freepbx – Page 36 – Nerd Vittles

Another Feather in the VoIP Cap: Fedora 20 Comes to PBX in a Flash

Monday, June 16, 2014 / 1 Comment on Another Feather in the VoIP Cap: Fedora 20 Comes to PBX in a Flash

Summer has always been the season for experimentation at Nerd Vittles, and 2014 is shaping up to be a banner year. Red Hat® has been a pioneer in all things Linux® so we were anxious to take their latest technologies for a spin. Nothing sums up Fedora™ 20 better than Cubieboard’s graphic (shown above). For those new to open source, Fedora is where the Bleeding Edge action is. If you like roller coasters and fast cars, then you’ll feel right at home with Fedora 20. Suffice it to say it’s the 10th year anniversary edition and the twentieth release of Fedora. What’s new? Well, almost everything. At the desktop level, you’ll be struck by how quickly Fedora components are closing the gap on Windows® and Mac OS X®. In particular, the new LibreOffice™ office suite will leave you wondering whether your favorite word processor has been ported to Linux. It’s that good. And graphics support in Firefox® is every bit as good as any browser you’re currently using on any platform. Of particular interest to us was Fedora’s new support for the Cloud and more important to VoIP, the ARM® platform. This opens up exciting possibilities with the Raspberry Pi® and especially the third generation BeagleBone Black® with its new 4GB flash drive. Is that enough trademark symbols for you? If we missed any owned Word®, our apologies. Yes, you all own your brand names. And no, we didn’t invent any of this. We’re in the aggregation business, trying to make all the pieces work together. For a look at everything new in Fedora 20, be sure to read Danny Steiben’s terrific review. While there still are a few rough edges, it’s actually a much better product than the graphic above might lead you to believe. Here is sample displaying a favorite webcam site, ours.

What does all of this have to do with VoIP? Everything. Fedora is where RedHat experiments with new technologies that ultimately find their way into Enterprise Linux® releases.¹ With last week’s release of RHEL 7, CentOS™ 7 cannot be far behind. And much of the new Linux technology found in Fedora will be coming to a VoIP desktop or Cloud near you very soon. So it was important for us to see just how well Asterisk® and FreePBX® perform using the current PBX in a Flash™ installer. If you’re one who likes to read the last page of a book first, we’d give Fedora 20 an A-. And we don’t give out many A’s.

Our tasks for today are three-fold. We’ll show you how to install PBX in a Flash on top of an existing Fedora 20 installation. Then we’ll show you how to roll your own Fedora Remix, a generic operating system that you can embellish and redistribute to your heart’s content (pursuant to GPL2) without worrying about RedHat’s legal beagles. Finally, we’ll provide a Fedora Remix appliance for VirtualBox® that will let you deploy and play with Fedora 20 and PBX in a Flash on your favorite desktop computer. The complete appliance setup takes less than 5 minutes on almost any Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop.

Installing PBX in a Flash Atop Fedora 20 or Fedora Remix

Before you can install the latest PBX in a Flash aggregation, you’ll first need an operating system platform on which to run it. In the case of Fedora 20, that means downloading and installing the Live Media Desktop Edition. For today, we’ll assume you’re installing Fedora 20 on VirtualBox, but any relatively recent desktop computer should work equally well.

You actually have two choices for your operating system: the Fedora 20 platform described above or the PIAF-FC20 Remix which is a superset of that platform. The choice is completely yours. The Fedora Remix is not provided or supported by the Fedora Project. It has been created and is maintained by Ward Mundy & Associates LLC on behalf of the PBX in a Flash Development Team. Download the official Fedora software from here. Or download the PIAF-FC20 Remix ISO from SourceForge.

Let us restate the obvious. This is Bleeding Edge technology. Only deploy it behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet port exposure. It is not safe to deploy this aggregation on the open Internet. It’s your phone bill. 🙂

Create a new Fedora 20 Virtual Machine in VirtualBox:

Type: Linux Version: Fedora RAM: 1024MB Default Drive Options with 20GB+ space Create Settings->System: Enable IO APIC and Disable HW Clock (leave rest alone) Settings->Audio: Enable Settings->Network: Enable, Bridged Settings->Storage: Far right CD icon (choose your ISO) and click Live CD/DVD Start

Install and configure Fedora 20:

Start your Virtual Machine Start Fedora Live (be patient while it loads) Click: Install to Hard Drive Choose Language and Click Continue Click: Install Destination (do not change anything!) Click: Done Click: Continue (to autoconfigure disk) Click: Begin Installation Click: Root Password: password, password, Click Done twice Click: User Creation: admin, admin, password, password, Click Done twice Wait for Software Install and Setup to finish Click Quit Click Activities and Search for terminal Click Terminal icon shutdown -h now Close the VM window and choose Power Off Machine

Adjust Virtual Machine to Remove Live Image:

Settings->Storage: Click on Fedora Live ISO Click: (-) icon to remove Live ISO Confirm: Remove Click: OK Restart Virtual Machine

Fedora 20 Initial Setup:

Accept default kernel for boot Click: Admin user, enter password, Accept Choose Language, Keyboard Ignore Link to Data in Cloud, Next Start Using Fedora Click: X to close Gnome Help window Activities, Search: terminal Click: Terminal icon su root enter your password init 3 login again as root ln -sf /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target /etc/systemd/system/default.target service sshd start chkconfig --level 2345 sshd on ifconfig (decipher IP address for SSH login) shutdown -h now

Once you login with admin:password, the Gnome Desktop will appear. Navigation is similar to a Windows or Mac desktop. Clicking on the Power button and then the Settings icon will bring up the Settings window. Clicking on Activities will bring up the Application list and Search bar. You can drag any of your favorite apps to the left toolbar for quick access. For our purposes, type terminal in the search bar to access a Terminal window. Switch to the root user: su root. And enter your root password. Then complete the steps above to configure Fedora 20 for PIAF installation. You will NOT lose your ability to also use Fedora 20 apps in graphics mode. Switch between modes with init 5 for graphics and init 3 for non-graphics, multi-user mode. PIAF installation and operation requires run level 3. But, once it’s installed and operating, you can easily switch to run level 5 to use desktop applications such as FireFox and LibreOffice. The advantages of a multi-purpose platform for those who travel or for deployment at small remote sites should be obvious. A single computer could be used to provide BOTH desktop computing services as well as a full-featured PBX with secure connectivity to home base.

Preliminary Steps for PIAF3 Installation:

Restart Virtual Machine Login as root using SSH so you can cut-and-paste cd /etc/yum.repos.d # change gpgcheck=0 for all repos yum -y install httpd* php wget nano iptables-services glibc.i686 sed -i 's|SELINUX=enforcing|SELINUX=disabled|' /etc/selinux/config systemctl enable httpd.service systemctl start httpd.service systemctl stop firewalld.service systemctl status firewalld.service chkconfig --level 2345 firewalld off cd /root wget http://pbxinaflash.com/piaf3-install.tar.gz tar zxvf piaf3-install.tar.gz ./piaf3-install

PIAF3 Installation Procedure:

Phase 1: Allow automated install to complete (2,000+ new components) Phase 2: Following reboot, choose option C to exit to command prompt Type: piafdl Flavor: PIAF-Green # expand the size of your SSH window now by doubling its size Enable make menuconfig option: Y Time Zone: your choice FreePBX: 2.11 Master password: your choice When menuconfig opens, press down arrow, right arrow, left arrow, and X Wait for reboot and login again Post-install script will run and leave you with a functional system

Congratulations! Enjoy your new Bleeding Edge VoIP platform.

