot above work as you would expect. After all, it’s an Android phone. POP3 and IMAP email accounts work fine. The cameras are great including movies and HDR. Skype® video works fine. Zoiper® IAX connections are terrific when linked back to an Asterisk® or VoIP.ms account. Music collections can be loaded using a USB connection to any Mac or Windows machine. Or plug in some earplugs and listen to your favorite FM radio station just like in the old days. For diehard music, sports, and talk radio fans, SiriusXM® Internet Radio works as well. The .apk is available in this thread.

As you might expect, communication with the manufacturer was difficult, but they were responsive. After considerable back and forth, we did manage to secure the newer ROM with Play Store support. Presumably, it is now shipping in phones destined for the United States. To actually load the new ROM, you need version 3.1312 of the Smart Phone Flash Tool. Once that’s installed on your Windows desktop, you can follow along with this tutorial to get the new ROM loaded into the phone. The sequence of events in using SP_Flash_Tool matters. Unzip the new ROM into a new folder on your desktop. Turn off your i5c and unplug it from the USB cable if it is connected to your Windows machine. Then run Flash_tool.exe from the SP_Flash_Tool folder on your desktop. Choose File -> Open Scatter-loading File and select MT6572_Android_scatter.txt from the folder with the unzipped new ROM. Click the Download button. Now plug in your phone using a USB cable connected to your PC. Do NOT turn on the phone. If you’ve properly loaded the MT6577 USB VCOM Drivers from above, the update should proceed within a few seconds, and you’ll see the progress bar changing colors in the flash tool application. It takes about 2 minutes to load the new ROM. Once you get the Download OK dialog box, unplug the phone and close the flash tool app. Before turning on the phone, be sure you’ve inserted a SIM card from either T-Mobile or AT&T/StraightTalk, or the phone will boot into Chinese (permanently) when you turn it on. Guess how we know? Now hold down the Power and Home buttons simultaneously for 10 seconds. Release the buttons and power on the phone in the usual way by pressing the Power button for a few seconds.

Just a couple more gotchas, and you should be good to go. First, DO NOT USE GOOGLE CREDENTIALS IN THIS PHONE THAT MATTER TO YOU! Based upon the performance of the browser using a very fast WiFi connection, our testing suggests that all browser activity and perhaps other activity (WiFi and GSM) may be routed through a proxy. Guess where? Second, do not use a Google account with two-factor authentication. It won’t work. Third, we’ve had excellent results with Zoiper IAX connections to an Asterisk server, but the setup is problematic. The Zoiper keyboard for data entry doesn’t have a period on it. Keyboards shown for other apps include the period so this is a Zoiper-specific problem, not an inherent limitation of the phone. To enter the IP address or FQDN of a host with Zoiper, you’ll need to send an email to the phone with the information. Open Gmail or your other mail client and copy the text to the phone’s clipboard. Then set up your Zoiper account. A long press on the host field will let you paste in the appropriate data. If you experience compatibility errors that prevent loading certain apps from the Play Store (Instagram is one example), then you’ll need to root your phone and load App Override from the Play Store. Then tell the app to override Play Store install restrictions. Finally, wade through the notification settings for the apps and reset them. After that, notifications worked as expected. GPS still no worky.

We did a quick-and-dirty video on YouTube to show off our CallWho™ Speech-to-Text Dialer coupled with SMS messaging and GoIP to test the message capabilities of the iPhone 5c and the i5c. CallWho is included as a standard feature using Incredible PBX 11™ with PBX in a Flash™. Enjoy!

iGoogle Added to Google Graveyard. Google has added (yet another) corpse to the Google Graveyard. This time it’s iGoogle, the need for which (according to Google) "has eroded over time." The iGoogle demise also means that Nerd Vittles TTS Google News Feed bit the dust. As much as we’re troubled to admit it, it would appear that Microsoft got it just about right in their spoof:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4

For the complete list of Google carnage, see last week’s Nerd Vittles article. Just in TTS applications for Asterisk, we’ve lost phone directories, sports scores, weather reports, and now news feeds. Can stock listings be far behind? And, coming next week, Google’s JavaScript Maps API gets put out to pasture. Then, of course, there are the text-to-speech and speech-to-text tools themselves. Wouldn’t make any long term plans using those platforms or any other Google platform for that matter. For those (formerly) enjoying the Nerd Vittles text-to-speech Google apps or Incredible PBX, this means that dialing 951 now returns "From, from, from" as the latest news headlines. There’s a simple fix that now is available. We’ve replaced Google News with Yahoo News! To replace the news app, simply run this update script.

Banner Day at Nerd Vittles. Today we’re delighted to announce that we’ve logged over 200,000 unique visitors from the United States this year alone! And we’re especially pleased to now have fans visiting from 216 countries. Thank you!

Originally published: Monday, November 11, 2013

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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.

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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…

Happy Halloween: Google Puts the Final Nail in the Google Voice Coffin

Friday, November 8, 2013 / 3 Comments on Happy Halloween: Google Puts the Final Nail in the Google Voice Coffin

Meet the new Microsoft: It’s Google! If you follow Nerd Vittles regularly, you’ll recall that five months ago we warned you to start packing your bags if you were a Google Voice user with PBX in a Flash. And, as a special Halloween treat, Google gave the open source community the finger. As of May 15, 2014, there will be no more XMPP support for Google Voice. So much for embracing the open source community. And, for all of you that supported and fostered the Google Voice project and were part of Google’s development community, F U. Welcome to Oligopoly World!

It’s one thing for a company to shift gears and venture out in a new direction. It’s quite another to knife your developers in the back on the way out the door. Here’s an interesting background piece on the folks now driving the Google Voice Bus. Fundamentally, there’s so much wrong with Mr. Singhal’s posting that it’s difficult to know where to begin. But let’s start with "These [Google Voice] apps violate our terms of service."

So let’s go to law school for a bit, shall we? One of the first things you’ll learn is never take the factual basis for someone else’s conclusions and insults at face value. Go read the material for yourself. And, when you do, what you’ll discover is there’s not even a hint that these Google Voice applications have ever violated Google’s terms of service. Never mind that Google was and still is selling and profiting from the GrooveIP application which is marketed and sold in the Google Play Store.

We’re reproducing the Terms of Service in all their glory so that you don’t have to take our word for it either. Of course, the terms are sprinkled across multiple web pages so bear with us…

And finally, there’s the Google catch-all which you will note changes regularly (and is about to change again). So, even if you didn’t violate the Terms last week, next week may be a different story. Multiply that Catch-22 by five years in the case of Google Voice.

Google Terms of Service

This Terms of Service will be replaced by our new Google Terms of Service effective November 11, 2013. Please see our summary of changes for additional details.
Last modified: March 1, 2012 (view archived versions)

Welcome to Google!

Thanks for using our products and services (“Services”). The Services are provided by Google Inc. (“Google”), located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States.

By using our Services, you are agreeing to these terms. Please read them carefully.

Our Services are very diverse, so sometimes additional terms or product requirements (including age requirements) may apply. Additional terms will be available with the relevant Services, and those additional terms become part of your agreement with us if you use those Services.

Using our Services

You must follow any policies made available to you within the Services.

Don’t misuse our Services. For example, don’t interfere with our Services or try to access them using a method other than the interface and the instructions that we provide. You may use our Services only as permitted by law, including applicable export and re-export control laws and regulations. We may suspend or stop providing our Services to you if you do not comply with our terms or policies or if we are investigating suspected misconduct.

Using our Services does not give you ownership of any intellectual property rights in our Services or the content you access. You may not use content from our Services unless you obtain permission from its owner or are otherwise permitted by law. These terms do not grant you the right to use any branding or logos used in our Services. Don’t remove, obscure, or alter any legal notices displayed in or along with our Services.

Our Services display some content that is not Google’s. This content is the sole responsibility of the entity that makes it available. We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law. But that does not necessarily mean that we review content, so please don’t assume that we do.

In connection with your use of the Services, we may send you service announcements, administrative messages, and other information. You may opt out of some of those communications.

Your Google Account

You may need a Google Account in order to use some of our Services. You may create your own Google Account, or your Google Account may be assigned to you by an administrator, such as your employer or educational institution. If you are using a Google Account assigned to you by an administrator, different or additional terms may apply and your administrator may be able to access or disable your account.

If you learn of any unauthorized use of your password or account, follow these instructions.

Privacy and Copyright Protection

Google’s privacy policies explain how we treat your personal data and protect your privacy when you use our Services. By using our Services, you agree that Google can use such data in accordance with our privacy policies.

We respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement and terminate accounts of repeat infringers according to the process set out in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

We provide information to help copyright holders manage their intellectual property online. If you think somebody is violating your copyrights and want to notify us, you can find information about submitting notices and Google’s policy about responding to notices in our Help Center.

Your Content in our Services

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

You can find more information about how Google uses and stores content in the privacy policy or additional terms for particular Services. If you submit feedback or suggestions about our Services, we may use your feedback or suggestions without obligation to you.

About Software in our Services

When a Service requires or includes downloadable software, this software may update automatically on your device once a new version or feature is available. Some Services may let you adjust your automatic update settings.

Google gives you a personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to use the software provided to you by Google as part of the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the Services as provided by Google, in the manner permitted by these terms. You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, or lease any part of our Services or included software, nor may you reverse engineer or attempt to extract the source code of that software, unless laws prohibit those restrictions or you have our written permission.

