gvoice – Page 6 – Nerd Vittles

Introducing IVRs in a Flash with Incredible PBX for Wazo

Monday, May 22, 2017

Last week we introduced the all-new, API-driven Admin User Interface for Wazo 17.07. But pretty pictures are only the icing on the cake. It’s what’s under the hood that really matters. And today we want to walk you through the new IVR User Interface with Incredible PBX for Wazo. The Wazo developers heard from many of you that were missing the GUI-driven IVR tools available in other products. And we’re pleased to tell you it’s another Home Run for Wazo. The UI is well-documented, easy to use, and incredibly simple to implement.

We should mention that our focus today is on the mechanics of using the new Wazo IVR Builder. We won’t be covering how to design a good IVR. If you want some great examples of poor IVR design, look no further than the main number of your favorite cellular or cable provider. Insofar as good design tips go, you can’t do better than learning from the master, Allison Smith. Here’s a link to her previous articles on Nerd Vittles.

We’re assuming you followed last week’s tutorial and added the basic components for the Admin user interface after using your browser to login to https://IPaddress/admin/. If not, start there and install the following plugins to begin: Users, Extensions, Contexts, and Devices. Next, add the plugins for Incalls, Outcalls, Trunks, and IVR. The whole setup procedure takes less than a minute. When you’re finished, your Navigation Sidebar should look like what’s shown above.

You’re obviously going to need a SIP or Google Voice trunk to handle incoming IVR calls so start there if you haven’t already set up at least one trunk that can be dedicated to your IVR. For the time being, add an Inbound Route for the Trunk that points to an extension.

Now we’re ready to create your first IVR using the new IVR template in the Admin UI. Using your web browser, log back in to https://IPaddress/admin/ and (1) click IVR in the Navigation bar. Then (2) click + Add to create a new IVR.

Since the pieces already are in place for the hard-coded Demo IVR that comes with Incredible PBX for Wazo, let’s use those components to demonstrate how easy it is to build your own IVR with the new GUI. As you can see from the completed form below, there are two main sections in setting up an IVR. There are some basic settings that handle answering the call, playing the welcome message, and managing error conditions. Then there are IVR options that correspond to the Digit pressed by the caller using a touchtone phone. Each of these options has a destination. Currently, the available options include playing a sound file, ringing an extension, running custom dialplan code, or hanging up a call. There also is the ability to nest IVRs. Once you have built the secondary IVRs, the options list will also include an IVR option.

Since our sample IVR uses custom contexts for each of the Incredible PBX applications, we’ll rely heavily on the Custom option to route calls to extensions that were created when these applications were installed: Call by Name (411), Join Conference (2663), Lenny (53669), Yahoo News (951), and Weather Forecasts by ZIP Code (947). We’ll also show you how to direct a call to an extension using the default WebRTC extension (701). To get things going, simply copy the entries shown below and then Save/Update the template. The Wazo syntax to call a Custom destination looks like this: Dial(Local/951@default).

Before you attempt to build your own IVR, keep in mind that you’ll need at least a greeting message that tells callers which buttons to press. This file should be placed in /var/lib/xivo/sounds/playback. You can also use any of the default sound recordings found in /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/en for error messages and retry alerts.

Once you have your IVR built, the last step is to adjust an incoming route for one of your DIDs so that it points to your newly created IVR. We do this using the Incalls option in the Navigation bar. If you’re adjusting an existing inbound route, just call it up and make the changes as shown below:

You’re good to go now. Call your DID from another phone and try out your first custom IVR.

Enjoy!

Published: Monday, May 22, 2017

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

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

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…

Cloud 9: VoIP on Steroids with Wazo and Vultr for $2.50/mo.

Monday, May 15, 2017 / 1 Comment on Cloud 9: VoIP on Steroids with Wazo and Vultr for $2.50/mo.

It tells you just how far we’ve come in Cloud Computing when $2.50 per month now buys you an Incredible PBX™ platform with great performance for a SOHO or home deployment. So what’s the catch? What else do you have to buy? If you’re in the United States, nothing! With a free Google Voice trunk, all of your incoming and outgoing calls to the United States and Canada are totally free. Does it matter where your phones are situated? Not at all. And how about scaling for large organizations? Not to worry! When you decide to move your entire organization to the Cloud, our friends at RentPBX stand ready to provide a 24×7 platform specifically engineered for VoIP at only $15 a month. Coupon code: NOGOTCHAS.

Getting Started with Vultr

We’ve used Vultr as our primary development platform for Nerd Vittles not only because of its price but also because of its reliability and feature set. With the recent reduction in the price of cloud instances, it’s now more than compelling as a stand-alone cloud solution for VoIP applications. An additional 50¢ a month buys you automatic daily, weekly, or monthly backups to a separate, fault tolerant storage system in the same data center. And, of course, Wazo itself generates nightly backups as well. What’s not to like? But don’t take our word for it. Walk through this tutorial with Vultr. You can even pay by the hour and kick the tires. Five hours of experimentation will set you back a whopping 2¢. Nope, that’s not a typo!

As you might imagine, the $2.50/month cloud instances at Vultr have been well received. In fact, that’s an understatement. Rather than oversubscribe users on their cloud platforms, Vultr limits the number of $2.50 cloud instances on each server. Lucky for all of us, Vultr maintains cloud hosting services in 15 cities around the world. As this is written, the $2.50 instances still were available in New York and Miami. Those locations obviously can change by the hour, but we have yet to see them disappear completely. A word to the wise: HURRY!

Getting Started with Incredible PBX for Wazo

After you have set up your account at Vultr using our referral link,¹ the first step is to create your new cloud instance. Choose the desired site that has $2.50/month availability and select the 64-bit Debian 8 as your server platform. IMPORTANT: With Wazo, it’s extremely important that you leave the Server Hostname & Label blank. Otherwise, Wazo’s setup wizard will fail.

(1) Once you’ve built and started your new virtual machine, log into your server as root using SSH/Putty and immediately change your root password: passwd.

(2) With the $2.50 size VULTR virtual machine, you must create a swapfile before beginning the Incredible PBX for Wazo installation. Here are the commands:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=1024k
chown root:root /swapfile
chmod 0600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile
echo "/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0">>/etc/fstab
sysctl vm.swappiness=10
echo vm.swappiness=10>>/etc/sysctl.conf
free -h
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

(3) Now you’re ready to kick off the Incredible PBX for Wazo install. The first phase is to bring Debian 8 up to current specs. Here are the commands:

cd /root
apt-get -y install cloud-init
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/IncrediblePBX14-Wazo.sh
chmod +x IncrediblePBX14-Wazo.sh
./IncrediblePBX14-Wazo.sh

(4) Once the Debian 8 upgrade is complete, reboot your server and log back in as root. Then run the Incredible PBX for Wazo installer a second time:

./IncrediblePBX14-Wazo.sh

(5) Your server will pause after the Wazo install is complete. Verify that Wazo started successfully by pressing the ENTER key.

(6) Your server then will run the Wazo setup wizard. Verify that the wizard completed without errors by pressing the ENTER key.

(7) The Incredible PBX for Wazo installer then will complete the remainder of the setup without user intervention. It takes less than 10 minutes.

(8) Now proceed to the Incredible PBX Initial Configuration tutorial to continue your setup and begin your adventure. Enjoy!

Published: Monday, May 15, 2017

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

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

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…

Vultr provides a modest referral credit to Nerd Vittles for those that use our referral code. It in no way colors our recommendation of Vultr. As we noted, we use Vultr as our primary development platform, and we did so long before there were referral credits. You won’t be disappointed. [↩]

Meet the New Incredible Fax: A $10 Fax Machine for Asterisk

Friday, May 12, 2017

Every year, technology gets better and cheaper. And, believe it or not, that even includes faxing especially with Asterisk® and Incredible PBX™. Today we take another giant leap forward by introducing fax technology with the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W. Adding a free Google Voice trunk provides not only free calling in the U.S. and Canada, but now you also get free faxing as well. And the latest release of Incredible PBX lets your RasPi determine whether incoming calls are humans or faxes, and it’ll route them accordingly. To send faxes, you can use the bundled AvantFax GUI client which lets you send PDF documents as faxes with a couple button clicks.