Rolling Your Own Fedora Remix

We promised you a quick tutorial on building your own Fedora Remix using Fedora 20 as a base. It’s actually pretty easy and can be built using the platform you created above. After logging into your server as root, issue the following commands to create the ISO. When you’re finished, you’ll have the same Fedora Remix ISO that can be downloaded from our SourceForge site.

mkdir /root/remix cd /root/remix yum -y install livecd-tools spin-kickstarts wget http://pbxinaflash.com/piaf-fc20-remix-ks.tar.gz tar zxvf piaf-fc20-remix-ks.tar.gz livecd-creator --config=fedora-live-desktop.ks --fslabel=PIAF-FC20-Remix \ --cache=/var/cache/live

PIAF3 VirtualBox Appliance with Fedora Remix

You may be asking, "Why the knuckle drill with rolling your own remix when Fedora provides the ISO for you?" The short answer is because RedHat has rules (lots of them) on how you can redistribute their open source products (many of which aren’t theirs at all). Most of these rules address which trademarks of theirs can and cannot be used and under what circumstances. For anyone building virtual machines, it’s simply the cost of doing business with RedHat. If it were as easy as removing the fedora-logos, fedora-release, and fedora-release-notes packages and replacing them with the generic-logos, generic-release, and generic-release-notes packages as RedHat’s site suggests, life would be easy. Unfortunately, there are dozens of commingled dependencies that get broken by directly swapping out these RPMs on a live system. While it has never been legally tested, as things stand today, you are forced to build your own ISO with the appropriate packages in order to comply with Red Hat’s licensing rules. Once you’ve done that, then creation of virtual machine appliances with the remix operating system are straight-forward and simple to create. We have built a VirtualBox appliance that will provide you a functional system on any desktop computer in minutes. The .ova appliance (3.1GB) is available for download from SourceForge. For those that want to experiment with this exciting new platform without the installation hassle, this virtual machine appliance is for you. After downloading the .ova image, just follow our previous VirtualBox tutorial to get started. It only takes a couple of minutes. At a minimum, change your root password by running passwd and change your FreePBX maint password by running passwd-master.

What’s Still Broken with PIAF Running Fedora 20

The new PIAF install procedure lets us push the latest fixes to every system as necessary. These always get loaded the first time you log in as root and configure your network for DHCP access, and you can reapply the latest fixes by issuing the command touch /etc/firsttime and then logging out and back into your server as root. With the latest fixes, the bug list is tiny. Apache authentication for FreePBX now works just as it does in all other versions of PBX in a Flash. Simply log into the FreePBX web GUI with username maint and the maint password you set up with passwd-master. The original PIAF status application has been replaced with an interim status app that provides most of the same functionality as the original. Zend Guard loader remains broken because Fedora 20 uses PHP 5.5. It means FreePBX commercial apps will not yet function. With those two exceptions, PBX in a Flash running under Fedora 20 should be indistinguishable from PIAF running on other OS platforms.

We really need your help identifying bugs! Much of this platform will ultimately be part of the new CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 builds. If you happen to stumble upon problems, particularly in FreePBX which now is dependent upon a new version of PHP and the new MariaDB database engine which replaced MySQL, please post a comment on the PIAF Forum AND open a bug ticket in the FreePBX Issue Tracker. The PIAF and FreePBX Dev Teams take all bug reports seriously and appreciate your assistance. Enjoy!

Originally published: Monday, June 16, 2014

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

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

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

Did you happen to notice who is using someone else’s trademark in their brand name? But we digress. [↩]

FMC: The Future of Telephony with Vitelity’s vMobile and Asterisk in the Cloud

Thursday, May 15, 2014

If making phone calls from a web browser is what you’ve always longed for, then you’re in good company with Google and its future direction in the telephony space. Call us old fashioned but this strikes us as a solution in desperate need of a problem. What’s wrong with a Plain Old Telephone or a smartphone for making connections with friends and business associates? The real head scratcher is the fact that the WebRTC and Hangouts push demonstrates that the wizards at Google are seriously out of touch with the next generation. Will our 14-year-old daughter use Skype or Hangouts or FaceTime? Sure. About once a month to chat with Grandma or to interact with cousins scattered around the country, it’s a terrific option. And the same is true in the business community. When you need to collaborate with a half dozen colleagues, conferencing applications are invaluable. But to meet 95% of day in and day out business requirements, a telephone or smartphone is the clear device of choice. So join us today in celebrating the end of Google Voice XMPP service and the beginning of a new and even more exciting VoIP era… sans Google.

#470660911 / gettyimages.com

Of course, if it were up to the next generation, telephone calls might completely disappear in favor of text messaging, Snapchat, Instagram, and any other platform that includes recorded photos or videos. Note the subtle difference. Kids really are not interested in live video interaction. They find posed images that tell a story much more appealing. Why? Because recorded photos and videos let users present their best face, their movie star pose, and their expression of what they want others to perceive they’re really like. In short, live video is too much like real life. Our conclusion for those targeting the next generation is you’d better come up with something better and quite different than Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime.

It’s Fixed-Mobile Convergence, Stupid!

Now let’s return to our primary focus for today, the current business community. Suffice it to say, there are a dwindling number of what we used to call "desk jobs" where an employee arrives at his or her desk at 9 a.m. and leaves at 5 p.m. As more and more jobs are headed off shore, the telephone and smartphone have replaced the corporate desk as the most indispensable corporate fixture. Particularly in the American marketplace, what we see with most businesses is a management layer and an (upwardly) mobile force of salespeople, consultants, and implementers that interact primarily through PBXs in an office headquarters or home office together with smartphones for those that generally are on the road. Many of these Road Warriors don’t even have a home phone any longer.

#185230942 / gettyimages.com

The telephony Holy Grail for this new business model is Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC). It’s the ability to transparently move from place to place while retaining your corporate identity. Every employee from the night watchman in Miami to the salesperson making calls from a Starbucks in California to the CEO in New York has an extension on a PBX in the cloud together with the ability to accept and place calls using the company’s CallerID name and number, transfer calls, and participate in conference calls regardless of whether the phone instrument happens to be a desktop phone or a smartphone. Is this even possible? Well, as of last week, the answer is ABSOLUTELY.

Vitelity has been a long-time corporate sponsor of both the Nerd Vittles and PBX in a Flash open source projects so we were thrilled when we were offered a free, Samsung Galaxy S III to try out the new (live) vMobile service that took Best in Show honors at ITEXPO Miami in January. As Vitelity’s Chris Brown would probably tell you, it’s one thing to demonstrate a new technology at a trade show and quite another to bring it into production. But Vitelity did it:

What we want to stress up front is that we’ve received no special treatment in getting this to work. We received the phone, opened a support ticket to register the phone on Vitelity’s vMobile network, and plugged our new credentials into the phone so that it could be integrated into our PBX in a Flash server. Once the smartphone became an extension on our PBX, we could place calls through our PBX with the S3 using both WiFi and Sprint 3G/4G service. Switching between WiFi and cellular is totally transparent. The CallerID for all outbound calls was our standard PBX CallerID. We also could place calls to other extensions on the PBX by dialing a 4-digit extension while connected to WiFi or the Sprint network virtually anywhere. If you have 3-digit extensions, those are a problem over the Sprint network but we’ll show you a little trick to get them working as well.

Keep in mind that every call from the S3 goes out through the PBX just as if you were using a standard desktop phone as a hardwired extension. And it really doesn’t matter whether the S3 has a WiFi connection or a pure cellular connection on Sprint’s network. You receive calls on the S3 in much the same way. It’s just another extension on your PBX. If you want to add it to a ring group to process incoming calls, that works. If other users on your PBX wish to call the S3 directly using the extension number, that works as well. If you want to transfer a call, pressing ## on the S3 initiates the transfer just as if you were using a phone on your desk. When we say transparent convergence, we really do mean transparent. No recipient of a call from the vMobile S3 would have any idea whether you were sitting at a desk in the corporate headquarters in New York or in a seat on a Delta jet after landing in San Francisco. Both the call quality and the corporate CallerID would be identical. And your secretary on maternity leave at Grandma’s house still could reach you using her vMobile S3 by simply dialing your corporate extension.