Open source software is important to us. Some software used in our Services may be offered under an open source license that we will make available to you. There may be provisions in the open source license that expressly override some of these terms.

The other important thing you learn in law school is that CONTEXT MATTERS. For example, there’s this generic warning buried in the terms which undoubtedly is the language Google is now using to claim that Asterisk, FreeSwitch, OBiHai, and GrooveIP implementations of Google Voice (among others) crossed the line:

Well, not so fast. It turns out that the "method" used for the Google Voice interface in all of these implementations happens to be the one that was documented, supported, and hosted on Google’s own developer web site. Here’s a snapshot of the site before it, too, disappears. Pay particular attention to the sentence we’ve highlighted: "[The Google Talk XMPP Extensions] are documented so that you can design a client that can take advantage of specific Google Talk features."

It’s also worth recalling that Google Voice began as Craig Walker’s Grand Central project and that Craig, while heading up the Google Voice team, had the following dialogue with me in June of 2009:

WM: Just hoping that you might reconsider providing a SIP interface to Google Voice. It really would make it the Whole Enchilada. Adding a password through the web interface would make it very secure. We’ve written several articles on Nerd Vittles about Google Voice, and it would be an incredible addition.

CW: Hey Ward. Thanks for your note and I share a lot of your sentiments. Let me get it out to the world as my first priority:)

Here’s the Bottom Line: You can’t have it both ways, Google. You can’t encourage open source development with one hand and then use your other fist to slap down developers who do exactly what you encouraged them to do. Sorry to say it but this time Microsoft got it just about right:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4

For organizations considering a move to Google’s platform, you might want to think twice and take an open-minded look at the carnage in the Google Graveyard. Remember Google Buzz? How about Google Wave? Then came Google knol. How about Google Directory Assistance (GOOG-411)? And then Google Reader followed by iGoogle. And now the open source edition of Google Voice. This is just the tip of The Iceberg. And most of the open source Google apps have also fallen by the wayside: sports scores, weather reports, news feeds, and the JavaScript Maps API is on the chopping block for later this month. Many of these weren’t failed undertakings. Google simply decided they no longer wished to support them regardless of whether millions of people depended upon them. Ask yourself this simple question. Do you really want to stake the future of your company or your development efforts on this sort of corporate infrastructure? What can you do? Start here.

Where Do We Go From Here? Have no fear. The VoIP community is not going to wither away because of Google’s shenanigans. We’ll have a lot of great new approaches and solutions in coming weeks and months. In the meantime, make yourself a list of how you currently use Google Voice services. You’ll need that as we move forward. A belated Happy Halloween! It took me 5 days to cool off sufficiently to even write this article.

Originally published: Tuesday, November 5, 2013

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Adventures in Twitterland: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Today is Twitter’s Coming Out Party with what could be 2013’s Biggest IPO. By the closing bell today, the U.S. probably will have a couple new billionaires. As one commenter on USA Today’s site noted, "I can’t get into the IPO. I’m too busy tweeting." Unfortunately, we’re not.

Having just returned from a quick visit to New York earlier this week, we were greeted by the following message when we logged into our Twitter account:

Why is my account suspended? Well, it could be that you’ve violated "The Twitter Rules" or maybe Twitter suspects that your account was hacked or compromised. I’m reminded of the old playground adage: It’s For Me To Know and You to Find Out. Urban Dictionary has an interesting take on what that really means.

Imagine if you will that you’re walking down the street in your favorite town minding your own business when a cop grabs you by the collar and says, "You’re under arrest." The natural inclination would be to ask why. Rather than tell you, the police officer hands you a copy of the municipal code with the admonition that you can always appeal.

Welcome to The World According to Twitter. Here you are assumed to know what you did wrong. And, if you don’t like the consequences, you can file "an appeal" after reading "The Rules". All of that, of course, is perfectly fine if you actually broke "The Rules" and know what you did. Joseph Heller couldn’t have made this up. If you’ve read Catch 22, you’ll recall that "the term was introduced by Doc Daneeka, an army psychiatrist who invokes ‘Catch 22’ to explain why any pilot requesting mental evaluation for insanity — hoping to be found not sane enough to fly and thereby escape dangerous missions [during World War II] — demonstrates his own sanity in making the request and thus cannot be declared insane."

We, of course, use Twitter for fun and to support our open source projects so there’s no financial hardship from Twitter’s antics while we endure "the appellate process." But, put yourself in the position of a business person with thousands of followers and suppose you actually used Twitter to announce new products and merchandise sales. Don’t!

As you can see from the screenshot above, all of a sudden you have 0 Followers. So your entire business model is basically down the toilet at the sole discretion of Twitter. In case you’re curious, no, we haven’t violated any of Twitter’s rules. We ~~still~~ used to send a couple of tweets a day as we have since opening our account years ago. Has our account been hacked? Obviously not. We still can get into it, and there are no tweets from us offering you a million bucks for managing some African prince’s business affairs.

In becoming a public company today, one would hope this situation will be addressed. But then I’m reminded of our Comcast adventures and some of the horror stories you hear about Facebook, and it’s probably safe to conclude that the Borg was probably right: "Resistance is futile." We’ve been patiently waiting 2 days for "our appeal" to be processed. We’ll let you know if we ever hear anything further. In the meantime, I’d hold off on that Twitter stock purchase.

If you happen to have a (working) Twitter account, do us and your friends a favor. Send a tweet to your followers about this article by clicking on the link below. Happy Tweeting!

1 p.m. Update. Surprise! Well, we’re back… kinda, sorta. Twitter let us out of jail but kept our pants and car keys. Following = 0, Followers = 0. No call. No email. Not even a tweet. Love means never having to say you’re sorry. Nice!

2:30 p.m. Update. Pants and car keys returned. Thanks a billion, Twitter. You’re the best.

Originally published: Thursday, November 7, 2013

The Definitive VoIP Quick Start Guide: Introducing PBX in a Flash 2.0.6.4.5

Monday, October 28, 2013 / 2 Comments on The Definitive VoIP Quick Start Guide: Introducing PBX in a Flash 2.0.6.4.5

What a difference a year makes in the VoIP World! We now have a rock-solid, reliable Asterisk® 11 release and an equally stable FreePBX 2.11 on which to build state-of-the-art VoIP servers. If you’re new to the VoIP community, watch this video before you proceed.

Now let us welcome you to the World of PBX in a Flash™. This is our best release ever whether you’re a total newbie or an experienced Asterisk developer. You can’t really appreciate what goes into an open source product like PBX in a Flash until you try doing it yourself. The sad part is we and the CentOS™ development team are part of a dwindling few non-commercial entities that still are in the open source "business." If you want to actually learn about Asterisk from the ground up using pure source code to customize your VoIP deployment, PBX in a Flash has no competition because your only other option is to roll your own starting with a Linux DVD. So our extra special kudos go to Tom King, who once again has produced a real masterpiece in that it is very simple for a first-time user to deploy and, at the same time, incredibly flexible for the most experienced Asterisk developer. The new PIAF 2.0.6.4.5 ISOs not only provide a choice of Asterisk® and FreePBX® versions to get you started. But now you can build and deploy standalone servers for SugarCRM™, NeoRouter™ VPN, YATE, and OpenFire™ XMPP using the 32-bit and 64-bit PIAF™ ISOs. So let’s get started.

Making a Hardware Selection

We’re going to assume that you need a VoIP telephony solution that will support an office of up to several dozen employees and that you have an Internet connection that will support whatever your simultaneous call volume happens to be. This is above and beyond your normal Internet traffic. To keep it simple, you need 100Kbps of bandwidth in both directions for each call.¹ And you need a router/firewall that can prioritize VoIP traffic so that all your employees playing Angry Birds won’t cause degradation in VoIP call quality. Almost any good home router can now provide this functionality. Remember to disable ALG on your router, and it’s smooth sailing.

For computer hardware, you’ll need a dedicated machine. There are many good choices. Unless you have a burning desire to preserve your ties with Ma Bell, we recommend limiting your Ma Bell lines to your main number. Most phone companies can provide a service called multi-channel forwarding that lets multiple inbound calls to your main number be routed to one or more VoIP DIDs much like companies do with 800-number calls. If this works for you, then any good dual-core Atom computer will suffice. You’ll find lots of suggestions in this thread. And the prices generally are in the $200-$400 range. For larger companies and to increase Asterisk’s capacity with beefier hardware, see these stress test results.

If your requirements involve retention of dozens of Ma Bell lines and complex routing of calls to multiple offices, then we would strongly recommend you spend a couple thousand dollars with one of our consultants. They’re the best in the business, and they do this for a living. They can easily save you the cost of their services by guiding you through the hardware selection process. They also have turnkey phone systems using much the same technology as you’ll find in PBX in a Flash. You won’t hurt our feelings.