Overview. Once you’ve downloaded the Incredible PBX for RasPi image and made yourself a microSD card for your RasPi, the setup goes like this. First, we’ll configure a WiFi connection to support your server. Then we’ll install a Google Voice trunk. Next, we’ll use the included Incredible Fax installer to put the HylaFax and AvantFax components in place and to set up an email address for delivery of incoming faxes in PDF format. And finally we’ll use the GUI to configure your Google Voice trunk to manage incoming calls from both fax machines and individuals that actually want to talk to you. Faxes will be delivered to your email address, and traditional calls will be routed to a SIP phone or smartphone of your choice. In under 30 minutes, you’ll have a plug-and-play computer that’s about the size of a couple sticks of chewing gum.

Raspberry Pi Zero W Shopping List

Before you can install Incredible PBX, you’ll need a compatible Raspberry Pi Zero W platform. Unless you already have some of the components, the easiest way to begin is to purchase a bundle that includes all the components you’ll need. Here’s your best bet. It’s $35 and includes everything except a USB keyboard and an HDMI monitor and cable. Click on the image for ordering info:

Incredible PBX Installation Tutorial

Here’s everything you need to know about installation and setup. Just follow the links.

Download and unzip Incredible PBX image from SourceForge (with GV OAuth support!)
Transfer Incredible PBX image to microSD card
Boot Raspberry Pi Zero W from new microSD card
Login to RasPi console as pi:raspberry to initialize your server and configure WiFi
Reboot after writing down your server IP address
Login via SSH as root:password to secure your passwords & configure firewall
Download latest Incredible Fax installer: http://nerd.bz/2nSeHKs
Install Incredible Fax: /root/incrediblefax13_raspi3.sh (Credentials: admin:password)

Once everything is set up and working, you can remove the keyboard and monitor and put the Raspberry Pi Zero W on a shelf and run it with nothing more than a power adapter. Each time you reboot Incredible PBX, you’ll get an email with the IP address of your server. The recommended setup is to reserve the IP address assigned by your DHCP server in your router’s configuration. Then you have the equivalent of a static IP address while preserving the flexibility to move your RasPi to another network if the need ever presents itself.

Incredible PBX Initialization Steps

With a USB keyboard and HDMI monitor attached to your RasPi, power up the device. Login as pi with the password: raspberry. Incredible PBX first will whir through a few initialization steps. As part of the Raspbian OS, the Raspberry Pi Foundation includes a handy utility called raspi-config. This gets run automatically as part of the initial setup procedure in Step #4. At a minimum, you should configure the following options:

Expand Filesystem (to use your entire microSD card)
Wait for Network at Boot (choose Slow to Enable)
International Options (configure all four options)
Advanced Options – HostName (name your server)
Finish (Save your settings but Delay reboot)

Incredible PBX WiFi Setup

The Raspberry Pi Zero W has WiFi-only networking. To get Internet connectivity, you’ll need to configure your server in Step #4 so that it can find your WiFi Access Point. Edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and insert the SSID and password (psk) for your WiFi network. Then save the file. Finally, stop and restart the wlan0 interface on your RasPi device, count to 15, and check the status of your server to decipher the new IP address for your WiFi connection. If no WiFi address, rinse and repeat.

ifdown wlan0
ifup wlan0
pbxstatus

Incredible PBX Phase 2 Configuration

Once you have your network IP address in hand, reboot your RasPi: reboot. Then use SSH or Putty to login to your RasPi from your desktop computer. The credentials are root:password. Complete the setup process by answering the prompts and be sure to set up a very secure root password and GUI admin password for your server.

Configuring a Gmail SmartHost for SendMail

Because of spammers, most Internet service providers now block mail from downstream mail servers. Your RasPi qualifies. There’s an easy way to determine if email service from your server is blocked. Just run the following command substituting your email address. Be sure to check your inbox and spam folder to determine whether you received the email.

echo "This is a test message." | mail -s testmessage yourname@youremaildomain.com

If you flunked the test, here’s what to do next. Modify SendMail to use an existing Gmail account as a SmartHost for email delivery. This means Gmail will actually send the messages rather than your server. Log into your RasPi as root and issue these commands:

cd /etc/mail
hostname -f > genericsdomain
touch genericstable
makemap -r hash genericstable.db < genericstable
mv sendmail.mc sendmail.mc.original
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/sendmail.mc.gmail
cp sendmail.mc.gmail sendmail.mc
mkdir -p auth
chmod 700 auth
cd auth
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" > client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:587 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
echo AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:465 \\"U:smmsp\\" \\"I:user_id\\" \\"P:password\\" \\"M:PLAIN\\" >> client-info
nano -w client-info

When the nano editor opens the client-info file, change the 3 user_id entries to your Gmail account name without @gmail.com and change the 3 password entries to your actual Gmail password. Save the file: Ctrl-X, Y, then ENTER.

Now issue the following commands. In the last step, press ENTER to accept all of the default prompts:

chmod 600 client-info
makemap -r hash client-info.db < client-info
cd ..
make
sed -i 's|sendmail-cf|sendmail\/cf' /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
sed -i 's|sendmail-cf|sendmail\/cf|' /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
sed -i 's|sendmail-cf|sendmail\/cf|' /etc/mail/Makefile
sed -i 's|sendmail-cf|sendmail\/cf|' /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
sed -i 's|sendmail-cf|sendmail\/cf|' /etc/mail/databases
sed -i 's|sendmail-cf|sendmail\/cf|' /etc/mail/sendmail.mc.gmail
sed -i 's|sendmail-cf|sendmail\/cf|' /etc/mail/sendmail.cf.errors
sendmailconfig

Finally, stop and restart SendMail and then send yourself a test message. Be sure to check your spam folder!

/etc/init.d/sendmail stop
/etc/init.d/sendmail start
apt-get install mailutils -y
echo "test" | mail -s testmessage yourname@yourdomain.com

Check mail success with: tail /var/log/mail.log. If you have trouble getting a successful Gmail registration (especially if you have previously used this Google account from a different IP address), try this Google Voice Reset Procedure. It usually fixes connectivity problems. If it still doesn’t work, enable Less Secure Apps using this Google tool.

The last step is to add the following command to /etc/rc.local to send you an email with your IP address and SSID whenever the RasPi is rebooted. Insert the following commands just above the exit 0 line at the end of the file. Use an email address to which you have access on the road!

echo "IP address for your Raspberry Pi: $(hostname -I) plus wireless network, if any: `iwconfig`" | mail -s "Raspberry Pi IP Address" yourname@yourdomain.com

Installing a Google Voice Trunk for Free Calling

If you want to use Google Voice, you'll need a dedicated Google Voice account to support Incredible PBX. 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!

IMPORTANT: Do NOT under any circumstances take Google’s bait to switch from Google Chat to Hangouts, or you may forever lose the ability to use Google Chat with Incredible PBX. Also 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. Good News! You're in luck. Google has apparently had a change of heart on discontinuing Google Chat support so it's enabled by default in all new Google Voice accounts. Once you've created a Gmail and Google Voice account, go to Google Voice Settings and 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've adjusted 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.

UPDATE: Google has improved things... again. You may not see the options documented above at all. Instead, you may be presented with the new Google Voice interface which does not include the Google Chat option. But fear not. At least for now there's still a way to get there. After you have set up your new phone number, click on (1) Settings -> Phone Numbers and then click (2) Transfer (as shown below). That returned the old UI. Make sure the Google Chat option is selected and disable forwarding calls to default phone number.

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!