So that’s the Fortune 500 view of the new VoIP universe. How about the little guy with a $15 a month PBX in a Flash server in the RentPBX cloud¹, a couple mobile sales people, and a handful of construction workers that build swimming pools for a living? It works identically. Each has an S3 connected as an extension on the PIAF cloud server. And calls can be managed in exactly the same way they would be handled if everyone were sitting side-by-side at desks in an office headquarters somewhere. The silver lining of cloud computing is that it serves as the Great Equalizer between SOHO businesses and Fortune 500 companies. Asterisk® paired with inexpensive cloud hosting services such as RentPBX lets you mimic the Big Boys for pennies on the dollar. We think Vitelity has hit a bases loaded, home run with vMobile.

vMobile Pricing

We know what you’re thinking. "Since you got yours for free, what does it really cost??" The Galaxy S3 (or S4) is proprietary running Trebuchet 1.0, a (rooted) CyanogenMod version of Android’s KitKat. You can purchase these devices directly from the Vitelity Store. Currently, you can’t bring your own device. The refurbished S3 is $189 including warranty. Works perfectly! That’s what we’re using. Next, you’ll need a vMobile account for each phone. Unless you’re a Nerd Vittles reader, it’s $9.95 per month. That gets you free WiFi calling and data usage anywhere you can find an available WiFi hotspot. And text messaging is free. For calls and data using Sprint’s nationwide network, the calls are 2¢ a minute and the data is 2¢ per megabyte ($20 per gigabyte). For us, a typical day of data usage with an email account and light web use costs about a quarter. YMMV! So long as you configure Android to download application updates when connected to WiFi, data usage should not be a problem unless you’re into photos and streaming video. Android includes excellent tools for monitoring and even curbing your data usage if this is a concern.

vMobile Gotchas

Before we walk you through the setup process, let’s cover the gotchas. The list is short. First, we don’t recommend connecting vMobile devices to a PBX sitting behind a NAT-based firewall, or you may end up with some calls missing audio. The reason is NAT and quirky residential routers. If you think about it, when your S3 is inside the firewall and connected to WiFi, it will have an IP address on your private LAN just like your Asterisk server. When your S3 is outside your firewall on either a cellular connection or someone else’s WiFi network, it will have an IP address that is not on your private LAN. Others may be smarter than we are, but we couldn’t figure a way to have connections work reliably in both scenarios using most residential routers. You can configure your S3’s PBX extension for NAT=No or NAT=yes, but you can’t tell Asterisk how to change it depending upon where you are. One simple solution is to deploy these phones with a VPN connection to your Asterisk server sitting behind a NAT-based firewall. The more reliable solution is to build your PBX in a Flash server in the cloud with no NAT-based firewall. Then use an IPtables WhiteList (aka Travelin’ Man 3) to protect your server. From there, you can either interconnect the cloud-based server with a second PBX behind your firewall, or you can dispense with the local PBX entirely. Either way will eliminate the NAT issues with missing audio. In both cases, use NAT=yes for the vMobile extension.

Another wrinkle involves text messaging. Traditional text messages work fine; however, MMS still is problematic unless you initiate the outbound MMS session with the other recipient. It’s probably worth noting that Google Voice never got MMS working at all despite years of promises. This wasn’t a deal breaker for us, but it’s a bug that still is being worked on.

Finally, there’s Sprint. You either love ’em or hate ’em. We really haven’t used Sprint service in about eight years. In the Charleston area, the barely 3G service still is just as lousy as it was eight years ago. But, if you live in an area with good Sprint coverage and performance, this shouldn’t be an issue for you. And vMobile works fine in Charleston. You just won’t be surfing the web very often unless you have hours to kill… waiting. Additionally, dialing numbers with less than 4 numbers is a non-starter with Sprint, but we’ll show you a simple workaround to reach 3-digit local extensions from your vMobile device below.

With a service as revolutionary as vMobile with Sprint’s new FMC architecture, we can’t help thinking there may be other cellular carriers with an interest in deploying this technology sooner rather than later. But, given the vMobile feature set, Sprint is good enough for now especially when WiFi connectivity is available almost everywhere.

vMobile Configuration at Vitelity

For the Vitelity side of the setup, you first configure your smartphone using the (included) My Phone app. When the application is run, your cellphone number will be shown. Tapping the display about a dozen times will cause the phone’s setup to be reconfigured. Vitelity will provide you the secret key to activate your account. Next, you’ll log into the Vitelity portal and choose vMobile -> My Devices under My Products and Services. The account for your vMobile device will already exist. Clicking on the pull-down menu beside your vMobile device will let you create your SIP account on Vitelity’s server. Enter the IP address or FQDN of your Asterisk server and set up a very secure password. Your username will be the 10-digit phone number assigned to your vMobile phone. Save your settings and then choose the Edit option to view your setup. The portal will display your Username, Password, and FreePBX/Asterisk Connect Host name. Write them down for use when you configure your new extension using FreePBX®.

vMobile Configuration for Asterisk and PBX in a Flash

On the PBX in a Flash server, use a browser to open FreePBX. Choose Applications -> Extensions and add a new generic SIP device. For Display Name and User Extension, enter the 10-digit phone number assigned to your vMobile device. Under Secret, enter the password you assigned in Vitelity’s vMobile portal. Click Submit and reload FreePBX when prompted. Then edit the extension you just created. Set NAT=yes and change the Host entry from dynamic to the FQDN entry that was shown in Vitelity’s vMobile portal, e.g. 7209876542.mobilet103.sipclient.org. Update your configuration and restart FreePBX once again. Finally, from the Linux command prompt, restart Asterisk: amportal restart. If you’re using a WhiteList with IPtables such as Travelin’ Man 3, be sure to add a new WhiteList entry for your vMobile Host entry. Finally, add your vMobile extension to any desired Inbound Routes to make certain your vMobile device rings when desired.

You now should be able to place and receive calls on your vMobile device. If you want to be able to call 3-digit Asterisk extensions on both WiFi and while roaming on the Sprint cellular network, then you’ll need to add a little dialplan code since Sprint reserves 3-digit numbers for emergency services and will reject other calls with numbers of less than 4 digits. Here’s the simple fix. Always dial 3-digit extensions with a leading 0, e.g. 0701 to reach extension 701. We’ll strip off the leading zero before routing the call. The dialplan code below works whether you’re calling a local 3-digit extension or a 3-digit extension on an interconnected remote Asterisk server. Simply edit extensions_custom.conf in /etc/asterisk and insert the following code at the top of the [from-internal-custom] context. Then restart Asterisk: amportal restart. Note that we’ve set this up so that, if you have an extension 701 on both the local server and a remote server, the call will be connected to the local 701 extension. If you have different extension prefixes for different branch offices (e.g. 7XX in Atlanta and 8XX in Dallas), then this dialplan code will route the calls properly assuming you’ve configured an outbound route with the appropriate dial pattern for each branch office.

exten => _0XXX,1,Answer exten => _0XXX,n,Wait(1) exten => _0XXX,n,Set(NUM2CALL=${CALLERID(dnid):1}) exten => _0XXX,n,Dial(sip/${NUM2CALL}) exten => _0XXX,n,Dial(local/${NUM2CALL}@from-internal) exten => _0XXX,n,Hangup

Vitelity vMobile Special for Nerd Vittles Readers

Now for the icing on the cake… We asked Vitelity if they would consider offering special pricing to Nerd Vittles readers and PBX in a Flash users. We’re pleased to report that Vitelity agreed. By using this special link when you sign up, the vMobile monthly fee will be $8.99 instead of $9.95. In addition, your first month is free with no activation fee. We told you last week that there was a very good reason for choosing Vitelity as your SIP provider. Now you know why.