Choosing the Right PIAF Platform

We get asked this question about a hundred times a week on the forums so here goes. There are more than two dozen permutations and combinations of CentOS, Asterisk, and FreePBX to choose from when you decide to deploy PBX in a Flash. We always recommend the latest version of CentOS because it tends to be the most stable and also supports the most new hardware. You have a choice to make between a 32-bit OS or 64-bit. Our preference is the 32-bit platform because it is better supported. The performance difference is virtually unnoticeable for most VoIP applications. With Asterisk, we always recommend an LTS release because these have long-term support. That narrows your choices to Asterisk 1.8 or Asterisk 11. At this juncture, we think you’d be crazy to install anything other than Asterisk 11. It’s incredibly reliable and stable, and it will be supported for years to come. It also supports Digium Phones. The bottom line is that Asterisk 11 is the latest and greatest with the best feature set. If we were building a system for a commercial business, it would be our hands-down choice. In the PBX in a Flash world, we have colors for various versions of PBX in a Flash that support different versions of Asterisk. Asterisk 11.6 happens to be the latest PIAF-Green, and we recommend you install it with the latest version of FreePBX as well, 2.11.0.11

Choosing the Right Phones

If there is one thing that will kill any new VoIP deployment, it’s choosing the wrong phones. If you value your career, you’ll let that be an organization-driven decision after carefully reviewing at least 6-12 phones that won’t cause you daily heartburn. You and your budget team can figure out the price points that work in your organization keeping in mind that not everyone needs the same type of telephone. Depending upon your staffing, the issue becomes how many different phone sets are you and your colleagues capable of supporting and maintaining on a long term basis.

Schmooze Com has released their commercial End Point Manager (EPM) at a price point of $39 per server. They’ve been using the application internally to support their commercial customers for over a year. Suffice it to say, it’s the best money you will ever spend. You can sign up for an account with Schmooze through our commercial support site and purchase the software now. You can review the Admin User Guide here. The beauty of this software is it gives you the flexibility to support literally hundreds of different VoIP phones and devices almost effortlessly. Using a browser, you can configure and reconfigure almost any VoIP phone or device on the market in a matter of minutes. So the question becomes which phones should you show your business associates. That again should be a decision by you and your management and budget teams, but collect some information from end-users first. Choose a half dozen representative users in your company and get each of them to fill out a questionnaire documenting their 10 most frequent daily phone calls and listing each step of how they processed those calls. That will give you a good idea about types and variety of phones you need to consider for different groups of users. Cheaper rarely is better. Keep in mind that phones can last a very long time, even lousy ones. So choose carefully.

The phone brands that we would seriously consider include Cisco, Aastra, Snom, Digium, Mitel, Polycom, Yealink, and Grandstream. Do you need BLF, call parking or multiple line buttons, a hold button, conferencing, speakerphone, HD voice, power over Ethernet support, distinctive ringtones for internal and various types of external calls, Bluetooth, WiFi, web, SMS, or email access, an extra network port for a computer, headset support, customizable buttons (how many?), quick dial keys, custom software, XML provisioning, VPN support? How easy is it to transfer a call? Do you need to mimic key telephones? Also consider color screens, touch screens, busy lamp indicators, extension modules (what capacity?). What do we personally use: Yealink’s T46G is our favorite, and we also have several Digium phones of various types, a couple of Aastra phones, a Grandstream GXP2200, and a collection of Panasonic cordless DECT phones, a fax machine, and Samsung Galaxy Note II connected through an OBi202 with an OBiBT Bluetooth Adapter.

Installing PBX in a Flash

With the office politics out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff.

Download PIAF 2.0.6.4.5 ISO from SourceForge
Burn the ISO to a USB Thumb Drive or a DVD using a Mac or Windows machine
Boot dedicated server using PIAF Flash Drive or DVD

For most deployments, choose the default install by pressing Enter.

Leave the UTC System Clock option unchecked and pick your Time Zone. Tab to OK and press Enter.

Choose a very secure Root Password. Tab to OK and press Enter. Your server will whir away for 5-10 minutes installing CentOS 6.4. When the reboot begins, remove the DVD or USB thumb drive.

Log into your server as root from either the console or an SSH connection to the IP address displayed on your server. Unless you need to install custom hardware drivers, choose the first option to install PBX in a Flash.

For today, we’re installing PBX in a Flash. So leave it highlighted, tab to OK, and press Enter.

Now pick your PIAF flavor, tab to OK, and press Enter. You’ll note there’s a new color. 🙂

The PIAF Configuration Wizard will load. Press Enter to begin.

Unlike any other aggregation, PIAF gives you the opportunity to fully configure Asterisk using make menuconfig if you know what you’re doing. For everyone else, type N and then confirm your choice.

Next, you’ll need to choose your Time Zone again for PHP and FreePBX. Don’t worry if yours is missing. A new timezone-setup utility is also to reconfigure this to any worldwide time zone once the install has completed.

Next, choose your version of FreePBX to install. If you plan to also install Incredible PBX and Incredible Fax:

Incredible PBX 3 requires PIAF-Purple and FreePBX 2.9
Incredible PBX 4 requires PIAF-Purple and FreePBX 2.10 (32-bit only)
Incredible PBX 11 requires PIAF-Green and FreePBX 2.11 (recommended!)

Finally, you need to choose a very secure maint password for access to FreePBX using a browser. You can pick your own, or the installer will generate one for you. Don’t forget it.

The installer will give you one last chance to make changes. If everything looks correct, press the Enter key and go have lunch. Be sure you have a working Internet connection to your server before you leave.

In about 30-60 minutes, your server will reboot. You should be able to log in as root again using your root password. Write down the IP address of your server from the status display (above) and verify that everything installed properly. Note that Samba is disabled by default. If you want to use your server with Windows Networking, run configure-samba once your server is up and running and you’ve logged in.

Configuring PBX in a Flash

Most PIAF Configuration is accomplished using the FreePBX Web GUI. Point your browser to the IP address shown in the status display above to display your PIAF Home Page. Click on the Users tab. Click FreePBX Administration. When prompted for your username and password, the username is maint. The password will be the FreePBX master password you chose in the Config Module phase of the PBX in a Flash installation procedure above.

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 PBX in a Flash. 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. FreePBX now has some of the best documentation in the business. Start here.

To get a minimal system functioning to make and receive calls, here’s the 2-minute drill. You’ll need to set up at least one extension with voicemail, and we’ll configure a free Google Voice account for free calls in the U.S. and Canada. Next, we’ll set up inbound and outbound routes to manage incoming and outgoing calls. Finally, we’ll add a phone with your extension credentials.

A Few Words About Security. PBX in a Flash has been engineered to run on a server sitting safely behind a hardware-based firewall with NO port exposure from the Internet. Leave it that way! It’s your wallet and phone bill that are at stake. If you’re running PBX in a Flash in a hosted environment with no hardware-based firewall, then immediately read and heed our setup instructions for Securing Your VoIP in the Cloud Server. We would encourage you to visit your PIAF Home Page regularly. It’s our primary way of alerting you to security issues which arise. You’ll see them posted (with links) in the RSS Feed shown above. If you prefer, you can subscribe to the PIAF RSS Feed or follow us on Twitter. For late-breaking enhancements, you also should regularly visit the Bug Reporting & Fixes Topic on the PIAF Forum.

Extension Setup. Now let’s set up an extension to get you started. A good rule of thumb for systems with less than 50 extensions is to reserve the IP addresses from 192.x.x.201 to 192.x.x.250 for your phones. Then you can create extension numbers in FreePBX to match those IP addresses. This makes it easy to identify which phone on your system goes with which IP address and makes it easy for end-users to access the phone’s GUI to add bells and whistles. In FreePBX 2.10 or 2.11, to create extension 201 (don’t start with 200), click Applications, Extensions, Generic SIP Device, Submit. Then fill in the following blanks USING VERY SECURE PASSWORDS and leaving the defaults in the other fields for the time being.

User Extension … 201
Display Name … Home
Outbound CID … [your 10-digit phone number if you have one; otherwise, leave blank]
Emergency CID … [your 10-digit phone number for 911 ID if you have one; otherwise, leave blank]

Device Options
secret … 1299864Xyz [randomly generated]
dtmfmode … rfc2833
Voicemail Status … Enabled
voicemail password … 14332 [make this unique AND secure!]
email address … yourname@yourdomain.com [if you want voicemail messages emailed to you]
pager email address … yourname@yourdomain.com [if you want to be paged when voicemail messages arrive]
email attachment … yes [if you want the voicemail message included in email]
play CID … yes [if you want the CallerID played when you retrieve message]
play envelope … yes [if you want date/time of the message played before the message]
delete Vmail … yes [if you want the voicemail message deleted after it’s emailed to you]
vm options … callback=from-internal [to enable automatic callbacks by pressing 3,2 after playing a voicemail message]
vm context … default

Write down the passwords. You’ll need them to configure your SIP phone.

Extension Security. We cannot overstress the need to make your extension passwords secure. All the firewalls in the world won’t protect you from malicious phone calls on your nickel if you use your extension number or something like 1234 for your extension password if your SIP or IAX ports happen to be exposed to the Internet.

In addition to making up secure passwords, the latest versions of FreePBX also let you define the IP address or subnet that can access each of your extensions. Use it!!! Once the extensions are created, edit each one and modify the permit field to specify the actual IP address or subnet of each phone on your system. A specific IP address entry should look like this: 192.168.1.142/255.255.255.255. If most of your phones are on a private LAN, you may prefer to use a subnet entry in the permit field like this: 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 using your actual subnet.

Adding a Google Voice Trunk. There are lots of trunk providers, and one of the real beauties of having your own PBX is that you don’t have to put all of your eggs in the same basket… unlike the AT&T days. We would encourage you to take advantage of this flexibility. With most providers, you don’t pay anything except when you actually use their service so you have nothing to lose.