Now you're ready to configure your Google Voice account in Incredible PBX. First, you'll need to obtain an OAuth 2 token for your Google Voice account. For a complete Google Voice OAuth tutorial, follow steps 8-10 in this Nerd Vittles tutorial. Once you have your credentials, you can do the rest of the Google Voice setup from within the Incredible PBX GUI. Choose Connectivity -> Google Voice. Once you've entered your credentials, you MUST restart Asterisk from the command line, or Google Voice calls will fail: amportal restart

If you have trouble getting Google Voice to work (especially if you have previously used your Google Voice account from a different IP address), try this Google Voice Reset Procedure. It usually fixes connectivity problems. If it still doesn’t work, enable Less Secure Apps using this Google tool.

Another option is to use an inexpensive SIP Gateway to Google Voice. The Simonics trunk in the Incredible PBX GUI is preconfigured for this purpose. All you'll need is your Google Voice credentials. Get started with this tutorial.

Installing Incredible Fax with HylaFax & AvantFax

Once you complete the initial configuration and get your mail server and Google Voice trunk squared away, it's time to run the Incredible Fax installer: ./incrediblefax13_raspi3.sh. You'll be prompted for an email address to which to deliver incoming faxes. After that, everything is pretty much automatic. A few prompts will appear during the installation process. Just press the ENTER key each time and ignore any errors you might see scrolling across your screen. They're harmless. When the HylaFax and AvantFax installs finish, reboot your server. Faxing won't work until you do!

Next, you need to change the default password for AvantFax which is a web-based interface to send faxes and read incoming faxes. From a browser, log into the IP address of your server. When the Incredible PBX menu appears, click the Users tab to display the Administrator menu. Then click on the AvantFax icon to load AvantFax. When prompted for credentials, enter admin:password for your username and password. You'll be prompted to change your password. Make it secure!

Finally, we need to configure your PBX to properly answer calls from fax machines as well as humans. Return to the Incredible PBX Admin menu and click the Incredible GUI icon. Then click the Server Administration icon. When prompted for your username and password, enter admin and the password you configured when you set up your server above. When the System Status screen displays, choose Connectivity -> Inbound Routes -> Default. Make the bottom section of the template look like this substituting your desired Destination for voice calls if you don't want them sent to the Incredible PBX IVR. Click Submit to save your changes and then reload your dialplan when prompted.

The best way to test things out is to send yourself a test fax. FaxZERO lets you send 5 free faxes of up to 3 pages every day. Give it a whirl. When you're ready to send a fax from Incredible PBX, log back into AvantFax, click on the Send Fax icon, and follow your nose.

Mastering the Incredible PBX Feature Set

Now would be a good time to explore the Incredible PBX applications. Continue reading there. If you have questions, join the PBX in a Flash Forums and take advantage of our awesome collection of gurus. There's an expert available on virtually any topic, and the price is right. As with Incredible PBX, it's absolutely free. Enjoy!

Originally published: Monday, March 27, 2017 Updated: Friday, May 12, 2017

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

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

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...

Free SMS Messaging Returns to Incredible PBX for Wazo

Monday, April 3, 2017

We continue our Wazo adventure today with a few simple additions to the Incredible PBX for Wazo dialplan. We will enable SMS messaging both from SIP phones such as the Yealink T46G and using voice recognition from any phone connected to Wazo including WebRTC. Of course, you still can use the command line to send SMS messages to one or more recipients using SMS Message Blasting which is covered below. To implement SMS messaging, you’ll need at least one Google Voice account configured. To implement the voice recognition option, you’ll also need to first enable voice recognition with Incredible PBX for Wazo.

The prerequisites for SMS Messaging with Incredible PBX for Wazo look like this:

Incredible PBX for Wazo Server
Preconfigured Google Voice Trunk
Activate Google Speech Recognition on your server

Activating Google Speech Recognition on Your Server. If you haven’t previously activated Google Speech Recognition on your Wazo server, you’ll need to complete this step if you want to be able to dictate SMS messages from phones connected to Wazo. Follow this tutorial to obtain a speech recognition API key and activate the Google service on your server. It only takes a couple minutes.

SMS Dictator for Wazo. True to form, Google broke the command-line SMS messaging component a few weeks ago. So let’s get that squared away before we begin. Install the latest Google Voice python scripts and the updated SMS Dictator components by issuing the following commands after logging into your server as root. You’ll need your Google Voice credentials to install the update:

cd /root
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/sms-dictator-wazo.tar.gz
tar zxvf sms-dictator-wazo.tar.gz
rm -f sms-dictator-wazo.tar.gz
./sms-dictator.sh

Wazo SMS Messaging Setup. You may also want to enable your SIP phones to send SMS messages directly. Login to your Wazo PBX using your favorite web browser. We need to review the existing gv.conf file by navigating to IPX Configuration → Configuration Files → gv.conf. Review the first context in the file. It should look like the following. Be sure that the third from the last line below does NOT wrap to a separate line in the Wazo editor! Insert your Google Voice credentials for GVACCT and GVPASS.

;# // BEGIN gv-outcall
[subr-gv-outcall]
exten = s,1,Set(XIVO_CALLOPTIONS=r)
same  =   n,GotoIf($["${MESSAGE(body)}" = ""]?skipsms)
same  =   n,Set(GVACCT=yourname@gmail.com)
same  =   n,Set(GVPASS=yourpassword)
same  =   n,System(/usr/bin/gvoice -e ${GVACCT} -p ${GVPASS} send_sms ${XIVO_DSTNUM} "${MESSAGE(body)}")
same  =   n(skipsms),Return()
;# // END gv-outcall

Once you get this set up and since we’ll be using plain text passwords to send the SMS messages through Google Voice, you’ll need to perform these two additional steps after first logging into your Google account with a browser using the same IP address as your Wazo server: (1) Enable Less Secure Apps and (2) Activate the Google Voice Reset Procedure. Now promptly send an SMS message from a phone registered to your Wazo server.

Dial S-M-S (767) from any phone connected to your Wazo PBX to send an SMS message. After dictating your message, you have the choice of keying in a 10-digit phone number for the SMS recipient or you can say the name of anyone in your AsteriDex phone book.

Sending SMS Messages. We obviously can’t cover the SMS messaging methodology for every SIP phone on the market. But here’s how to send an SMS message using Yealink’s T46G. First, configure one of the buttons on the phone as an extension on your Wazo PBX. Next, press the Menu button. Highlight Messages and press OK. Choose Text Message and OK. Choose New Message and OK. Type your SMS message using the keypad and press Send button. For the From: field, use the left and right arrow keys to select your Wazo extension. Press the down arrow and fill in the SMS number of your recipient just as you would do on your smartphone. Press the Send button. "Sending Message" will appear briefly on the T46G’s display. Wazo’s Asterisk CLI also will show transmission of the SMS message.

Interestingly, the same SMS functionality exists on the $29 UTP E-62 (if you can find one). Choose Menu → Applications → SMS → New. Type your SMS message using the keypad and press Send button. For the From: field, use the left and right arrow keys to select your Wazo extension. Press the down arrow and fill in the SMS number of your recipient just as you would do on your smartphone. Press the Send button. "Sending Message" will appear briefly on the UTP’s display. Wazo’s Asterisk CLI also will show the SMS transmission.

For bargain hunters that can’t find a UTP E-62, Yealink’s $50 YEA-SIP-T19P-E2 Entry-level SIP phone also appears to support SMS messaging. As with the UTP phones, you’ll need a $9 power supply unless your network supports POE.