And, if you’re new to Cloud Computing, take advantage of the RentPBX special for Nerd Vittles readers. $15 a month gets you your very own PBX in a Flash server in the Cloud. Just use this coupon code: PIAF2012. Enjoy!

Originally published: Thursday, May 15, 2014

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

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

RentPBX also is a corporate sponsor of the Nerd Vittles and PBX in a Flash projects. [↩]

Beware the Ides of May: It’s Hammertime for Google Voice

Thursday, May 1, 2014 / 8 Comments on Beware the Ides of May: It’s Hammertime for Google Voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyEE0qpfeig

You don’t have to be a soothsayer to appreciate what’s about to happen in the VoIP community. In just two weeks, millions of telephones in the United States are about to go silent. Let’s begin with what we know and don’t know about Google Voice and Google’s May 15 deadline. Google has made it crystal clear that XMPP connectivity to Google Voice is going away on May 15. What that means is that inbound and outbound calling using an XMPP connection to Google Voice will no longer work, period. And the platform really doesn’t matter. That includes Asterisk, FreePBX, FreeSwitch, Yate, and GrooVe IP as well as hardware ATAs such has ObiHai devices. Why? The short answer is because Google says so, and they are/were paying the bills. The longer answer is that companies such as Microsoft and Apple that have proprietary communications platforms were not reciprocating with free connectivity to their services in the same way that Google was providing XMPP service. Another probable reason is that Google was taking a financial bath on Google Voice services which were being abused by many commercial organizations. Reportedly, as many as three to five million DIDs have been handed out as part of the Google Voice project with very little return on investment.

Some have suggested this is just another tempest in a teapot like Y2K. After all, Y2K came and went without many catastrophes. The difference is that businesses spent hundreds of millions of dollars preparing for Y2K to make certain there were no train wrecks. With Google Voice, many individuals have taken the ostrich approach with their heads buried in the sand pretending things are just going to work out. Without some effort on the part of those still using Google Voice, May 15 will be their Julius Caesar moment.

What to Do? One school of thought is that the "old fashioned" Google Voice connections using Python which simulated a web call with Google Chat will still function. If receiving and placing calls using your existing Google Voice numbers matters to you, take the opinions of these self-proclaimed experts with a grain of salt. Here’s what you need to appreciate. First, nobody outside of Google actually knows whether the Python approach will continue to function or not. Second, even if it works on May 15, nothing would preclude Google from making "adjustments" at any time that would disable this functionality. They’ve done it before. They can do it again. And Google has made it abundantly clear that they’re putting an end to the free gravy train. Third, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that PSTN call forwarding using Google Voice may be the next axe to fall. This probably won’t happen on May 15, but who knows. Finally, should you decide to go down this road, be aware that it is a major coding project regardless of your platform. But, if this is the road you wish to travel, you can find some tips on making the transition here. You’ve been warned.

The Smarter Approach. Our recommendations today are limited to those in the United States. Our apologies, but that’s two-thirds of our readership and roughly 95% of those that currently rely upon Google Voice. The same recommendations apply to those in Europe and South America and the Far East if calls to destinations in the U.S. are a major part of your VoIP traffic. What do we recommend? First, become VoIP savvy! The provider you use for outbound calls need not be the provider you use for incoming calls. Not putting all your eggs in one basket is a very good idea in the VoIP world.

Call us Chicken Little if you must, but Outbound Calling with Google Voice is going away on May 15. So, in the next two weeks, you definitely need to come up with an alternative for call terminations in the U.S./Canada market. We think you have two options: purchase an all-you-can-eat plan that includes sufficient outbound calling minutes to meet your existing requirements. Or you can select a provider that offers pay by the minute service for all of your outbound calls. One advantage with most of the pay-by-the-minute providers is that you can set your CallerID as desired. Don’t be misled by the all-you-can-eat claims. Every VoIP provider imposes some sort of cap on outbound calling even if their plan is advertised as "unlimited." If your outbound calling minutes exceed 2000-3000 minutes a month, you’re going to be looking for a new provider within weeks because every provider that we know will drop you like a hot potato when you are no longer profitable in their business model. The other gotcha is that most, if not all, of the all-you-can-eat plans are restricted to residential (non-business) use.

Full Disclosure: We have a favorite all-you-can-eat provider (Vestalink) and a favorite pay-as-you-go provider (Vitelity), and both of them provide some financial support to the Nerd Vittles and PBX in a Flash projects; however, both were our favorites before they provided any support to our projects.

All-You-Can-Eat Calling Plans. We continue to like Vestalink (formerly Obivoice) even though their prices have increased since the release of our original article. That’s actually a good thing. There was no way they could have stayed in business with their original pricing model. On a new 2-year plan with unlimited U.S./Canada inbound AND outbound calls, E911 service, and a free DID in your choice of area codes, the current rate for 24 months is $89.99 which works out to roughly $3.50 a month. The service comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Another option which we previously have covered is a hardware device such as the netTALK Duo. With an upfront $100 hardware investment, you get the same features as Vestalink for $30 a year which works out to less than 10¢ a day. With both services, you have the option of porting your existing Google Voice number for a one-time fee. With Vestalink, you also have the option of spoofing your outbound CallerID number with your existing Google Voice number once it is verified as belonging to you. We prefer the latter approach at least until Google gives some hint that their call forwarding of incoming Google Voice calls is going away. Both services are bargains in our view. But, as we noted, for residential service we still prefer the pure VoIP solution provided by Vestalink.

Pay-As-You-Go Call Terminations. Most of the reputable pay-by-the-minute providers charge between 1¢ and 2¢ a minute for outbound calls with charges billed in 6 to 10-second increments. Unless you make an enormous number of lengthy calls, these rates are a bargain. Vitelity remains our favorite provider primarily because of the flexibility their service offers in setting up multiple sub-accounts for use with Asterisk or FreeSwitch. A sign-up link with a 50% discount on most DIDs is provided here and at the end of this article. We appreciate your support of our VoIP projects!!

While it is not yet officially available, the most compelling reason to switch to Vitelity is vMobile, a new $9.99/month cellphone plan that will integrate your Vitelity cellphone (actually a Samsung Galaxy S III) directly into your Asterisk setup. What that means is calls to extensions on your Asterisk server will also ring on your cellphone. And your cellphone functions exactly like any other extension on your Asterisk server whether you’re operating on 3G, 4G, or LTE networks as well as on WiFi at your home or office. You’ll be able to park calls, transfer calls, set up call monitoring, conferencing, and recording just as if you were on a standard VoIP phone in your home or office. And you can’t beat the price. Inbound and outbound calls on WiFi are totally free. Calls received or placed over what appears to be Sprint’s nationwide network are 2¢ a minute, about the same cost as pure VoIP calls.

For pay-by-the-minute terminations, we always recommend you set up accounts with multiple providers. Then, by setting multiple trunk sequences in your outbound routes, you’ll always have successful calls even when a particular provider happens to have an outage. Other than perhaps a small deposit, redundancy costs you nothing since you only pay for calls that you actually place through each provider. For a current list of our favorite termination providers in both the U.S. and Canada, see this thread on the PIAF Forum.

Handling Incoming VoIP Calls. Here’s the bottom line. The one thing you don’t want to do is risk losing your phone number because of the Google Voice train wreck. We have noticed a dramatic difference in call reliability for incoming calls over the past few months. Perhaps it’s an upstream provider problem… and perhaps not. Whatever the reason, get your phone numbers ported out of Google Voice as quickly as you can. It doesn’t have to be in the next two weeks, but you are well advised to begin the porting process soon. The Nerd Vittles Vitelity link will get you a monthly rate of $3.95 for a Tier A DID with unlimited incoming calls each month and automatic server failover. There are a few less expensive DID providers but, when it comes to our phone number, we’ve always wanted a provider with rock-solid reliability, flexibility, and a proven track record. Vitelity meets those requirements in spades. As we noted at the outset, the other advantage in separating out your inbound and outbound trunks is that, when service gets disrupted (and it happens to the best of providers), you’re not completely dead in the water.