For today, we’re going to take advantage of Google’s current offer of free calling in the U.S. and Canada through the end of 2013. You also get a free phone number in your choice of area codes. PBX in a Flash now installs a Google Voice module under FreePBX -> Connectivity that lets you set up your Google Voice account with PBX in a Flash in just a few seconds once you have your credentials.

A Word to the Wise: All good things come to an end… especially those that are free. So plan ahead with some alternate providers that keep your phones working should Google decide to pull the plug or change the terms with Google Voice.

Signing Up for Google Voice. You’ll need a dedicated Google Voice account to support PBX in a Flash. 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 rather than creating a separate account. Take our word for it. 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… set up a dedicated Gmail and Google Voice account², and use it exclusively with PBX in a Flash. Google Voice no longer is by invitation only. If you’re in the U.S. or have a friend that is, head over to the Google Voice site and register. If you’re living on another continent, see MisterQ’s posting for some tips on getting set up.

You must choose a telephone number (aka DID) for your new account, or Google Voice calling will not work… in either direction. 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 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 PBX in a Flash to function with Google Voice! Otherwise, inbound and/or 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 and enable it. Be sure to try one call each way from Google Chat in Gmail. Then disable Google Chat in GMail for this account. Otherwise, it won’t work with PIAF.

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

Call Screening – OFF
Call Presentation – OFF
Caller ID (In) – Display Caller’s Number
Caller ID (Out) – Don’t Change Anything
Do Not Disturb – OFF
Call Options (Enable Recording) – OFF
Global Spam Filtering – ON

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.

Configuring Google Voice Trunk in FreePBX. All trunk configurations now are managed within FreePBX, including Google Voice. This makes it easy to customize PBX in a Flash to meet your specific needs. Click the Connectivity tab in FreePBX 2.11 and choose Google Voice [Motif]. To Add a new Google Voice account, just fill out the form. NOTE: The form has changed from prior releases of FreePBX. Do NOT check the last box: Send Unanswered to GoogeVoice Voicemail, or you may have problems receiving incoming calls.

Google Voice Username is your Google Voice account name without @gmail.com. Password is your Google Voice password. NOTE: Don’t use 2-stage password protection in this Google Voice account! Phone Number is your 10-digit Google Voice number. Next, check only the first two boxes: Add Trunk and Add Outbound Routes. Then click Submit Changes and reload FreePBX. Down the road, you can add additional Google Voice numbers by clicking Add GoogleVoice Account option in the right margin and repeating the drill. For Google Apps support, see this post on the PIAF Forum.

Outbound Routes. The idea behind multiple outbound routes is to save money. Some providers are cheaper to some places than others. It also provides redundancy which costs you nothing if you don’t use the backup providers. The Google Voice module actually configures an Outbound Route for 10-digit Google Voice calling as part of the automatic setup. If this meets your requirements, then you can skip this step for today.

Inbound Routes. An Inbound Route tells PBX in a Flash how to route incoming calls. The idea here is that you can have multiple DIDs (phone numbers) that get routed to different extensions or ring groups or departments. For today, we’ll build a simple route that directs your Google Voice calls to extension 201. Choose Connectivity -> Inbound Routes, leave all of the settings at their default values except enter your 10-digit Google Voice number in the DID Number field. Enable CallerID lookups by choosing CallerID Superfecta in the CID Lookup Source pulldown. Then move to the Set Destination section and choose Extensions in the left pull-down and 201 in the extension pull-down. Now click Submit and save your changes. That will assure that incoming Google Voice calls are routed to extension 201.

IMPORTANT: Before Google Voice calling will actually work, you must restart Asterisk from the Linux command line interface. Log into your server as root and issue this command: amportal restart.

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.

General Settings. Last, but not least, we need to enter an email address for you so that you are notified when new FreePBX updates are released. In FreePBX 2.11, choose Admin -> Module Admin and click on the Upgrade Notifications shield on the right. Plug in your email address, click Submit, and save your changes. Done!

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!

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.

What’s Next? We’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do with PBX in a Flash. Log into your server as root and type help-pbx for a list of simple install scripts that can add almost any function you can imagine. And Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax can be installed in under 2 minutes to provide you almost every Asterisk application on the planet. You can read the complete tutorial here. In addition, Travelin’ Man 3 can be installed as part of Incredible PBX for rock-solid Internet security. If you care about your wallet, add Travelin’ Man to your server!

New App of the Week. We’re pleased to introduce Trunk Failure Email Alerts for Asterisk supporting SIP, IAX2, and Google Motif trunks. Just insert your email address in this little script and run it every hour as a cron job. You’ll get an email alert whenever any of your VoIP trunks fail. Enjoy!

VoIP Experts on Twitter. GetVoip.com has just released their list of The Top 50 VoIP Experts to Follow on Twitter. It’s a great read… but we may be biased. 😉

Originally published: Monday, October 28, 2013

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The 5-Minute PBX: PIAF-Green Virtual Machine for Windows, Mac, or Linux

Tuesday, October 22, 2013 / 4 Comments on The 5-Minute PBX: PIAF-Green Virtual Machine for Windows, Mac, or Linux

In our never-ending trek to build the Perfect PBX™, we have a sneak peek for you today of the soon-to-be-released PBX in a Flash™ 2.0.6.4.5 featuring CentOS® 6.4 LAMP stack (32-bit), Asterisk® 11.5.1, and FreePBX® 2.11.0.11. The 2.0.6.4.5 release also has a number of new security patches including a new Linux kernel that’s been patched to eliminate the reported zero-day vulnerability. Once you download today’s appliance, you can have a turnkey PBX running under VirtualBox® on almost any desktop computer in less than 5 minutes. We’re not talking about a crippled telephony platform with limited functionality. What you’ll have is the same platform that hundreds of thousands of organizations use to run their corporate phone systems. And, if you want the Incredible PBX™ feature set with literally dozens of open source telephony applications including news, weather, stocks, tide reports, SMS messaging, free faxing with Incredible Fax™, telephone reminders, wakeup calls, and more then just add a couple minutes to run two one-click installers. Welcome to the world of open source!

The real beauty of PBX in a Flash has not been that someone with sufficient expertise couldn’t assemble something just as good or even better. Watch some of the AstriCon presentations if you have any doubts. The beauty of PIAF is it puts this technology down where the goats can get it. It provides a toolset that encourages further development by simplifying the learning curve for a broad cross-section of the VoIP community while not compromising functionality or flexibility. The source code for the major components is included in the build so you can customize and recompile Asterisk or load a new version of Asterisk or any additional Linux app in minutes without losing your existing setup.

If Voice Over IP technology is Greek to you, here’s a new 60-minute video tutorial that will tell you everything you need to know about this exciting, new technology before you begin the actual installation process:

As many of you know, we have literally hundreds of gurus on the PIAF Forum. That doesn’t mean any particular person or group knows everything. It’s merely a designation that a particular individual is an expert at something. The collective wisdom of the group is what makes PBX in a Flash as a project better because we’ve put in place a platform that experts from many different disciplines can build upon without needing to learn everything about everything. Simply stated, you can be a terrific chef without knowing how to build a stove!

Turning to Asterisk® 11 and FreePBX® 2.11, these releases are a remarkable step forward both in terms of toolset and in the amazing stability of the platform. For our part, we want to get our latest release of PBX in a Flash with CentOS 6.4, Asterisk 11.5.1 and FreePBX 2.11 release into as many hands as possible with a near zero investment in hardware and setup time.

The Ultimate VoIP Appliance: PIAF Virtual Machine for VirtualBox

Today brings us to a new plateau in the virtual machine development era. Thanks to the masterful work of Tom King on PBX in a Flash 2.0.6.4.5, we’re pleased to introduce a new product that can be installed in under 5 minutes and will run on any Windows PC, Mac, or Linux machine as well as Solaris. And, unlike the dedicated machine platforms and OpenVZ compromises of years past, today’s PIAF-Green Virtual Machine is state-of-the-art giving you everything a bare metal install from source code would have provided. Most importantly, the components are truly portable. They can be copied to a 4GB flash drive¹ for the price of a good hamburger and installed from there onto any type of machine that happens to be in front of you. Five minutes later, you have a fully functional Asterisk server with FreePBX and exactly the same feature set and source code that you would have had doing a bare metal PIAF install to a dedicated server. And we’ve built this 32-bit production-ready PIAF-Green Virtual Machine with Asterisk 11.5.1 and FreePBX 2.11. No Internet access required to perform the install. Sound too good to be true? Keep reading or, better yet, try the PIAF appliance for yourself. The install process is simple:

Download and install VirtualBox onto a Desktop Machine of your choice
Download and double-click on the PIAF-Green Virtual Machine to import it into VirtualBox
Select the PIAF-Green Virtual Machine in VirtualBox Manager Window and click the Start button

Introducing Oracle VM VirtualBox

We’re late to the party, but Virtual Box®, Oracle’s virtual machine platform inherited from Sun, is really something. It’s not only free, but it’s pure GPL2 code. VirtualBox gives you a virtual machine platform that runs on top of any desktop operating system. In terms of limitations, we haven’t found any. We even tested this on an Atom-based Windows 7 machine with 2GB of RAM, and it worked without a hiccup. So step #1 is to download one or more of the VirtualBox installers from VirtualBox.org or Oracle.com. As mentioned, our recommendation is to put all of the 100MB installers on a 4GB thumb drive. Then you’ll have everything in one place whenever and wherever you happen to need it. Once you’ve downloaded the software, simply install it onto your favorite desktop machine. Accept all of the default settings, and you’ll be good to go. For more details, here’s a link to the Oracle VM VirtualBox User Manual.