Creating an SMS Message Blast with Wazo. Here’s how to take advantage of SMS Message Blasting using a Google Voice account with Incredible PBX for Wazo. Log into your server as root and do the following:

Edit /root/smsmsg.txt and insert the text message to be sent
Edit /root/smslist.txt and create a list of the phone numbers to receive the message
Edit /root/smsblast and insert your gvoice username and password
Run /root/smsblast to kick off the SMS Blast

Receiving SMS Messages. Typically reply messages to Google Voice numbers are forwarded either to an email address or to Hangouts. We don’t recommend enabling incoming mail on your Wazo PBX. Instead, add a New Alternate Email Address to your Google Voice account in Settings → Voicemail & Text. After verifying the new email address, set it as your Voicemail Notification email address and Save changes. Go back into Settings → Voicemail & Text and make certain that you have also checked the Text Forwarding checkbox which now should reflect your alternate email address. Now all of your incoming SMS messages will be delivered to this email address.

TIP: Google will no longer let you forward incoming SMS messages directly to another SMS destination, but you can cheat. If you have your own mail server or a non-Gmail account on which you can redirect incoming mail without verification, then simply set up the alternate email address as documented above. Then reroute that email address to point to an SMS-email gateway that forwards incoming messages to SMS, e.g. 8431234567@txt.att.net to send an SMS message to your AT&T cellphone. The complete list of providers is here. Enjoy!

Originally published: Monday, April 3, 2017

Need help with Asterisk? Come join 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…

Best of Both Worlds: Marrying Asterisk to 3CX’s Free PBX with a $35 Raspberry Pi

Monday, March 6, 2017 / 1 Comment on Best of Both Worlds: Marrying Asterisk to 3CX’s Free PBX with a $35 Raspberry Pi

One of the real beauties of Asterisk® has always been its flexibility in talking to other PBXs, both commercial and open source. There are numerous reasons why you might want to try this. First, it makes it easy to migrate to a commercial platform where you can get support for mission critical telephony requirements. Second, you may want a hybrid setup where servers with on-site support personnel can run Asterisk while remote satellite offices can take advantage of a commercial PBX and the support options it offers. Third, you may want to take advantage of specific features that are only available by relying upon multiple PBX solutions. In the case of 3CX, their integrated softphone clients with one-click setup simplicity, conferencing and WebRTC apps, and Call Center offerings are the best in the business while providing unmatched VoIP security. Asterisk on the other hand is light-years ahead of almost everybody in the text-to-speech and voice recognition fields while offering the most powerful VoIP toolkit to build any custom VoIP application imaginable.

Today we thought it would be fun to walk you through the easy way to tie an Incredible PBX server with all its features to a powerful (free) 3CX platform with its virtually flawless softphone clients.¹ When we’re finished, you’ll have a free 3CX server in the Cloud at a one-time total cost of $17.50. And you’ll be able to place and receive free U.S./Canada calls from any iPhone, Android phone, or PC using the 3CX client from anywhere in the world with nothing more than a WiFi connection. The Google Voice trunk supporting the calls will reside on Incredible PBX for the Raspberry Pi. When you’re sold on the power of the 3CX platform, you can upgrade to the 3CX 4-simultaneous call commercial offering with unlimited users and trunks at an annual cost of just $149. Maintenance and upgrades are included. Large organizations have relied upon back office servers for custom applications forever. And now you can take advantage of the same flexibility using a tiny $35 Raspberry Pi and our free (as in really free) Incredible PBX software. No Gotchas!

Initial Raspberry Pi Platform Setup

Before we can interconnect 3CX’s Free PBX with a Raspberry Pi, you obviously have to set up both PBX platforms. For the Raspberry Pi, our recent Nerd Vittles tutorial will walk you through the setup process. In lieu of a Raspberry Pi, you can use any legacy FreePBX®-based Asterisk platform including Incredible PBX 13, PIAF3, Elastix®, AsteriskNOW®, or FreePBX Distro®. The setup procedure is exactly the same.

Building a 3CX Server in the Cloud

Building a 3CX server in the Cloud is equally easy. Let’s go through the process once again. If you’re just experimenting, a lifetime Cloud-based server at CloudAtCost for a one-time charge of $17.50 cannot be beat. We would hasten to add that we don’t recommend this platform for production use, but it’s a terrific proof-of-concept option. When you’re actually ready to deploy 3CX for production use, the least costly Cloud solution is the $3.49 per month OVH RAID offering with 2GB of RAM and 10GB storage. The $5 per month offerings from Digital Ocean and Vultr are other alternatives worth a look. Both of these platforms come with free credits ($10 and $20, respectively) to let you try things out.

To get started, sign up for a $17.50 server at Cloud at Cost. They will send you credentials to log into the Cloud at Cost Management Portal. Change your password IMMEDIATELY after logging in. Just go to SETTINGS and follow your nose.

To build your free 3CX PBX, create a virtual machine by clicking on the CLOUDPRO button in the CloudAtCost control panel. Then click Add New Server. Choose 1 CPU, 512MB RAM, and 10GB storage for your server. Choose Debian 8 64bit as the OS Type and click Complete.

While CloudAtCost is building your server platform, obtain a free license key for 3CX.

Once the Debian 8 server appears in your Control Panel, it will look something like what’s shown above, not CentOS obviously. The red arrow points to the i button you’ll need to click to decipher the password for your new virtual machine. You’ll need both the IP address and the password for your new virtual machine in order to log into the server which is now up and running with a barebones Debian 8 operating system. Note the yellow caution flag. That’s telling you that Cloud at Cost will automatically shut down your server in a week to save (them) computing resources. You can change the setting to keep your server running 24/7. Click Modify, Change Run Mode, and select Normal – Leave Powered On. Click Continue and OK to save your new settings.

Finally, you’ll want to change the Host Name for your server to something more descriptive than c7…cloudpro.92… Click the Modify button again and click Rename Server to make the change. Your management portal then will show the new server name as shown above.

Next, log in to your new Debian server as root using SSH or Putty and issue the commands below. Step #1 is to change your root password. What appears as the fourth line below is actually part of the third line and needs to be run as a single command. The last line to install SendMail will actually be run after you elect to use the Web Interface Wizard to configure 3CX. Just run it from the SSH command line before you switch to a browser to complete the 3CX setup.

passwd
wget -O- http://downloads.3cx.com/downloads/3cxpbx/public.key | apt-key add -
echo "deb http://downloads.3cx.com/downloads/3cxpbx/ /" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/3cxpbx.list
apt-get update
rm -f /zang-debian.sh
apt-get -y install 3cxpbx
apt-get -y install sendmail sendmail-bin

When the initial setup finishes, choose the Web Interface Wizard and complete the install using your favorite web browser. Enter your 3CX license key when prompted. Make up a very secure Username and Password to access your 3CX portal. Specify that your IP address is Dynamic when prompted (even though it isn’t). This tells 3CX to generate an FQDN for your server. Accept the default ports for HTTP (5000) and HTTPS (5001) access to your server. We recommend choosing 4-digit extensions numbers which will make it easy to distinguish 3CX extension numbers from 3-digit extension numbers of the RasPi platform. While logged into the 3CX management portal, adjust Settings → Email to Mail Server → 127.0.0.1 and Reply to → noreply@YourActual3CX-FQDN. Leave the other settings blank and click TEST then OK. Now download your favorite 3CX smartphone client, send yourself the Welcome Email for your default extension, and your 3CX initial setup is complete.

Server Interconnection Overview

Now we’re ready to interconnect the two servers. What we’ll be doing is creating Trunks on both the Raspberry Pi and the 3CX server and tying them together. We’ll use this trunk to handle the call traffic between the two PBXs. Then we’ll add incoming and outgoing call routes on both servers to specify how the individual calls should be routed. Because the free version of 3CX limits the administrator to a single trunk, we’ll offload all of the provider trunks to the Raspberry Pi and reserve the one available 3CX trunk as the interconnect path to the Raspberry Pi. For today’s setup, we’ll use 3CX’s free softphone clients as the actual phone devices for end-users. Of course, you could also use your favorite SIP phones, and 3CX provides automatic configuration for dozens of devices. But we want to introduce the 3CX smartphone clients because they provide an incredibly easy way to get users connected without having to worry about punching holes in firewalls.