For the short term, so long as you have an existing DID in the U.S. or Canada, you can forward your incoming Google Voice calls to that DID by simply adding it as a call forwarding destination in your Google Voice profile. We also recommend adding your cellphone as an additional call forwarding destination. Finally, be sure to disable the Google Chat option in your Google Voice setup and remove the Google Voice trunk in your FreePBX Google Voice/Motif setup. Good luck!

Originally published: Thursday, May 1, 2014

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

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

4 Months in Paradise: The Return of Free International VoIP Calling

Friday, April 25, 2014 / 1 Comment on 4 Months in Paradise: The Return of Free International VoIP Calling

With the impending implosion of Google Voice, it seemed appropriate to begin our quest for alternative termination providers. One of the real beauties of VoIP technology is you don’t have to put all of your eggs in one basket particularly in the termination department. It costs almost nothing to set up accounts with multiple providers for outbound calling. In addition to redundancy, the other clear advantage in using multiple providers for outbound calls is that you can take advantage of special rates to different destinations. So here’s the bargain of the week. If you have loved ones traveling to South America, Europe or Asia this summer, now’s your chance to sign up for VoIP service with FreeVoipDeal and enjoy four months of free calling to more than 50 countries around the world for every $15 of credits you purchase on their web site. Please note the fine print: "FreeVoipDeal reserves the right after a certain amount of calls to start charging the default rate." There is no mention of what that "certain amount" happens to be. When your free calling finally ends, you can either purchase $15 of additional credits for 120 more "free" days or continue to call all of the previously free destinations for about 2¢ a minute.

The company behind FreeVoIPDeal is betamax which hosts over 30 sites offering varying deals to different countries. BEWARE: The prices change regularly. So a country that’s free today may suddenly cost money tomorrow. How does a mere mortal keep track? Well, betamax probably hopes that you won’t. But an enterprising individual named Robert Siemer has done the work for you. His backsla.sh/betamax web site automatically updates the pricing for all betamax sites every day! If this sounds like a lot of work to save a few cents a minute, you’d be right. And Vitelity which sponsors both the Nerd Vittles and PBX in a Flash projects offers consistently low rates to all of these countries. You’ll find a DID special at the end of this article, and their excellent international rate table is available at this link.

Setting Up an Account. Before you can set up a trunk in PBX in a Flash, you’ll first need to create a FreeVoipDeal account. In the "old days" this required use of their Windows client to obtain your credentials. Now you can simply create an account on the web site at this link. You’ll need either a regular land line or a cell phone number to verify your registration. Once you’re set up and you’ve deposited at least 10 euros (about $15) in your account, it’s time to set up a SIP trunk and outbound route in PBX in a Flash.

Configuring a Trunk with PBX in a Flash. Assuming you already have a phone registered to an extension in PBX in a Flash, it’s a one-minute drill to configure a trunk and outbound route to support FreeVoipDeal. Using a browser, log into FreePBX® using your maint username and password. Choose Connectivity -> Trunks -> Add SIP Trunk. Name the trunk: FreeVoipDeal. For the Dialed Number Manipulation Rules, enter Prepend: 1 and Match Pattern: NXXNXXXXXX. Clear out all of the default entries in Outgoing and Incoming Settings. Then, in Outgoing Settings, enter Trunk Name: freevoipdeal. For the PEER Details, enter the following using your actual account USERNAME and PASSWORD. Then SAVE your settings and reload FreePBX.

username=USERNAME authuser=USERNAME secret=PASSWORD type=peer qualify=yes nat=yes insecure=port,invite host=sip.freevoipdeal.com fromdomain=sip.freevoipdeal.com dtmfmode=auto disallow=all canreinvite=no allow=ulaw

There’s no need to enter a CallerID number. All of the outgoing calls will be delivered as ANONYMOUS. You also won’t need to register with the provider since Asterisk® can handle this on the fly using your credentials entered above.

Configuring an Outbound Route with PBX in a Flash. One more step, and you’ll be ready to start making calls. Choose Connectivity -> Outbound Routes. For the Route Name, enter: FreeVoIPDeal. For the Dial Pattern to make U.S. calls, enter: NXXNXXXXXX. If you want to force callers to dial a prefix to use the FreeVoipDeal trunk, then enter a 9 or some other number in the Prefix field. For Trunk Sequence 0, choose: FreeVoipDeal. Click Submit Changes and restart FreePBX when prompted. You’re done!

Making Your First Call. Using a phone or softphone logged into your server, dial the prefix (if any) plus the 10-digit number of someone in the United States. When the called party answers, make sure you can hear the called party and vice versa. If not, open Settings -> SIP Settings in FreePBX and add your External IP and Local Network settings. Also make certain the NAT entry is set to YES.

Configuring Your Server for International Calls. We do not recommend configuring your server to permit international calls to everywhere. The reason is simple. If strangers manage to access one of your extensions, they can run up your phone bill in a hurry. For this reason, we also strongly recommend that you do not configure automatic credit card replenishment with any VoIP provider!

For international calling, we recommend you add a separate Dial Pattern to both your FreeVoipDeal trunk AND the outbound route for each country code you wish to enable. Here is the complete list of codes. For example, to allow calls to Germany from another country, you’d add 49XXXXXXXXXX, save your changes, and reload FreePBX.

Spoofing Your CallerID. If you first verify that you own a number by using the web portal, you then can spoof the outbound CallerID using the number you verified. Just add the following entries to your trunk settings replacing 9991234567 with your verified CallerID number. Special thanks to @hillclimber on the PIAF Forum for the tip.
fromuser=0019991234567 sendrpid=yes

Originally published: Friday, April 25, 2014

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

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

The Perfect VoIP Sandbox or Is It? Meet Digital Ocean Cloud Hosting

Thursday, April 17, 2014 / 4 Comments on The Perfect VoIP Sandbox or Is It? Meet Digital Ocean Cloud Hosting

After a week of testing, we’re taking a second look at Digital Ocean, a ~~terrific~~ cloud platform for experimenting with VoIP. Our initial testing was performed during a week that many folks were on Spring Break. After Easter weekend, our own testing suggested a very different level of performance. That warranted a more sober reevaluation in our judgment. Before we get to the specifics, let us emphatically stress that we do not recommend Digital Ocean as a long-term, cloud-based VoIP solution because of some mixed reviews on overall service reliability. Go here for details. Our own testing confirms that performance can be problematic because of what looks to be server capacity issues. To their credit, Digital Ocean provides bleeding edge technology which is regularly updated. But, if rock-solid platform stability and reliable performance are your primary requirements, there is no finer service than RentPBX, a long-time supporter and contributor to the PBX in a Flash project. With the PIAF2012 coupon code, your first turnkey PBX in the cloud is still $15 a month with server locations throughout the world. The cost difference is negligible if the quality of your phone calls actually matter to you. RentPBX has a proven record as an extremely reliable provider. And, if your business depends upon reliable VoIP technology, RentPBX remains one of the best bargains on the planet.

For today, we’re exploring Digital Ocean which we believe offers a good platform for learning about Asterisk® and VoIP because of its flexibility in creating and deleting virtual machines in the cloud environment. As you can see from the screenshot above, the base Digital Ocean offering appears to be ideal as a cloud-based Asterisk server. The 512MB memory option with 20GB of SSD storage and a terabyte of monthly bandwidth costs $5 a month. You actually pay $0.007 an hour until you reach the $5 monthly cap. Unfortunately, depending upon server load, performance can be hit and miss.