Installing the PIAF Virtual Machine

Step #1 is to download the PIAF-Green Open Virtualization Appliance (.ova) from SourceForge.

Step #2: Verify the checksums for the 32-bit .ova appliance to be sure everything got downloaded properly. To check the MD5/SHA1 checksums in Windows, download and run Microsoft’s File Checksum Integrity Verifier.

For Mac or Linux desktops, open a Terminal window, change to the directory in which you downloaded the .ova file of your choice, and type the following commands:
md5 PIAF-Green-32.ova (use md5sum for Linux) openssl sha1 PIAF-Green-32.ova

The correct MD5 checksum for PIAF-Green-32.ova is 7691127afd065412e40429cee49a4738. The correct SHA1 checksum for PIAF-Green-32 is 9b3828649dc9644d046ef83cb227aea4c1473c65.

Step #3: Double-click on the downloaded .ova file which will begin the import process into VirtualBox. It only takes a couple minutes, and you only do it once. IMPORTANT: Be sure to check the Reinitialize the Mac address of all network cards box before clicking the Import button.

Once the import is finished, you’ll see a new PIAF virtual machine in the VM List of your VirtualBox Manager Window. You’ll need to make a couple of one-time adjustments to the PIAF-Green Virtual Machine configuration to account for differences in sound and network cards on different host machines.

Click on the PIAF-Green Virtual Machine in the VM List. Then click Settings -> Audio and check the Enable Audio option and choose your sound card. Save your setup by clicking the OK button. Next click Settings -> Network. For Adapter 1, check the Enable Network Adapter option. From the Attached to pull-down menu, choose Bridged Adapter. Then select your network card from the Name list. Then click OK. That’s all the configuration that is ever necessary for your PIAF-Green Virtual Machine. The rest is automagic.

Running the PIAF Virtual Machine in VirtualBox

Once you’ve imported and configured the PIAF Virtual Machine, you’re ready to go. Highlight PIAF Virtual Machine in the VM List on the VirtualBox Manager Window and click the Start button. The PIAF boot procedure with CentOS 6.4 will begin just as if you had installed PBX in a Flash on a standalone machine. You’ll see a couple of dialogue boxes pop up that explain the keystrokes to move back and forth between your host operating system desktop and your PIAF VM.

Here’s what you need to know. To work in the PIAF Virtual Machine, just left-click your mouse while it is positioned inside the VM window. To return to your host operating system desktop, press the right Option key on Windows machines or the left Command key on any Mac. For other operating systems, read the dialogue boxes for instructions on moving around. Always shut down PIAF gracefully! Click in the VM window with your mouse, log in as root, and type: shutdown -h now.

Run the PIAF Virtual Machine behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet port exposure!

To begin, position your mouse over the VM window and left-click. Once the PIAF VM has booted, log in as root with password as the password. Change your root password immediately by typing passwd at the command prompt. Now set up a secure maint password for FreePBX as well. Type passwd-master. If you’re not in the Eastern U.S. time zone, then you’ll want to adjust your timezone setting so that reminders and other time-sensitive events happen at the correct time. While logged into your server as root, issue this command:
/root/timezone-setup

Next, use a browser to log into your PIAF server by pointing to the IP address of the PIAF VM that’s displayed in the status window of the CLI. Click on the User button to display the Admin choices in the main PIAF Menu. Click on the FreePBX option to load the FreePBX GUI. You will be prompted for an Apache username and password. For the username, use maint. For the password, use whatever password you set up with passwd-master.

Now read the latest PIAF Quick Start Guide and begin your VoIP adventure. Then you’ll want to do some reading on VirtualBox. We’ve barely scratched the surface. Setting up Headless VMs that run in the background on any server is a breeze. From the command line, here’s an article to get you started. But you also can start Headless VMs from within the GUI by highlighting the VM and clicking Shift->Start. Always shut down VMs gracefully: Close->ACPI Shutdown. You’ll find more great tips at virtualbox.org and GitHub.

One of the real beauties of VirtualBox is you don’t have to use a GUI at all. The entire process can be driven from the command line. Other than on a Mac, here is the procedure to import, configure, and run the PIAF-Green-32 Virtual Machine:

VBoxManage import PIAF-Purple.ova VBoxManage modifyvm "PIAF-Green-32" --nic1 nat VBoxManage modifyvm "PIAF-Green-32" --acpi on --nic1 bridged VBoxHeadless --startvm "PIAF-Green-32" & # Wait 1 minute for PIAF-Green to load. Then decipher IP address like this: VBoxManage guestproperty get "PIAF-Green-32" /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/IP # Now you can use SSH to login to PIAF-Green at the displayed IP address # Shutdown the PIAF-Green Virtual Machine with the following command: VBoxManage controlvm "PIAF-Green-32" acpipowerbutton
On a Mac, everything works the same way except for deciphering the IP address. Download our findip script for that.

Adding Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax

You can read all about the Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax feature set in our recent Nerd Vittles article. If you decide you’d like to add one or both to your PIAF-Green Virtual Machine, just log into your server as root and issue the following commands. NOTE: You must install Incredible Fax after installing Incredible PBX, or you will lose the ability to install Incredible PBX at a later time. With Incredible Fax, there are a number of prompts during the install. With the exception of the prompt asking for your local area code, just press Enter at every other prompt.
cd /root wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx11.gz gunzip incrediblepbx11.gz chmod +x incrediblepbx11 ./incrediblepbx11 ./incrediblefax11.sh

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 6.4, 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.

AsteriDex
CallerID Superfecta (FreePBX Module adds Names to CID Numbers)
CallWho for Asterisk (Dial 411)
Digium Phone Support (install-digiphones)
Preconfigured Email That Works with SendMail and Incredible Fax
OSS Endpoint Manager
Extensions (1 preconfigured with random password)
Festival Server and Festival TTS for Asterisk (festival –server &)
Flite TTS for Asterisk
FreePBX Backups
Google Dictionary by Phone (Dial 333)
Google News by Phone (Dial 951)
Google Stocks by Phone (Dial 950)
Google Voice (FreePBX GV/Motif Module)
Hotel-Style Wakeup Calls (FreePBX Module)
Incredible Backups… and Restores (install-incredbackup2)
ISN: FreeNum SIP Calling from Any Phone
MeetMe Conference Bridge (just dial C-O-N-F)
Mondo Full System Backups (install-diskbackup)
Incredible Fax 11 (/root/incrediblefax11.sh)
Incremental Daily Backups (install-dailybackup)
Munin Reports (install-munin)
NeoRouter VPN Client (nrclientcmd)
NewsClips from Yahoo
ODBC Database Support (Dial 222, 223)
OpenFire Instant Messaging & Chat Server (install-openfire)
New PBX in a Flash Registry (show-registry)
PPTP VPN for PIAF (/root/install-pptp)
Reminders by Phone and Web
SAMBA Windows Networking (configure-samba)
SMS Dictator with Google Voice (Dial S-M-S)
Speech-to-Text Directory Assistance (Dial 411)
Stealth AutoAttendant
TFTP Server (setup-tftp)
Tide Reports with xTide (Dial T-I-D-E)
Travelin’ Man 2 & 3 (Secure, remote access)
Trunks (Vitelity, Gtalk, SIPgate, IPkall, VoIP.ms, and more)
Weather by ZIP Code
Worldwide Weather by Phone (Dial 949)
Wolfram Alpha by Phone (/root/wolfram)

Originally published: Tuesday, October 22, 2013

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It’s An Oligopoly, Stupid: What’s Wrong with Comcast Business Class Internet?

Tuesday, October 15, 2013 / 3 Comments on It’s An Oligopoly, Stupid: What’s Wrong with Comcast Business Class Internet?

Let’s begin with what sounds like a fairy tale but turns out to be a nightmare. After watching your country invest hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-subsidized infrastructure, you’ve finally decided it’s time to buy your own car. You visit the only car dealer in town and are told that all vehicles are leased, not sold, for a period of three years. Cars come in three models. Would you like a 200, 300, or 400 horsepower engine? You opt for the 400 horsepower model and, just as your new car sputters off the lot, you discover a 14-page list of Terms and Conditions in your glove box. The document reveals that the manufacturer doesn’t make any guarantees regarding the performance or reliability of your new vehicle. And, if you attempt to return the car in a couple months because of the vehicle’s unreliability or lousy performance, you agree to forfeit 75% of the entire cost of the 3-year lease. And, no, you cannot sublease or even give your crappy purple Scion¹ to somebody else. Aside from the fact that Scion actually makes great automobiles with excellent warranties, the only real difference in this scenario and The World According to Comcast is the fact that, with a car, the item being leased becomes less valuable every day. With Comcast, prices continue to go up, and up, and up…

So perhaps you think the cellphone oligopoly is similar. The Bell Sisters could only wish. With a cellphone plan, the carriers actually subsidize the cost of your discounted cellphone by spreading the cost over a period of two years. Thus, their early termination fees which typically run $200 to $300 are closely tied to recovery of the subsidized cost of your discounted phone. With Comcast, the company is not providing any hardware that you don’t actually pay for either up front or on a pay-as-you-go basis. Build out costs are payable in advance. Cable modems are leased by the month. When you discontinue service, the cable modem is returned and handed out to the next poor ~~sucker~~ customer waiting in line.