To place outbound calls on the 3CX side, 3CX provides enormous flexibility in call routing. Because we chose 4-digit local extensions when we set up the 3CX server, it will make it easy to route other calls through the outbound trunk to the Raspberry Pi using nothing more than the length of the dial string. For example, 3-digit calls line up perfectly with extension numbers on the Incredible PBX for RasPi platform. So 3CX users can easily reach extensions connected directly to the Raspberry Pi. And 10-digit 3CX calls will be forwarded to the Raspberry Pi as traditional outbound calls. They will be processed just as if you had dialed a 10-digit call from a Raspberry Pi extension. For example, if you have a registered Google Voice trunk to handle 10-digit calls on the Raspberry Pi, then the same call path would be used for calls originating from 3CX extensions. And, yes, calls to the U.S. and Canada would still be free and would display the CallerID associated with the Raspberry Pi’s Google Voice trunk. You could get more creative and add an additional dialing prefix on the 3CX side to route specific types of calls to a designated outbound trunk on the Raspberry Pi side based upon the dialing prefix, but we’ll leave that as a homework project for you.

For incoming calls on the 3CX side, in addition to 4-digit local extension-to-extension calling, we can define the destination for incoming calls that originate from either a Raspberry Pi extension or from outside calls coming in from one of the Raspberry Pi’s provider trunks. These are managed by assigning one or more DIDs in the 3CX trunk configuration and then creating 3CX Inbound DID Rules that tell 3CX where to route calls to each defined DID. For 3CX softphone clients registered to extensions, it means your cellphone will ring whenever a call is routed to that particular extension. On the Raspberry Pi side, we create Incoming Call Routes for each DID to be routed to 3CX and specify our defined 3CX trunk as the destination for incoming calls from those DIDs. Not all DIDs on the Raspberry Pi have to be routed to the 3CX server obviously. That is merely one of many call destination options available to the administrator on the Raspberry Pi server.

Here’s a typical call path for an outside call that is placed to a Google Voice number registered with your Raspberry Pi. The Asterisk server running on the Raspberry Pi would answer the call placed to the Google Voice Trunk. Asterisk then would check for an Incoming Route on the Raspberry Pi with a DID matching the number of your Google Voice trunk. Finding a match, Asterisk would check for the desired destination of the call and would note that it is listed as the registered 3CX trunk. Asterisk would pass the call through this trunk to the 3CX server including its associated DID and CallerID info. The 3CX server would answer the incoming call and would check for an Incoming Route matching the DID passed from Asterisk. Finding a match, it would pass the call to the Extension specified in the Incoming Route. When 3CX rings the extension, it would also detect that a softphone was registered to that extension and would also ring the 3CX client on the user’s smartphone. The user answers the call on the 3CX client of their smartphone and begins a conversation. The free version of the 3CX server supports 8 simultaneous calls so you are unlikely to ever run out of call paths for calls in the home and small office environment.

Firewall Setup for Server Interconnection

Because the 3CX server is sitting in the Cloud, its firewall is configured automatically as part of the setup process. If your Raspberry Pi is sitting behind a NAT-based firewall, then you would need to map port UDP 5060 from the router on your public IP address to the private IP address of your Raspberry Pi. In addition, login to your Raspberry Pi as root using SSH and run /root/add-ip to whitelist the public IP address of your 3CX server in the cloud. Otherwise, the 3CX server cannot establish a connection to your Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi Trunk Configuration

Using a browser, login to the web interface for FreePBX on your Raspberry Pi and choose Connectivity → Trunks → Add SIP (chan_sip) Trunk. Name the trunk remote. In the Outgoing Settings, make the entries shown below naming the trunk remote and using a secure secret that will be used to interconnect the two servers. The Register String looks like the following: main:secret@3CX-IP-Address where main is the 3CX server trunk name, secret is your secure secret, and 3CX-IP-Address is the 3CX public IP address.

3CX Trunk Configuration

Using a browser, login to your 3CX server: https://3CX-IP-Address:5001 or http://3CX-IP-Address:5000. From your Dashboard, choose SIP Trunks → Add SIP Trunk. Create a Generic SIP Trunk and then fill in the blanks as shown below. For Registrar/Server/Gateway Hostname or IP, use the public IP address or FQDN of your Raspberry Pi. For Type of Authentication choose Outbound. The authentication credentials should be remote and the secure secret you chose, and the Main Trunk No should match the DID of the Google Voice trunk you set up on your Raspberry Pi. Then pick a default Destination for incoming calls.

3CX Outbound Rules Configuration

Next, we need to tell 3CX which outgoing calls to send out through the Raspberry Pi trunk we just set up. In our example today, we’re going to send all 10-digit calls and 3-digit calls. The 10-digit calls will be routed out the Google Voice trunk on the Raspberry Pi side. And the 3-digit calls will be sent directly to Raspberry Pi extensions. So we’ll need two Outbound Rules.

For the first rule, choose Outbound Rules → Add. For the Rule Name, specify StandardOut. Apply the rule to Calls to Numbers with a length: 10. For Route 1, choose Generic SIP Trunk as the Destination. Click OK to save the new rule.

For the second rule, choose Outbound Rules → Add. For Rule Name, specify StandardInt. Apply the rule to Calls to Numbers with a length: 3. For Route 1, choose Generic SIP Trunk as the Destination. Click OK to save the new rule.

If you already have configured a 3CX smartphone client for one of your 3CX extensions, you now should be able to dial any 3-digit or 10-digit number and have the call processed through your new 3CX→RasPi trunk without any further setup assuming you’ve created a Google Voice trunk on the Raspberry Pi side. That wasn’t too hard, was it?

Routing Incoming Google Voice Calls to 3CX

Depending upon your own requirements, you may want to route incoming Google Voice calls or other trunks directly to an extension and/or softphone on your 3CX server. You obviously could set up multiple trunks of any type on the Raspberry Pi side and have the calls to each trunk routed to a different extension or softphone on the 3CX side. To enable this on the 3CX side, edit your Generic SIP Trunk and click the DIDs tab. Then Add each of the 10-digit DIDs of the Raspberry Pi trunks you wish to redirect. Next, create an Inbound Rule for every DID and tell 3CX where to route the calls.

On the Raspberry Pi side, add each of your Google Voice Trunks. Then create an Inbound Route for each DID and specify the Destination as Trunks → Remote (sip). The 3CX server will take care of routing the various incoming calls to each of the Google Voice trunks to its predefined extension and/or softphone. Enjoy!

Originally published: Monday, March 6, 2017

9 Countries Have Never Visited Nerd Vittles. Got a Friend in Any of Them https://t.co/wMfmlhiQ9y #asterisk #freepbx pic.twitter.com/TPFGZbqWB6

— Ward Mundy (@NerdUno) April 22, 2016

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…

A simpler Bridge setup is available in the paid versions of 3CX. [↩]

Cellphone Hell: 2017 Minefield Navigation Guide

Thursday, February 16, 2017 / 4 Comments on Cellphone Hell: 2017 Minefield Navigation Guide

Well, it’s been an interesting week. RingPlus, a Sprint MVNO, has gone belly up after Sprint pulled the plug on them. Lawsuit details are here. Then, not surprisingly, Sprint announced a new "unlimited" talk, text, and data plan: 5 phones for $90 with a free iPhone with trade-in. After first year, Sprint price escalates to $160 for 4 lines or $190 for 5 lines. And then, Verizon surprised everyone with an "unlimited" plan of their own: 4 phones for $180. With both of these plans, you pay through the nose for the first phone, and then the remaining ones are either free or almost free. So you might as well have some more babies and give them each a phone. For our weary followers that have been with RingPlus, you are about to be introduced to the Sprint Gotcha. Unbeknownst to you, when you inserted that RingPlus SIM and turned on your phone, Sprint locked the phone to their network. And guess what? RingPlus can’t unlock it, and Sprint won’t claiming that you’re not "their customer." But, alas, if you’ve bought your phone, you’re still entitled to use it with a provider of your choice. And, if your phone supports other CDMA carriers such as Verizon or GSM carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile, you’re in luck. There’s a terrific guy with a company called GSM Zambia, and he will unlock your Sprint phone for $10.84 assuming you have a Windows PC with a USB connector and cable to plug in your phone. For those lucky enough to have a Google-branded phone such as a Nexus or Pixel, you have no worries. Google unlocks it automatically when you insert a SIM card from a different provider.