Digital Ocean calls their images droplets, and you’ll have to pardon us for using the terms interchangeably. The bottom line is we were able to create a PBX in a Flash server with Incredible PBX 11 running atop CentOS 6.5 in less than an hour. And we played with it for another hour. See below for the total cost. Note that the meter continues to run with your droplets until you physically Destroy them from the Digital Ocean Control Panel. What our initial testing did not reveal was that at busy times of the day the droplet creation process can vary from almost instantaneous to a couple of hours.

Getting Started. Let’s walk through the entire process of creating a PBX in a Flash server and adding Incredible PBX 11 using a Digital Ocean droplet, and we’ll assume you hit a Digital Ocean server on a good day. First, you’ll need an account. You can sign up with our referral code and provide a little financial support to the Nerd Vittles project. That doesn’t cost you a dime. Here’s the link. As part of the sign up procedure, you’ll be prompted to enter a coupon code. SSDMAY10 will get you a $10 credit if you hurry. You still need to add at least $5 to your account either using a credit card or PayPal. We strongly recommend that you start with a minimal investment to make certain that Digital Ocean’s performance will meet your requirements. Test it regularly during your free trial period.

Once you’re registered, you can create your first Droplet by clicking on Droplets in the Digital Ocean Control Panel and then clicking the Create Droplet button. You’ll be prompted for a Hostname, the size Droplet you wish to create, the Region for your cloud-based server, and the Image Type for your server. We used PIAF512 for the hostname. The 512MB memory droplet will work just fine for experimentation. Choose a region that’s close to the provider you wish to use for VoIP calls. For the image type, choose a CentOS 6.5 32-bit server. In the Settings, leave Enable VirtIO checked and skip the Private Networking and Enable Backups options for the time being. Click Create Droplet to initiate the droplet build process which takes under a minute. Your new Droplet credentials will be emailed to you when the procedure is complete.

Installing PBX in a Flash. At this point, you have the option of logging into the Droplet from the Digital Ocean Control Panel, or you can use SSH to log in as root using the IP address provided in your Droplet creation email. Once you’ve logged in, issue the following command to set up your new server for the PIAF3 installer:
yum -y install wget nano

Now you’re ready to kick off the PBX in a Flash 3 installation. Here are the commands:
cd /root wget http://pbxinaflash.com/piaf3-install.tar.gz tar zxvf piaf3-install.tar.gz ./piaf3-install

The server will whir away for about 5 minutes (on a good day) configuring a CentOS superset of over 500 additional RPMs to support PBX in a Flash 3. When the setup is complete, your droplet will reboot. Count to 30 and then log back in as root and choose option A to install PBX in a Flash. Then choose PIAF from the menu of choices. Accept the license agreement and select PIAF-Green as your desired flavor. This gets you the latest Asterisk 11 release. When the Configuration Wizard loads, choose N to avoid loading Make MenuConfig for customization of Asterisk. Confirm your choice. At Step 2, choose your Time Zone and confirm your choice. At Step 3, choose FreePBX® 2.11 as your GUI and confirm your choice. At Step 4, create a master password for GUI and utility access. Tap Enter to confirm all of your selections one final time. Then take a coffee break. Depending upon server load, you’ll have a shiny new PBX in a Flash 3 server with CentOS 6.5, Asterisk 11, and FreePBX 2.11 in either 30 minutes (on a good day) or a couple of hours (on a not-so-good time of day).

Installing Incredible PBX 11. Once your server has rebooted following completion of the PIAF install, you’re ready to install Incredible PBX 11. This gets you dozens of preconfigured applications for Asterisk as well as a base configuration of FreePBX. You’ll still need to add a VoIP trunk to handle incoming and outgoing calls as well as configuring a phone to use your extension 701 credentials. Log back into your server and issue the following commands to install Incredible PBX 11:
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx11.gz gunzip incrediblepbx11.gz chmod +x incrediblepbx11 ./incrediblepbx11

You can complete the configuration of your server using the FreePBX GUI. Using a browser, visit the IP address of your server. Click the Users button to display the PIAF Admin Control Panel. Then click the FreePBX option. Log in with username maint and the maint password you created above. Sign up for VoIP service with your favorite VoIP provider. Then create a trunk for that provider or edit and enable one of the preconfigured trunks that’s included in Incredible PBX. Download a softphone to your desktop and configure it using the credentials provided for the 701 extension in FreePBX. Then you’re ready to make your first call. See last week’s Nerd Vittles article for complete details.

Originally published: Thursday, April 17, 2014 Second Look: Wednesday, April 23, 2014

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

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

The 5-Minute PBX: Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax for PBX in a Flash 3

Thursday, April 3, 2014

With the release of version 3 of PBX in a Flash™, it seemed only fitting to reintroduce our one-click wonder that takes advantage of the latest and greatest feature sets in both Asterisk® 11 and FreePBX® 2.11. Incredible PBX™ 11 gives you the best of all worlds plus all of the very best, preconfigured Asterisk applications we could find. And the installer together with all of the apps are pure open source so you can learn how to build a system like this for yourself if that happens to be your thing.

You’ll need two components to get started: a CentOS 6.5-compatible operating system and the latest PIAF-Green which includes Asterisk® 11 and FreePBX® 2.11. Once you have these components in place and before you make any additions to your server, download and run the Incredible PBX 11 installer. If you wish to add fax support, run the Incredible Fax 11 installer. It’s easy enough for a fifth grader! Five minutes later you’re ready to begin the VoIP adventure. It’s FREE!

News Flash: Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax also are available for the $35 Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black.

So what’s included? Dozens of upgraded Asterisk Apps. 9-Layer Security. 20 Preconfigured VoIP Provider Trunks. One-Click Installers for Asterisk.everything. Certified Asterisk support. Google Voice connectivity with Asterisk Motif until May 15. (HINT: It’s time to start looking elsewhere!) Voice-enabled SMS messaging and script-based SMS message blasting. Incredible PBX Automatic Updates. And Incredible Fax™ 11 delivers free faxing with HylaFax™ and AvantFax®. Both the Incredible PBX and Incredible Fax installers now are GPL2-licensed so add all the tweaks you like. And you’re licensed to use our trademarks so long as you retain the original functionality of the Incredible PBX and Incredible Fax collection of applications.

The Incredible PBX 11 Inventory. For those that have never heard of The Incredible PBX, here’s the current 11.9 feature set in addition to the base install of PBX in a Flash with a CentOS 6.5-compatible OS, 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 installation 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)
Download latest Incredible Fax installer: http://nerd.bz/2nSeHKs
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)

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

Creating the Base Linux Platform for PBX in a Flash

We’re not doing anything special here. In fact, you can build your base Linux platform for PBX in a Flash on a standalone server, on a virtual machine of your choice, or in the cloud using a provider such as Amazon or RentPBX. You can use CentOS 6.5, Scientific Linux 6.5, or the PIAF 6.5 OS. The easiest way is documented here because the ISO is the smallest to download and install. The results will be the same with the other Linux OS flavors documented above.