[gview file="http://business.comcast.com/docs/smb-pdfs/cbc_terms_020309.pdf"]

Early Termination Fees. So let’s calculate the fee that Comcast could impose if you decide after a couple months that your business can no longer survive on their "Business Class" level of service and performance. On the Business Internet D50 plan (note that there’s no mention in the contract that this has been touted by the sales rep as a 50Mbit down, 10Mbit up Internet service), the "discounted" cost with one static IP address is $125 per month for 36 months = $4,500. You used the service for two months which reduces the lease balance to $4,250. The 75% Early Termination Fee for the service you never used and for which Comcast made no representation as to performance or reliability works out to a whopping $3,187.50. Makes your $125 monthly cellphone bill sound like a bargain, doesn’t it?

According to Craig Moffet, an analyst at the Wall Street firm Bernstein Research, Comcast and Time Warner are making a 97 percent margin on their “almost comically profitable” Internet services. So this is clearly not a case of recovering infrastructure costs. After all, most of those were either paid or subsidized by federal, state, and local governments. This is simply an oligopolist doing what they do best in unregulated local markets with almost zero competition by regulatory design. It’s good old-fashioned price gouging! What a coincidence that Comcast also happens to be one of the "top ten" political contributors in the United States.

Internet Performance. The other glaring problem lies with Comcast selling tiers of service at different price points while providing no assurance that the performance levels will ever be met. We all appreciate that Internet performance can vary; however, the Comcast terms go far beyond that. If Comcast provided a 2400 baud modem level of performance for three years, our reading of the contract terms suggests that Comcast is fully within its rights even though the service was sold as offering 50 megabit download speeds. Comcast’s terms and conditions specifically disclaim any responsibility for achieving any performance measurement ever. In short, the speed designations allow Comcast to charge higher rates without offering anything of contractual value to the customer in return.

How’s the Service? Let us briefly replay the last 8 days of dealing with Comcast Business Class in our office. This all transpired while a Comcast sales rep was pitching a new 3-year contract as the only way for us to decouple our existing Business Class Internet "service" from our residential cable TV bill. This would allow us to once again get business class support without a 30-minute residential support run-around on every Business Class Internet support call, a highly touted (and necessary!) feature that actually worked during the first two years of our first contract.

Sunday, Oct. 6, 6 a.m. – Preparing to leave town for AstriCon 10. Internet dead.
Sunday, Oct. 6, 7 a.m. – Reset cable modem, Comcast tests modem. All fine. Internet still dead.
Monday, Oct. 7, all day – Repeat of Sunday. Internet still dead.
Tuesday, Oct. 8, all day – Same story.
Wednesday, Oct. 9, all day – Same story.
Thursday, Oct. 10, 4 p.m. – Another hour with Comcast support. Will try to schedule visit for Friday.
Friday, Oct. 11, 10 a.m. – Tech arrives. Takes one look at modem and declares the unit defective.
Friday, Oct. 11, rest of day – Internet works.
Saturday, Oct. 12, 6 a.m. – Internet dead. Comcast reports A-OK. Is the modem in bridge mode? Yes.
Sunday, Oct. 13, 3 p.m. – Comcast support: In bridge mode? Ooops. No. Internet finally works.
Monday, Oct. 14, 4 p.m. – Internet dead. Looks like a fiber cut. Offers 1 month Internet credit.
Monday, Oct. 14, 9 p.m. – Internet works.

What Can You Do About It? For openers, raise hell with your favorite Congressman. Assuming he or she didn’t receive a "political contribution," it might actually help. Then write or visit your state and local elected representatives and hand them a copy of this article if you’re too shy to tell your own story. Nearly everybody has a ‘Comcast Story’ to tell. Encourage all of these folks either to open up the marketplace for real competition or to establish local initiatives to bring affordable Internet service to local businesses and communities. Last, but not least, write your local newspaper and encourage them to shine a spotlight on business practices such as these. You might be surprised by the results. If there’s an organization that deserves a lower job approval rating than Congress, we have a tip for you.

What’s Next? We’ve reached out to @ComcastCares for comment. We’ll let you know if there’s a meaningful response.

Originally published: Tuesday, October 15, 2013

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With apologies to Scion that actually makes perfectly functional and dependable automobiles! Listen to the song for details. [↩]

AstriCon 10: WOW! What a Coming Out Party for Asterisk 12!

Friday, October 11, 2013 / 1 Comment on AstriCon 10: WOW! What a Coming Out Party for Asterisk 12!

It was the tenth anniversary of AstriCon in Atlanta this week with an SRO crowd, and what a week it was. Comparing Asterisk® 12 to Asterisk 11 and previous iterations would be much like comparing Windows 8 to Windows 3.1. Facelift doesn’t begin to describe the metamorphosis. There’s a brand new (robust) SIP implementation featuring PJSIP, and a new restful interface known as ARI that lets you get at all of the Asterisk internals with a simple web command. You can transfer calls, play sound files, set up conferences and move participants with the click of a button. Here’s the complete slideshow on Asterisk 12. That’s just the tip of iceberg. Features still are being added almost weekly. Unlike previous releases, there’s no feature freeze in Asterisk 12 so long as the additions are germane to the new functionality already incorporated into Asterisk 12. See the Wiki link for details. And the work under the hood really shines. Here’s another shocker. There’s actually documentation. In fact, you can no longer add code to the project without also providing documentation for your code. Yes, this is truly a WOW moment! Think of it more as the Second Coming of Asterisk. Most importantly, the alpha release was relatively stable! And now there’s a beta.

We were so excited by our preliminary look at Asterisk 12-alpha and the new PIAF-Black (we’re running out of colors) preview that we actually set up our Incredible PBX IVR with news, weather, stocks, reminders, and conferencing in our car for the 5-hour trip to Atlanta. Speech to text works. Text to speech works. In fact, with the exception of CDRs, everything worked with the existing FreePBX® 2.11 dialplan code. The CDR transformation will get sorted out in coming weeks/months with the introduction of FreePBX 2.12. Back to our story, with the help of Verizon Wireless 4G LTE tethering, close to a hundred people called into the demo IVR to try things out for themselves. No crashes, no stuttering, high quality VoIP calls. In short, just pure Allison IVR goodness. See if you can find her in the snapshot of your favorite hams.

Monday and Tuesday of AstriCon are primarily devoted to future development goals and objectives. Known as AstriDevCon, the forum is by invitation only to about 50 developers. We were fortunate to be included this year, but the work of the group is no secret. You can review exactly what was said and where we’re headed in this Wiki posting of the meeting. The good news is there will be more meat on the bones of Asterisk 12. And our security recommendations regarding incorporation of Fail2Ban-like functionality directly into Asterisk made the list. This means attacks and vulnerabilities can be identified in real time rather than delaying a response until Fail2Ban has had time to scan your logs for nefarious activity. We also were heartened to see almost a third of AstriCon presentations devoted to beefing up security on Asterisk systems. We’ll have more to say about those discussions as well as some recommendations in coming weeks.

WebRTC also was a big hit at AstriCon 10. This provides the functionality to make and receive phone calls to Asterisk-based systems using nothing more than a web browser. A WebRTC implementation for FreePBX-based systems including PBX in a Flash is just around the corner. Some of you may recall that we released a WebRTC appliance based upon PBX in a Flash last winter. It will run on any Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop so read the tutorial and download away for a quick preview of what’s coming.

We were especially pleased to review Steve Murphy’s new SayScript proposal for Asterisk 13. In a nutshell, this would transform all "say" commands with prerecorded sound files into pluggable modules with translation to any language on the fly. "Language packs" would be developed that include script files, prompts, and SayScript logic to handle almost any speech chore in Asterisk. Think of it as Text-to-Speech on Steroids. Here’s a complete copy of Steve’s presentation in PDF format if you’d like more details.

Last but not least, Schmooze introduced a new fault-tolerant, high availability commercial module for FreePBX that brings complete redundancy to the Asterisk platform for the first time. Until October 15, you can purchase the two-node system for half-price, just $1,500. Be sure to let them know your friends at Nerd Vittles referred you so that we can keep the lights on for another year. And keep us posted during your deployment.

Originally published: Friday, October 11, 2013

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Finally a 100% Portable PBX: Introducing GoIP, a SIP-GSM Gateway for Asterisk

Monday, September 30, 2013 / 15 Comments on Finally a 10015 Portable PBX: Introducing GoIP, a SIP-GSM Gateway for Asterisk

How far we have come! The original Asterisk® claim to fame was its ability to interface with proprietary phone systems and legacy telephony hardware, the glue that literally kept companies stuck to their overpriced PBXs. And, just as wired phone systems began to lose their edge, along came the Bell Sisters to introduce cellular communications with billing that began when the phone started ringing and an end to toll-free calling and extra fees for text messaging on top of exorbitantly priced data service. The piece that traditionally has been missing from Asterisk deployments has been interconnectivity with cellular data services. Well, that was then, and this is now. Meet the GoIP GSM Gateway in one, four, eight, and 16-channel flavors to meet your every need. Our focus today will be the one-channel GoIP device, but the larger units work almost identically so, once you’ve mastered the device, it’s not rocket science to move to the 4-channel or 8-channel device (or even larger) if the extra GSM ports better meet your office’s requirements.¹

Let’s begin with the basics. What does it do? What does it cost? Why do I need it? How steep is the learning curve?