There are more gotchas awaiting those with iPhones. You see Apple actually makes an iPhone that supports all four of the major U.S. carriers: Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile. The problem is you probably didn’t get handed that phone. Instead, you got one that was locked to the Sprint network or the AT&T/T-Mobile GSM network, and both of them are missing the necessary radios to support other carriers. But there’s good news. If you’re a loyal customer and have AppleCare for your iPhone, chances are pretty good that Apple will work with you to swap out the phone for one that will work with the carrier of your choice. You have to say this for Apple. Nobody else in the cellphone business would even give you the time of day if you made such a request. So, yes, we are a FanBoy and for very good reason. Apple bends over backwards to help out its loyal customers. Just be advised that you probably will need to speak with an Apple Store manager, and he will probably have to call Cupertino to obtain the document explaining how to handle the transaction. In our case, it was several phones under Apple leases which made things even more complex. But Apple solved it, and they were pleasant about it.

AT&T has had a new "unlimited" plan for about a year, but there were several gotchas in addition to their fine print about what unlimited really means. First, you had to also be a DirecTV customer, but they eliminated that requirement today. And, second, tethering was prohibited. While we’ve previously noted that you could work around the tethering problem by purchasing a ZTE Mobley portable device for your car that could be used outside the vehicle with an adapter. But the wrinkle was AT&T wanted another $40+ a month to cover the device on your unlimited plan. While AT&T boasts that the fourth phone on the unlimited plan is free, it turns out the car device doesn’t meet their definition so, if you only need 3 phones, you still have to cough up the $40 for the mobile device.

T-Mobile also had an "unlimited" plan, but it also restricted tethering. However, T-Mobile is not one to leave money on the table, and they quickly removed the tethering limitation once the Verizon plan was announced. So the bottom line on the 4-phone unlimited plans as of today looks like this: Sprint $90 (10GB tethering), T-Mobile $160 (10GB tethering), AT&T $180 (no tethering), and Verizon $180 (10GB tethering). All four carriers describe their plans as "unlimited" while none truly are insofar as 4G data is concerned. The new buzzword is "deprioritization" which means the carrier reserves the right to slow your data speeds once you reach a certain threshold. Also be advised that zero-rating of certain services is likely to become less of an issue with the Trump administration. In T-Mobile’s case, you get unlimited streaming of certain music and video services at reduced bandwidth. With AT&T, you get streaming of DirecTV movies at reduced bandwidth. With Sprint, you get HD video streaming at no extra cost plus a free iPhone7 for the next 18 months when you trade-in certain older phones. Unless you live in a very busy metropolitan area, user reports suggest that deprioritization shouldn’t be a concern. Here’s the Reddit thread with everything you need to know.

Despite our extreme dislike for almost everything about the Sprint organization and the way they do business, if you happen to live in a city with good Sprint coverage, you really can’t beat their 5 phones for $90 "unlimited" deal at least for one year. After that, Sprint is no bargain at all. If you’re using RingPlus, then that probably means you already have endured Sprint so the change will be easy for you. Just be advised that there are plenty of Sprint reps out there that will try to tell you your phones don’t qualify because they were "prepaid" phones and the plan is only available for "postpaid" phones. A better approach is to visit a Sprint store and advise them that you wish to port your existing phones to the new Sprint unlimited plan. That seems to work although YMMV. Remember, it’s still Sprint you’re dealing with. Good luck!

Feb. 27 Update: The Unlimited Data Plan competition continues to escalate. Today, AT&T sweetened its unlimited plan offering by adding 10GB of free tethering to each phone on its plan beginning Thursday. And T-Mobile announced that customers now can register three phones on its unlimited plan for only $100/month. Unlike Sprint, the T-Mobile offering has no one-year discount cutoff for customers taking advantage of the special pricing. All four major carriers in the U.S. now offer 10GB/month of tethering for each phone on an unlimited data plan.

Published: Thursday, February 16, 2017 Updated: Monday, February 27, 2017

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…

R.I.P. RingPlus: Don’t Panic, Google Hangouts Is Your Friend

Thursday, February 9, 2017 / 1 Comment on R.I.P. RingPlus: Don’t Panic, Google Hangouts Is Your Friend

Three months ago, we warned you that RingPlus appeared to be on its last leg and to begin planning your exit strategy. February 11 appears to be their Drop Dead Date although Ting apparently will now absorb all RingPlus accounts that aren’t ported out but under markedly different terms. For openers, there’s a $6 per month charge per phone before you even turn it on. After that, it’s pay-as-you-go for minutes, messages, and data. While the buckets are pooled between all of your phones, the pricing is not cheap. 1,000 minutes will run you $18/month while 2100 minutes will set you back $35/month. 1,000 text messages costs $5/month while 2,000 will run $8/month. 2 gigs of data is $20/month with an additional $10/month for each additional gigabyte or fraction thereof. For a family of four with four phones and modest usage sharing 2100 minutes, 2000 messages, and 2 gigs of data per person, the monthly tab (not including taxes and fees) would be $123 which works out to over $30 per phone. To add insult to injury, Sprint automatically locks RingPlus phones to their network, but you’ll have to move heaven and earth to get them to unlock the devices, even those that were paid in full, without moving to Sprint for several months of "service." Thinking you’ll switch to Sprint’s unlimited 5 phones for $100 unlimited plan, think again. They’ve ended that promotion. So what is a guy or gal to do? We’ve dusted off some of our previous recommendations to provide you an extremely inexpensive solution if you have WiFi access most of the time and do modest mobile calling and texting without WiFi.

Feb. 11 Update: We have some good news and bad news. First, the bad news. It’s still the Sprint network. And now the good news. RingPlus has alerted users that their Drop Dead Date has been postponed until February 21. The migration to Ting is expected next week, well before the Feb. 21 date. And more good news. Sprint is not one to leave money sitting on the table, and yesterday they announced a new "Unlimited" Plan offering 5 lines with unlimited calls, texts, and data for $90 a month. The pricing is good through the end of March, 2018. This is good for a couple of reasons. First, it will keep you on the Sprint network for a month or two in order to qualify all of your existing phones for unlocking. Second, it’s a great deal despite the fine print explaining that unlimited doesn’t really mean unlimited: "Data deprioritization applies during times of congestion. Reqs ebill and new account." Don’t think you’re going to save money by moving fewer phones. The first phone is $50/month. The second is $40. And the next three are free. Our best advice is to wait until after your numbers have been ported to Ting which is better equipped to handle porting than RingPlus while the Titanic is sinking.

Feb. 13 News Flash Verizon introduces unlimited data plans including tethering…

💞 Verizon introduces Unlimited Data Plan w/ Tethering: 4 lines/$180+ 💞 https://t.co/AZqVSplywl #asterisk #voip #MobileComputing pic.twitter.com/iku1m0k0jn

— Ward Mundy (@NerdUno) February 13, 2017

When we introduced Google’s new Pixel phone, we noted that it seemed like a perfect candidate to determine whether we could do everything a normal mobile phone could do using no cellular service. In other words, we wanted to set up the mobile phone basically in Airplane Mode with no SIM card usage and just WiFi connectivity. The goal was to determine what, if anything, we couldn’t do that we’d normally expect to do using a top-of-the-line mobile phone. There was one obvious prerequisite. The mobile phone needed an Internet connection. This could be a normal WiFi network connection, or it could be a connection using an LTE-powered WiFi HotSpot, or it could be a WiFi connection established through tethering to an existing smartphone. It turned out that all three options let us make calls, send and receive text messages, and surf the web with no monthly cost for the additional phone other than the cost, if any, for the WiFi data used.