Start by downloading the 32-bit or 64-bit CentOS 6.5 minimal install ISO. You can do exactly the same thing using Scientific Linux if you prefer. The PIAF 3.0.6.5 OS images and torrents for VirtualBox are available on SourceForge. With the ISOs, go through the usual drill of preparing an installer from the ISO. Burn the ISO to a USB Thumb Drive or a CD/DVD using a Mac or Windows machine. With VirtualBox .ova images, you can build a virtual machine in under 2 minutes. So pick your favorite methodology and create your Linux platform on the hardware of your choice. If you want your drive partitions configured without LVM in the standard PIAF2 methodology, follow this tutorial.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Neither CentOS nor Scientific Linux installs with network connectivity enabled. This is one of the primary reasons that we previously have customized CentOS for use with PBX in a Flash. After performing a minimal OS install, log in as root and issue the following commands to prepare your server for PBX in a Flash:
sed -i 's|no|yes|' /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 ifup eth0 yum -y install wget nano

Creating a PBX in a Flash 3.0.6.5 Server

Now you’re ready to install PIAF-Green with Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 2.11. Just download the PIAF3 Installer and run it. It works exactly as it always has. The installer is plain text so feel free to customize it to meet your own requirements. If you need the complete PIAF installation tutorial, jump to this link.
cd /root wget http://pbxinaflash.com/piaf3-install.tar.gz tar zxvf piaf3-install.tar.gz ./piaf3-install

Installing Incredible PBX 11

The installation process is simple. Log into your server as root and issue the following commands:
cd /root wget http://incrediblepbx.com/incrediblepbx11.gz gunzip incrediblepbx11.gz chmod +x incrediblepbx11 ./incrediblepbx11

When the installation finishes, you’ll be prompted whether to install Travelin’ Man 3 and Travelin’ Man 2. As documented below, Incredible PBX is designed for use behind a hardware-based firewall with no Internet port exposure. If you need phones at remote locations that are not behind your firewall, then you also need a way to protect your server from the bad guys since you’ll have to allow port 5060 and 10000-20000 UDP access to your server through the firewall. Travelin’ Man 3 does this by setting up a whitelist of safe Internet addresses and domains. Travelin’ Man 2 lets end-users take control by creating safe IP addresses using a web browser. If you don’t have external phones, you don’t need either of these resources so you can just cancel the rest of the Incredible PBX install by pressing Ctrl-C. Then restart Asterisk with this command: amportal restart.

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

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

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

Hardware-based Firewall
IPtables
Fail2Ban
Randomized Extension Passwords
IP-Address Lockdown for Extensions
Travelin’ Man 2 User-Managed WhiteList
Travelin’ Man 3 Administrator-Managed WhiteList
NeoRouter VPN
PPTP VPN

Prerequisites. For standalone hardware buffs, here’s what we recommend to get started properly:

Broadband Internet connection
$200 Dual-Core Atom PC, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD (no moving parts!)
dLink Router/Firewall. Low Cost: $35 WBR-2310 Best: DGL-4500 Latest: DIR-826-L
2 Dedicated Google Voice accounts (voice and fax)

We’ve shifted gears on our recommended Atom platform for PIAF3 after excellent results with both the single-core and dual-core Atom kits manufactured by Foxconn (pictured on the left below). That’s the dLink Gaming Router on the right. Seems kinda silly to spend twice as much for a machine that you can build yourself in under 5 minutes. Basically you remove four screws, insert a Phillips screwdriver in one of the holes and gently pry the cover away from the box. Then you pop off the back by inserting a small flat-blade screwdriver, remove four more screws, slide in a solid-state drive (SSD) and a 4GB stick of notebook computer RAM, and you’re done in a couple minutes. Replace the screws and the cover, and you have a perfect PIAF2 platform with terrific performance and no moving parts for about $200. The link above will take you to the PIAF Forum thread for these machines. They go on sale almost weekly. See the right column of Nerd Vittles (just below our tweets) for this week’s special at Amazon. The dual-core Atom box typically is under $150. It could easily handle an office with 50+ employees sitting on a bookshelf with an Internet connection (wired or wireless!). No noise. Very little heat. Low power requirements. Perfect!

Configuring Google Voice

If you plan to use Google Voice, be advised that, according to Google, it’s going away in less than 6 weeks on May 15. If you want to use it anyway, you’ll need a dedicated Google Voice account to support Incredible PBX 11. If you want to use the inbound fax capabilities of Incredible Fax 11, then you’ll need an additional Google Voice line that can be routed to the FAX custom destination using FreePBX. The more obscure the username (with some embedded numbers), the better off you will be. This will keep folks from bombarding you with unsolicited Gtalk chat messages, and who knows what nefarious scheme will be discovered using Google messaging six months from now. So keep this account a secret!

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

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

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

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

Call 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.

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

[purehtml id=10]

Accessing The FreePBX 2.11 GUI

Using a web browser, you access the FreePBX GUI by pointing your browser to the IP address of Incredible PBX 11. Click on the Users tab. It will change to Admin. Now click the FreePBX Admin button. When prompted for a username, it’s maint. When prompted for the password, it’s whatever you set up as your maint password when you installed PBX in a Flash. If you forget it, you can always reset it by logging into your server as root and running passwd-master.

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

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

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

Installing Incredible Fax 11

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

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

Troubleshooting 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.

Configuring 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 701, close the Account window. Then click on YATE’s Telephony Tab and place your first call. It’s that easy!

Taking Incredible PBX 11 for a Spin

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

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

Incredible PBX 11 Automatic Update Utility

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

Choosing VoIP Providers

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

Incredible PBX 11 includes preconfigured trunk setups for all of your favorite trunk providers. Just plug in your credentials and activate the trunks you need. In less than a minute, you’re done. Here’s the Incredible PBX Top 20 Trunk List with some reasons why these providers made our short list:

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

Configuring Email Noticing in FreePBX

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

A Final Word About Security

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

Kicking the Tires

NEWS FLASH: Google Speech Recognition was an integral part of several Incredible PBX apps including the 949 Weather Reports and 411 Phonebook Directory Lookups with AsteriDex. Google changed their API to now require a personal API key for further use of the service. Thanks to Lefteris Zafiris, the speech recognition engine has been restored to operation. For instructions on obtaining your own API key and for properly reconfiguring your system to support speech-to-text, see this thread on the PIAF Forum. Google’s API is for personal and development use only!

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

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

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

Deals of the Week. A relatively 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 assist with our disaster recovery plan.

Originally published: Thursday, April 3, 2014

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

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

BYOB: Easy Peasy PIAF-Green with Asterisk 11.8.1 and ‘Genuine’ CentOS 6.5

Tuesday, March 18, 2014 / 1 Comment on BYOB: Easy Peasy PIAF-Green with Asterisk 11.8.1 and ‘Genuine’ CentOS 6.5

Let’s put aside the debate over Red Hat CentOS licensing and the GPL for a moment and talk about everyone’s favorite party. And we confess up front to being big fans of Patrón tequila. But let’s suppose for a moment that the Patrón family added some fine print to the label on their tequila bottles that said you cannot distribute margaritas with Patrón tequila and claim they are made with genuine Patrón tequila because the drink is no longer pure Patrón. In other words, for your Margaritaville invitations, you now have to state that each invitee BYOB, and you’ll provide the mixers and ice. WOW! What a party!

So that’s where we find ourselves in the current CentOS standoff with Red Hat. To demonstrate just how silly this entire trademark gimmick is, today we’re going to show you how to Bring Your Own CentOS platform and build a genuine PBX in a Flash server with Asterisk and FreePBX in about the same time as in the good ol’ days. When you’re finished you’ll have exactly the same PBX in a Flash server running on a genuine CentOS platform. Have we diluted CentOS or the CentOS brand? Not at all. In fact, we’ve made the exact same margarita! What this little experiment demonstrates is the real motivation behind the Red Hat licensing restrictions which have little or nothing to do with brand dilution.

Creating the Base CentOS Platform for PBX in a Flash

We’re not doing anything special here. In fact, you can build your base CentOS platform for PBX in a Flash on a standalone server, on a virtual machine of your choice, or in the cloud using a provider such as Amazon or RentPBX.

Start by downloading the 32-bit or 64-bit CentOS 6.5 minimal install ISO. You can do exactly the same thing using Scientific Linux if you prefer. Go through the usual drill of preparing an installer from the ISO. Burn the ISO to a USB Thumb Drive or a CD/DVD using a Mac or Windows machine. Then create your CentOS 6.5 platform on the hardware of your choice.