What Does It Do? In a nutshell, GoIP is a SIP-talkin’ GSM gateway that sits on the same network as your Asterisk server. Once you configure a trunk and a few special Asterisk settings to support SMS messaging, you’ll have another full-featured provider for your PBX, only this one happens to be GSM cellular-based. The good news is GoIP brings to your PBX most of the same feature set that is available using your favorite GSM cellphone except now every extension on your PBX in a Flash™ server can share the cellular connection both for calls and messaging. That means inbound and outbound cell calls as well as inbound and outbound SMS messaging for every extension on your PBX.

With today’s Nerd Vittles additions, here’s the new feature set using a GoIP device from any extension on your PBX:

Make outbound calls through the GoIP cellular trunk from any PBX extension
Receive incoming cellular calls and redirect them to any number on your PBX
Dictate text by phone and deliver SMS messages to any SMS-capable device
Use a browser to create and deliver outbound SMS messages to any SMS device
Receive incoming SMS messages and forward the messages to any email address
Receive incoming SMS messages and forward the messages to any SMS number
Send an SMS message with a password and receive a callback with DISA dialtone

What Does It Cost? As much as we love Amazon for its referral revenue support of our blog and open source projects, we couldn’t find a single-channel GoIP offering at a reasonable price. The Amazon links provided above for the larger units are competitive (about $100 per port). For the single-channel model, eBay® is your friend. You’ll find multiple providers in the $150 price range. All of the units we’ve found ship from China. We used this provider who got the GoIP device to us exactly 14 days after we ordered it. Ours shipped with the latest firmware, but firmware updates are available here. AliExpress also sells the devices for about the same price. We’ve had good luck with them in the past.

The other expense with the GoIP devices is cellular service. For each channel, you’ll need a GSM SIM card just like what your GSM, AT&T, or T-Mobile cell phone uses. The good news is there are lots of other choices now. See WalMart for some options. Another option for low frequency use would be T-Mobile’s pay-by-the day plans. The $1 (unlimited SMS messaging) or $2/day (unlimited calls and unlimited SMS messaging) plans are almost perfect since you don’t need data. Just be sure to choose a GSM carrier, AT&T or T-Mobile in the U.S. market. Both are supported by StraightTalk. Our favorite remains the (almost) unlimited calling, text, and data $45 plan from StraightTalk. With their AT&T-compatible SIM (don’t buy it in a StraightTalk-locked phone!), it’s a simple matter of moving the SIM card from your cellphone to the GoIP’s GSM slot (connectors facing down). The GoIP unit can spoof an IMEI for picky providers.

Why Do I Need It? The two major advantages of adding a cellular trunk to your PBX are redundancy and portability. Except in the Hurricane Katrina situation, chances are that your Internet service provider and your cellular provider won’t both be dead in the water² at the same time. The good news is that even with a hurricane, you can pack up your PBX in a Flash server or Raspberry Pi together with your GoIP device and move to higher ground. As fast as you can say "George Bush is a compassionate conservative," you’ll be back in business.

And then there are the mobile users such as construction site workers, mobile firefighters deployed to a site far from home and other first responders, or even the nomads that manage conventions in a different town every week. Think AstriCon! Rather than relying on crappy hotel WiFi service or paying an arm and a leg for installation of cable or DSL Internet service which often isn’t available anyway, now you have the flexibility to deploy a full-featured PBX at almost any temporary site with nothing more than a $30 Wi-Fi firewall/router, a PBX in a Flash Server or Raspberry Pi, and a GSM SIP trunk courtesy of GoIP. The only other ingredient you need is a little electricity. That could be a wall outlet, or a generator, or an inexpensive AC inverter for your vehicle. Did we mention it’ll work identically on the next site without spending an extra nickel. Hardware cost for the Mobile Communications Center (as shown below): about $250.

Last but not least are all of the organizations that could benefit from an SMS-based emergency messaging service. A dollar a day is a small price to pay to deploy a service that can alert the public, employees, or parents and students of emergency situations. Before you read about the next mass shooting or midnight tornado, give it some thought. We’ve already introduced SMS Blaster to make the job easy. Or you can roll your own by building a simple text file in /tmp/callees.txt with a 10-digit³ callee’s phone number on each line. Then add the following snippet to your Asterisk dialplan code and put your emergency message in line 2. You’ve just replaced a $100 a month message blasting service with a totally portable, self-managed solution. And you’ll recover your hardware costs in less than three months.

[goip-sms-blaster] exten => s,1,Answer exten => s,n,Set(SMSMSG="Here is where your emergency message goes.") exten => s,n,ReadFile(callees=/tmp/callees.txt) exten => s,n,Set(callees=${URIENCODE(${callees})}) exten => s,n,Set(callees=${REPLACE(callees,%0A,-)}) exten => s,n,Set(SMSNUM=${callees:0:10}) exten => s,n,While($[${LEN(${SMSNUM})}>9]) exten => s,n,NoOp(Here's where we send SMS message to: ${SMSNUM}) exten => s,n,Set(SMSOUT=${SMSNUM}%0A${SMSMSG}) exten => s,n,Set(SMSOUTRAW=${URIDECODE(${SMSOUT})}) exten => s,n,Set(MESSAGE(body)=${SMSOUTRAW}) exten => s,n,MessageSend(sip:goip_1) exten => s,n,Set(callees=${callees:13}) exten => s,n,Set(SMSNUM=${callees:0:10}) exten => s,n,Set(SMSNUM=${REPLACE(SMSNUM,-,0)}) exten => s,n,EndWhile() exten => s,n,Hangup()

How Steep Is the Learning Curve? Lucky for you, you’re not going to have to worry about the learning curve. After all, that’s why you come to Nerd Vittles, isn’t it? We’ve spent the better part of a week getting the GoIP to sit up and bark. If you’re a slow typist, it might take you 10 minutes to get everything set up and functional once you have your GoIP device and SIM card in hand. When we’re finished, you’ll have an easy way to make and receive calls through your GoIP device using any extension on your PBX. And you’ll have a simple utility to send and receive SMS messages. In fact, you’ll be able to dictate your SMS messages from any phone connected to your PBX and send them out to any number supported by SMS including the millions of Google Voice numbers. Last but not least, we’ll provide a utility to send password-protected SMS messages to GoIP and receive a return call with DISA dial tone to make outbound calls using any available trunks on your PBX.

A Word About Security. We’re a little paranoid when it comes to security so bear with us. Without impugning anyone’s integrity, suffice it to say this device is manufactured in China. Although the device reportedly runs Linux, none of its other firmware is open source, at least not that we could find. There also are three back doors into the system which can be triggered by SMS commands to the device itself. These are well documented in the GoIP User’s Manual. Whether there are other backdoors or whether the device "phones home" are questions we have neither the time nor the money to explore. Unless you do, you are well advised to treat the device in the same way you would treat a new employee on their first day at work. Don’t put the device on a private LAN in which other computers or devices on the LAN are not protected. Don’t use a SIM card with an automatic renewal feature or with authority to post charges against your credit or debit card. Change your Admin password to the device immediately. Don’t use a password you use elsewhere! Anyone can reset the device to factory defaults by knowing the default credentials and sending RESET admin in an SMS message to the device. We love the device, but be careful.

Initial Setup of the GoIP Device

To begin, you’ll need cellphone coverage in the place where you intend to connect your GoIP device. Verify this while the SIM card you plan to use is still installed in a working cellphone. Make a call and send an SMS message to verify that the site is appropriate. Next, verify that you have a place to connect your GoIP device to your LAN in the same location. Both of these are important first steps, or you’ll be wasting your time continuing on. Once the connectivity issues are out of the way, turn off your cell phone, remove the GSM SIM card, and insert it into the GoIP device with the connectors pointing downward. You should hear a click when the SIM card is properly seated. Now connect the device behind a hardware-based firewall/router that provides DHCP service. Plug an Ethernet cable into the LAN port of the GoIP device and connect it to your network. Finally, using the power adapter provided, apply power to the device. Watch the blinking lights. While booting the RUN light will flash on and off every 100 milliseconds. Once the RUN and CHANNEL lights flash GREEN once per second, you’re in business. Now use another cellphone to send a text message with the word INFO to the phone number associated with the SIM card you plugged into the GoIP Device. You should receive a return message telling you the DHCP LAN address associated with the GoIP CHANNEL port where you plugged in the SIM card. Write it down! We’re not going to use the PC port so you can ignore its IP address for now.

Asterisk Prerequisites for Today’s GoIP Project

We’ll be using PIAF-Green with Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 2.11 today so you’ll have to read between the lines if you’re using a prehistoric release or a non-FreePBX system. We’re also assuming you’ve installed Incredible PBX™ 11 which provides the necessary components to get Google’s text-to-speech and speech-to-text features working. If you’d prefer to roll your own, then start by installing Lefteris Zafiris’ GoogleTTS and Speech Recognition components for Asterisk. For PBX in a Flash users that aren’t using Incredible PBX, you can follow this tutorial to install all of the necessary components in one click.