Why Would You Do Such a Thing? We can think of a number of reasons. The most important considerations for RingPlus users are it’s considerably cheaper than adding another mobile phone to your cellular plan and you’re not tied to Sprint’s lousy network. Typically, adding a mobile phone to many cellphone plans can cost upwards of $50 a month before you make the first call. Second, some may like the flexibility of having BOTH an iPhone and an Android phone because of differences in features and functionality. Finally, it’s a perfect way to introduce younger children to mobile phone technology without spending an arm and a leg on cellular service.

What’s a Typical Use Case for a Non-Cellular Mobile Phone? We can think of several scenarios where this makes perfect sense. We happen to have a Verizon HotSpot that’s still on an unlimited data plan. While it costs almost $100 a month, it lets 7 devices connect to blazing fast LTE service at zero additional cost. If you travel with a group of people that all need mobile phones and that typically travel or work together except when alternative WiFi service is available, this is a real deal. For those with a newer vehicle that includes a WiFi HotSpot or an OBD-II diagnostics port¹ and AT&T’s $100 ZTE Mobley device, mobile phones and tablets in the car or truck work perfectly without a cellular connection. And AT&T now lets you add a vehicle’s WiFi hotspot or ZTE Mobley to their unlimited data plan for $40 a month.² If you have four kids and a spouse, you can do the math. Finally, if you and your family or business associates spend 95% of the day either at home or in an office or car with WiFi, everyone now gets the flexibility of a mobile phone with no recurring cost just like the good ol’ days with RingPlus. Driving our daughter to the school bus stop in our old neighborhood recently, we happened to check for WiFi access because the cellular service was so horrible. There were 27 separate WiFi HotSpots, all of which were secured. Seems we weren’t the only ones having difficulty with cell service in the neighborhood.

VoIP Requirements for a Non-Cellular Mobile Phone. As we’ve said many times, the beauty of VoIP technology is not having to put all your eggs in one basket. So there’s really no reason to deploy a single technology. In the Google world, that means you can take advantage of Google’s rich collection of messaging applications such as Hangouts and Allo and Duo while also deploying Skype, Facebook Messenger, WebRTC and SIP-based services to connect to traditional hosting providers and PBXs such as Incredible PBX and PIAF5 powered by 3CX (shown below). Today we’ll walk through the setup process for all of these. When we’re finished, you’ll have crystal-clear phone calls as well as SMS messaging with something you never got with RingPlus, multiple layers of redundancy.

What Does All of this Really Cost? You obviously have to purchase a mobile phone but, if you’ve been with RingPlus, you already have one or more phones in hand. When we’re finished today, you’ll be able to make calls as well as send and receive SMS messages in multiple ways. Calls and SMS messages to U.S. and Canada destinations are free using Google’s services. Skype-to-Skype calls worldwide are free. SMS messages sent and received using Pinger/Textfree as well as Facebook Messenger are also free of charge. For calls made using a SIP softphone or WebRTC connection to an Incredible PBX or PIAF5 PBX, you only pay the standard VoIP tariff for the calls, typically less than a penny a minute for domestic calls. Calls to many international destinations are free using FreeVoipDeal.com.

Numerous SIP softphones for Android devices are available at no cost including Zoiper, CSipSimple and many others. Still others are available for less than $10 and can be installed on as many Android devices as you happen to own, e.g. Acrobits and Bria. And, of course, the 3CX softphone above is free with PIAF5. Stick with softphones with 4 stars or better!

Putting the VoIP Pieces in Place. Once you have your SIM-free phone in hand, switch to Airplane mode and then reactivate WiFi. Go through the basic setup to establish a WiFi connection in your home or office. Then it’s time to add the components you’ll need to turn your smartphone into a fully-functioning VoIP phone. If they’re not already on your phone, download the following apps from the Google Play Store or the iPhone App Store: Hangouts, Hangouts Dialer, Allo, Duo, Skype, Facebook Messenger, Textfree, Port Knocker,³ DynDNS or FreeDyn (not free!) Client,⁴ and the VoIP softphones of your choice.

We recommend reserving the Google Voice number associated with the primary Gmail account on your smartphone for use with Hangouts, Allo, and Duo. The reason is that you can’t really use these services satisfactorily while also using the same Google Voice number with Google Chat and the Asterisk® XMPP module. Our previous Nerd Vittles tutorial will walk you through obtaining multiple Google Voice numbers to use with with your smartphones or Incredible PBX and PIAF5.

Pictured above is the layout we actually use. Keep in mind that the bottom row stays in place as you scroll through other screens on your smartphone. Long-press on an existing icon on the bottom row and drag it off the row. Then long-press on the app you want to add and drag it onto the bottom row. We recommend replacing the default Phone and Messaging apps with the Hangouts Dialer and Allo (as shown). We also include a SIP softphone on the bottom row which gives you multiple ways to place and receive calls.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/293184354″ params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="400″ height="300″ iframe="true" /]

But I Really Want a Cellphone Provider. Yes, we hear you. Backup cellphone service has its virtues. Here are 3 Android phones from Google ranging in price from $199 to $649 with easy payment plans ranging from $8 to $27 a month. Each gives you unlimited domestic calling as well as unlimited domestic and international texting with multiple cellphone carriers. Rates start at $20 a month plus $10/GB for data. You even get bill credits for any data you don’t use. Project Fi is worth a careful look if you’re on a budget and limit most of your data usage to WiFi connections. Here’s a great article explaining the pro’s and con’s of Project Fi after six months of actual usage.

Bottom Line. On our smartphone we have the following services activated and functioning reliably: Google Voice with Hangouts, Allo and Pinger for SMS messaging, Bria for VoIP calling with Incredible PBX for XiVO, CSipSimple and Zoiper for SIP calling with Incredible PBX 13, Facebook Messenger, Skype, plus the 3CX Dialer for calling with PIAF5 powered by 3CX. That translates into 5 different phone lines supporting free incoming and outgoing voice calls, plus 2 additional lines for free SMS messaging, plus the Facebook and Skype services to reach over a billion people worldwide at no cost. And both the PIAF5 and XiVO lines can support calls via multiple trunks using customized dial prefixes. Even with all these services running, most smartphones have sufficient horsepower to make it through a busy day. What are you waiting for? Make the switch!

Update: Another WiFi HotSpot Option. We’ve now had an opportunity to test yet another WiFi HotSpot solution. This one uses AT&T’s Unite Pro, available from Amazon for $65. Rather than sign up for AT&T’s $50 monthly pay-as-you-go plan, you can use this with StraightTalk with minimal effort. That lets you purchase 2 months of service and 4GB of BYOT data for $40. Be sure to purchase the Mobile HotSpot Plan and not a cellphone plan! To get started, visit your neighborhood WalMart and pick up the StraightTalk Bring Your Own Tablet SIM Activation Kit. Do NOT mistakenly buy the BYO Phone Activation Kit. It won’t work! The kit includes a 1GB Data service plan that’s good for 30 days from activation. With your Unite Pro in hand, insert the AT&T SIM card that came with the tablet activation kit. Turn on the HotSpot and select it as your WiFi connection using your desktop PC. The name of the HotSpot and its WiFi password will be displayed on the main screen of the HotSpot. From your desktop, use a browser to log into 192.168.1.1. The default administrator password is attadmin. Goto Settings -> Mobile Broadband -> APN and add a new APN with name: StraightTalk and APN: tfdata. After saving it, select it as active APN.