By default, neither CentOS nor Scientific Linux installs with network connectivity enabled. This is one of the primary reasons that we always have customized CentOS for use with PBX in a Flash. After performing a minimal OS install, log in as root and issue the following commands to prepare your server for PBX in a Flash:
sed -i 's|no|yes|' /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 ifup eth0 yum -y install wget nano

Creating a PBX in a Flash 3.0.6.5 Server

Now you’re ready to make a margarita. Just download the PIAF3 Installer and run it. It works exactly as it always has. The installer is plain text so feel free to customize it to meet your own requirements. If you need the complete PIAF installation tutorial, jump to this link. Party on!
cd /root wget http://pbxinaflash.com/piaf3-install.tar.gz tar zxvf piaf3-install.tar.gz ./piaf3-install

Originally published: Tuesday, March 18, 2014

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

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

Some Recent Nerd Vittles Articles of Interest…

Closing the Book on CentOS: Introducing PBX in a Flash 3 with PIAF 3.0.6.5 OS

Friday, February 21, 2014 / 10 Comments on Closing the Book on CentOS: Introducing PBX in a Flash 3 with PIAF 3.0.6.5 OS

Over the past few weeks, we’ve attempted to document some of the issues that have arisen as a result of what Red Hat claims it has been assigned from a few of the current CentOS developers. The CentOS trademark issues boil down to these: (1) ownership, (2) prior assignments and licenses, (3) dilution, and (4) GPL2. You can only sell that which you own. You can’t undo licenses that previously have been issued and relied upon. Generic use of a term over a lengthy period of years raises a strong presumption of genericide particularly when there has never been any attempt to protect the mark. And you can’t breathe a trademark exemption into GPL2 just because you’d like it to be a GPL3 license.

These issues obviously aren’t going to be settled overnight. Indeed, there are "the usual suspects" that put a not in front of virtually anything we suggest. That’s perfectly fine. We all have the right to our own opinions. But, absent some flexibility from Red Hat, these issues will work their way through a very cumbersome legal process over many years regardless of the views of the armchair quarterbacks. We’ll be watching and, if it becomes necessary, participating. There’s almost a decade of history on CentOS that some appear to have forgotten or perhaps never knew. Suffice it to say, CentOS has had a bit of a checkered past. We’ll cover some of it in coming months to give everyone a better appreciation of the issues that are at stake. In the meantime, PBX in a Flash has a loyal following, and we owe it to our users and supporters to remove the CentOS distraction and move on.

Today we are pleased to introduce PBX in a Flash 3 with an all-new GPL2 operating system, our own. It is compatible with the LAAMP stack that has been deployed by all of the Asterisk aggregations over the past decade including PBX in a Flash, Asterisk@Home, trixbox, Elastix, AsteriskNOW, and the FreePBX Distro. Simply stated, nothing has changed except the removal of the items to which Red Hat now asserts some ownership interest.

We’re rolling PIAF3 out in three stages, two of which we’re introducing today. There are new 32-bit and 64-bit virtual machine images. There are migration scripts to transform a PIAF2 server into PIAF3. And there will be new ISO images down the road a bit. The PIAF Dev Team is a group of individuals that do this for fun, not for profit. So eating comes first. Then we work on PBX in a Flash as time permits. No, we haven’t gotten filthy rich from donations and advertising. And, yes, we have sufficient resources to maintain the infrastructure necessary to continue to support the project indefinitely. If you’d like to volunteer to assist, by all means do so. The more, the merrier!

Movin’ On Up: Migrating Your PIAF2 Server to PIAF3

We’ve documented a simple procedure on the PIAF Forum to convert your PIAF2 server into a PIAF3 server. We fully appreciate that some may need a little hand-holding even though the scripts are provided and are in plain text. If you’d like to perform the procedure, set aside about an hour when your server is not in use AND only after you have made a full backup of your current system. For backup tips, go here and here and here. Then follow this link to begin. If you run into issues, just post your question on the forum. We have hundreds of gurus that stand ready to help you… cheerfully.

The Ultimate VoIP Appliance: PIAF3 Virtual Machine for VirtualBox

Today brings us to a new plateau in the virtual machine development era. 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 32-bit and 64-bit production-ready PIAF-Green Virtual Machines with Asterisk 11.7 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 PIAF3 Virtual Machine

Step #1 is to download the PIAF-Green Open Virtualization Appliance (.ova) of your choice from SourceForge. If you prefer torrents, they are there as well thanks to the work of Isaac McDonald.

Step #2: Verify the checksums for the .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 and type the following commands:
md5 PIAF-Green-3.6.5.-32.ova (use md5sum for Linux) MD5: a0562d213a31ace848b8a00bfb3d9218 openssl sha1 PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32.ova SHA1: 7aa74ffdc6a0f2b5a2ec0557c7bb78f8fe9cfb23

md5 PIAF-Green-3.6.5.-64.ova (use md5sum for Linux) MD5: d146ce1381b58effcaaaf3ef095806ab openssl sha1 PIAF-Green-3.6.5-64.ova SHA1: 19a9981094047eb25d585f9a2d0198a056d56a98

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 the new PIAF-Green virtual machine in the VM List of your VirtualBox Manager Window. You’ll need to make a couple of one-time adjustments to the VM 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. On some VM platforms in order to successfully boot the VM, you may need to manually enable PAE/NX support under System -> Proccessor. On most platforms, it’s enabled by default. That’s all the configuration that is ever necessary for your PIAF-Green Virtual Machine. The rest is automagic.

Running the PIAF-Green Virtual Machine in VirtualBox

Once you’ve imported and configured the PIAF3 Virtual Machine, you’re ready to go. Highlight PIAF3 Virtual Machine in the VM List on the VirtualBox Manager Window and click the Start button. The PIAF3 boot procedure 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 PIAF3 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 PIAF3 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:
setup-timezone

Next, use a browser to log into your PIAF3 server by pointing to the IP address of the PIAF3 VM that’s displayed in the status window of the CLI. Click on the User button to display the Admin choices in the main PIAF3 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 Virtual Machine:

VBoxManage import PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32.ova VBoxManage modifyvm "PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32" --nic1 nat VBoxManage modifyvm "PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32" --acpi on --nic1 bridged VBoxHeadless --startvm "PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32" & # Wait 1 minute for PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32 to load. Then decipher IP address like this: VBoxManage guestproperty get "PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32" /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/IP # Now you can use SSH to login to PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32 at the displayed IP address # Shutdown the PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32 Virtual Machine with the following command: VBoxManage controlvm "PIAF-Green-3.6.5-32" 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 PIAF 3.0.6.5, 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 3. 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: Friday, February 21, 2014

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

Special Thanks to Our Generous Sponsors

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

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

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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.

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Creating the Base Linux Platform for PBX in a Flash

Creating a PBX in a Flash 3.0.6.5 Server

Installing Incredible PBX 11

Configuring Google Voice

Accessing The FreePBX 2.11 GUI

Installing Incredible Fax 11

Troubleshooting Audio and DTMF Problems

Configuring a Desktop Softphone

Taking Incredible PBX 11 for a Spin

Incredible PBX 11 Automatic Update Utility

Choosing VoIP Providers

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Kicking the Tires

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Creating the Base CentOS Platform for PBX in a Flash

Creating a PBX in a Flash 3.0.6.5 Server

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Movin’ On Up: Migrating Your PIAF2 Server to PIAF3

The Ultimate VoIP Appliance: PIAF3 Virtual Machine for VirtualBox

Introducing Oracle VM VirtualBox

Installing the PIAF3 Virtual Machine

Running the PIAF-Green Virtual Machine in VirtualBox

Adding Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax

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