Initial Setup of FreePBX for the GoIP Device

We’ve found that it’s easier to configure the FreePBX® side to support the GoIP, and then configure the GoIP unit. There are seven simple steps. If you don’t want SMS DISA callback support in your setup, skip the last two steps.

Add GoIP SIP Trunk
Add Custom SIP Settings
Add GoIP Outbound Route
Add GoIP Custom Destination
Add GoIP Misc Application
Add GoIP DISA Context
Add GoIP DISA Misc Application

1. Start by adding a new SIP Trunk to support the GoIP device. Be sure to match the device names we’ve shown exactly, or nothing will work. Our special thanks to samyantoun for his initial work on this. Replace 192.168.0.107 with the IP address of your GoIP. Replace 77 with whatever dialing prefix you want to use to make calls through the GoIP trunk. And add the phone number associated with your GoIP in the Outbound CallerID field. If you’re using the GoIP device behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet port exposure, then you can leave password as the secret. Otherwise, you would want something very secure!⁴

2. Add a couple of custom SIP entries at the bottom of Asterisk SIP Settings to support SMS messaging with Asterisk. Set accept_outofcall_messages=yes and outofcall_message_context=sms_message. Then Submit Changes.

3. Add an Outbound Route to make calls using your GoIP device using the dial prefix you chose for the trunk:

4. Next we need to add a FreePBX Custom Destination to support the Nerd Vittles speech-to-text module which we’ll be using to dictate and send SMS messages using any telephone on your PBX. Under Admin -> Custom Destination, add an entry that looks like this:

5. Then we need to associate an extension number with the custom destination we just added. We’ve chosen 4647 which spells GoIP. Choose Applications -> Misc Application and enter the following:

6. DISA is an Asterisk function that lets someone call into your PBX and obtain dial tone to place an outbound call using the available trunks on your PBX. In the case of the GoIP device, this gets a little fancier. We’ll actually be sending an SMS message with a custom password to the GoIP device, and it will in turn call the SMS sender’s number and provide DISA dialtone after the user enters a special DISA PIN. Make the PIN and password very secure. We’ll get to the password in a minute. On the FreePBX side, add a DISA context in FreePBX under Applications -> DISA that looks something like the following with a secure PIN (not the one in the example):

7. In order to use DISA with GoIP, we’ll need an extension associated with the DISA function. We add this number using FreePBX Misc Application. You can use any available extension number you like. Just remember what you chose when we configure the GoIP side to support SMS DISA access. Here’s what we use:

Configuration of the GoIP Device

All of the GoIP device configuration is handled using a browser pointed to the internal IP address of the GoIP. If you haven’t already done so, send an SMS message with the word INFO to the phone number associated with your GoIP device. You will get a return message with the private IP address of the unit. Using a browser, point it to the IP address and login with username admin and password admin. It’s probably a good idea to reset your unit to factory defaults before beginning the setup just to make sure you’re starting with a clean slate. Send an SMS message to the device with the words RESET admin to initialize the hardware.

As we’ve mentioned, sending the admin password to the device with the RESET keyword forces a total reset of the device so you obviously want to change this admin password immediately unless you want to risk a total stranger sending a reset command to your device. Do it now under Tools -> Change Password -> Administration Level. It’s probably a good idea to change the other passwords as well.

Next, click Configurations. This is the screen on which you set everything. The Preference pane has the country-specific settings for both the network and your cellphone carrier so set them carefully. The IMEI will default to the actual IMEI of your unit. If your cellphone carrier requires registration of a specific IMEI before your SIM card will work, then you can spoof the IMEI using the IMEI of the cell phone that was previously used with this SIM card. For the East Coast of the United States, our setup looks like this:

If you’re using DHCP for the GoIP, the Network Configuration pane shouldn’t require any changes. We do recommend that you lock the DHCP address to the GoIP in your router so that it doesn’t inadvertently change down the road. You will note that a PPTP VPN tunnel for the device is supported although we haven’t yet played with it.

The Call Settings pane has all of your SIP settings for the GoIP. These have got to be right or nothing will work. Our setup (that works) is shown below. Start by clicking on each of the Settings and Preferences links to open up the sub-menus. Both 192.168.0.180 entries should be replaced with the IP address of your Asterisk server. The Phone Number and Authentication ID both need to be goip_1 as shown. The password is password unless you changed your secret in the FreePBX trunk setup. DTMF Signaling should be changed to Outband and DTMF Type should be RFC2833. Ours still doesn’t work reliably, but that may be the lousy cellphone signal in our office. We recommend ULAW and ALAW exclusively for the Audio Codecs. You don’t want the overhead of codec translation particularly if you’re using a Raspberry Pi. On a normal server, G.729 would obviously reduce the bandwidth of GoIP voice calls. Get it working first and then experiment! The RTP port range should be 10000-20000 to match your Asterisk default setup.

The Call Divert pane is where we configure all of the Nerd Vittles magic. Forward Number(PSTN To VoIP) should be the number on your PBX to which you want inbound GoIP calls forwarded when someone calls the cellphone number associated with your GoIP device. This could be an extension, ring group, IVR, or even the DISA number we set up above. Just be sure you have a verrrrrry secure DISA PIN if you go this route! It’s your phone bill. The SMS Mode must be changed to Relay, and SMS Forward SIP Number must be s to work with the Nerd Vittles apps.

Once you have all of your settings entered, click the Save Settings link under Configurations. The unit will reload its SIP setup. It usually takes about 30 seconds. We recommend you now test the setup to make sure you can make a call to the GoIP number and have it forwarded to an extension on your Asterisk server. Then use an extension on your PBX to place an outbound call using the GoIP dial prefix you assigned above. If either call fails, check your settings for typos in both the FreePBX and GoIP configurations.

Adding the Nerd Vittles Apps to Support the GoIP Device

Now for the fun stuff. We’ve built a little shell script that sets up all of the Nerd Vittles applications we outlined above. It’s licensed as GPL2 code so you are more than welcome to make any changes or additions which you believe would be useful. We hope you’ll share them with the rest of us. The script puts everything in the proper place on Incredible PBX systems to support SMS messaging with Asterisk. You’ll be prompted for the following information:

Email address to which to forward incoming SMS messages
SMS number to which to forward incoming SMS messages
Very secure password to trigger PBX callbacks
Extension number to ring on callbacks

1. When incoming SMS messages are received by the GoIP unit, Asterisk will forward them to this email address.

2. When incoming SMS messages are received by the GoIP unit, Asterisk will forward them to this SMS number. You can disable either the forwarding email address or the forwarding SMS number (not both!) by editing the [sms_message] context in extensions_custom.conf and commenting out either of these lines with a semicolon:

exten => s,n,system(echo "SMS Message From ${SMSDID}: ${SMSMSG}"...
exten => s,n,MessageSend(sip:goip_1)

3. This password is what must be sent as an SMS message to the GoIP device to trigger a return call from Asterisk. Do NOT include any spaces in the password and make it very secure!

4. This is the extension number that will be used to place the return call from Asterisk. For DISA service, it would be 3172 in today’s setup. It could also be a regular extension on your PBX if you simply want to trigger a return call from your home or office extension when you send this password via SMS to the GoIP device. Note that the home or office extension must answer the call before the return call will be placed to your SMS device or phone.

Installation. To install the components (a one-minute job!), log into your server as root and issue the following commands:

cd /root rm GoIP-install.sh wget http://incrediblepbx.com/GoIP-install.sh chmod +x GoIP-install.sh ./GoIP-install.sh

If you ever need to make changes to your setup, just run the script again and answer the prompts.

Kicking the Tires. To make sure everything is working, try sending an SMS message to the GoIP with your secret password from #3 above. You should get a return call within 30 seconds. Next, from an extension on your PBX, dial 4647. Dictate a brief message and then enter a phone number for delivery of the message via GoIP to some SMS device (not your GoIP unit!). Finally, send a "Hello World" SMS message to your GoIP device. It should be forwarded to both your email address (#1) and SMS number (#2) within a few seconds. Enjoy!

Deals of the Week. There’s still an amazing deal on the street if you hurry. A new company called Copy.com is offering 20GB of free cloud storage with no restrictions on file size uploads (which are all too common with other free offers). Copy.com has free sync apps for Windows, Macs, and Linux systems. To take advantage of the offer, just click on our referral link here. We get 5GB of extra storage, too, which will help avoid another PIAF Forum disaster.

Originally published: Monday, September 30, 2013

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

We are pleased to once again be able to offer Nerd Vittles’ readers a 20% discount on registration to attend this year’s 10th Anniversary AstriCon in Atlanta. And, if you hurry, you also can take advantage of the early bird registration discount. Here’s the Nerd Vittles Discount Code: AC13NERD.

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Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

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. [↩]
With apologies for the tasteless photo and pun. [↩]
The length of the phone numbers obviously can be adjusted to meet your local requirements. Just replace the 10’s with the length of the phone numbers you wish to use. Then replace 13 with 3 more than the phone number length you chose. [↩]
We have engineered today’s GoIP solution for users in the U.S. and Canada. It obviously will support international deployment as well by making adjustments to the dial strings and cellphone settings in both the FreePBX and GoIP configurations. [↩]

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