Now switch back to your desktop PC and change your default WiFi connection so that you can access the Internet. Visit http://STBYOT.com to register your StraightTalk SIM card and activate your 1GB data plan. You’ll need your SIM card number (at the bottom of the big card from which you removed the MicroSIM). Then you’ll need your scratch-off data service PIN. Once you complete the setup and register with StraightTalk, activate your service. Now turn off your HotSpot and turn it back on. It should display a 4G connection at the top left of the screen. At this point, reselect the HotSpot as your WiFi connection for your desktop PC. Then try to make a connection to a web site on the Internet, and you should be in business. For conservative data usage, 4GB for $40 with 2 months of service is the best deal we’ve been able to find for those that prefer pre-paid cellular service.

Published: Thursday, February 9, 2017 Updated: Friday, February 17, 2017

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…

OBD-II port is mandatory on vehicles sold in the U.S. since 1996. But you may not need a vehicle at all. 🙂 [↩]
DirecTV service is required to take advantage of AT&T’s Unlimited Data Plan offering. [↩]
We strongly recommend setting up PortKnocker with the credentials found in /root/knock.FAQ on your Incredible PBX server. This will provide a back door to assure that you aren’t inadvertently locked out of your server by the Incredible PBX firewall while you are traveling. [↩]
You’ll need to set up a dynamic DNS client on your Android phone in order to keep your IP address updated and whitelisted with the Incredible PBX firewall. Unfortunately, this feature requires the FreeDyn paid app on the iPhone. [↩]

Chasing Rainbows: The VoIP in the Cloud Trifecta

Monday, January 30, 2017 / 2 Comments on Chasing Rainbows: The VoIP in the Cloud Trifecta

Week after week, the VoIP landscape for Cloud Computing continues to improve. And today we have more terrific news. Not only is there a new release of Wazo with simplified support for WebRTC and FollowMe roaming, but the Wazo 17.02 release also is now available on the RentPBX platform worldwide. Coupling Wazo and RentPBX with a secondary Cloud platform to achieve total VoIP redundancy is the VoIP in the Cloud Trifecta if ever there were one. RentPBX has been a platinum sponsor of Nerd Vittles for many years and, while they may not be the cheapest Cloud provider, they are certainly the best when it comes to VoIP. The reason is simple. Their cloud platform is only used for VoIP so you’re not competing for server resources with a zillion customers that are compiling millions of lines of code all day long. You also get free support! Their worldwide hosting locations translate into crystal clear VoIP calling without jitter using your favorite VoIP providers. With the Nerd Vittles NoGotchas coupon code, monthly service is just $15. For mission critical VoIP platforms, we recommend you set up Wazo with RentPBX as your primary server and configure a secondary server at OVH or Vultr.com or Digital Ocean for an additional $3.50 to $5 per month. Using Wazo’s native High Availability feature, your business gets a fault-tolerant platform with automatic failover for less than $20 a month.

Installing Incredible PBX for Wazo at RentPBX

We want to quickly walk you through the installation procedure at RentPBX because it’s the easiest cloud platform to get up and running, period. First, sign up for an account at RentPBX and order Incredible PBX for Wazo which you’ll find under the PBX in a Flash section of their site. Next, choose your favorite hosting location. We strongly recommend their Miami site if you’re east of the Rockies. For example, ping times to atlanta.voip.ms are under 14 milliseconds. The LA node works great for those on the Left Coast. Then choose Incredible PBX Wazo (Debian 8 Asterisk 14) for your platform. Enter a hostname for your server (HINT: test.rentpbx.com works fine if you don’t have your own) and click Continue. Enter NoGotchas for your Promo Code. Click Validate Code and then Checkout. Once you receive your credentials, login to your new server as root using SSH or Putty. The RentPBX setup procedure is a two-step install. First, you get Debian up to date. Then you reboot and the main Incredible PBX installer will be run.

Because of some new certificates, you will get an exim prompt during the initial phase of the install. Just type q to proceed. After initial reboot, log back in with your root credentials and complete the prompts to add your Wazo web password, a telephone reminders numeric password, and a PPTP username and password. Review your passwords carefully. Then press ENTER to proceed with the installation of Incredible PBX for Wazo. Set your time zone when prompted. After about 5-10 minutes, you will be prompted to verify that the Wazo base install completed successfully. It’s perfectly normal that some of the Wazo services are disabled at this juncture. If you see “Wazo fully booted” after the listing of services, you’re good to go. Just press ENTER to proceed. The installer then will run the Wazo Wizard. Within a minute or two, you will again be asked to verify that it completed successfully. If you see no error messages, press ENTER and go have a cup of coffee. The rest of the install will proceed without further prompting. In 10-20 minutes, your server will be ready to use.

Setting Up SIP and Google Voice Trunks with Wazo

When the installation is finished, you can make toll-free calls in the U.S. and Canada without doing anything except dialing "1″ and the 10-digit number from any phone connected to your server. For other calls, there are two steps in setting up trunks to use with Incredible PBX. First, you have to sign up with the provider of your choice and obtain trunk credentials. These typically include the FQDN of the provider’s server as well as your username and password to use for access to that server. Second, you have to configure a trunk on the Incredible PBX for Wazo server so that you can make or receive calls outside of your PBX. As with the platform tutorials, we have taken the guesswork out of the trunk setup procedure for roughly a dozen respected providers around the globe. In addition, Wazo Snapshots goes a step further and actually creates the trunks for you, minus your credentials, as part of the initial Incredible PBX install.

For Google Voice trunks, log into your server as root and run ./add-gvtrunk. When prompted, insert your 10-digit Google Voice number, your Google Voice email address and OAuth 2 token. The native Google Voice OAuth tutorial explains how to obtain it.

For the other providers, review the setup procedure below and then edit the preconfigured trunk for that provider by logging into the Wazo web GUI and choosing IPX → Trunk Management → SIP Protocol. Edit the setup for your provider (as shown above) and fill in your credentials and CallerID number in the General tab. Activate the trunk in the Register tab after again filling in your credentials. Save your settings when finished. No additional configuration for these providers is required using the Incredible PBX for Wazo Snapshot.

Directing Incoming Calls from Wazo Trunks

Registered Wazo trunks typically include a DID number. With the exception of CallCentric, this is the number that callers would dial to reach your PBX. With CallCentric, it’s the 11-digit account number of your account, e.g. 17771234567. In the Wazo web GUI, we use IPX → Call Management → Incoming Calls to create inbound routes for every DID and trunk associated with your PBX. Two sample DIDs have been preconfigured to show you how to route calls to an extension or to an IVR. To use these, simply edit their settings and change the DID to match your trunk. Or you can create new incoming routes to send calls to dozens of other destinations on your PBX.

Routing Outgoing Calls from Wazo to Providers

Outgoing calls from extensions on your Wazo PBX must be routed to a trunk provider to reach call destinations outside your PBX. Outgoing call routing is managed in IPX → Call Management → Outgoing Calls. You tell Wazo which trunk provider to use in the General tab. Then you assign a Calling Digit Sequence to this provider in the Exten tab. For example, if NXXNXXXXXX were assigned to Vitelity, this would tell Wazo to send calls to Vitelity if the caller dialed a 10-digit number. Wazo has the flexibility to add and remove digits from a dialed number as part of the outbound call routing process. For example, you might want callers to dial 48NXXNXXXXXX to send calls to a Google Voice trunk where 48 spells "GV" on the phone keypad. We obviously don’t want to send the entire dial string to Google Voice so we tell Wazo to strip the first 2 digits (48) from the number before routing the call out your Google Voice trunk. We’ve included two examples in the Wazo Snapshot to get you started. Skype Connect (shown below) is an example showing how to strip digits and also add digits before sending a call on its way:

Setting Up a Softphone & WebRTC with Wazo

If you’re a Mac user, you’re lucky (and smart). Download and install Telephone from the Mac App Store. Start up the application and choose Telephone:Preference:Accounts. Click on the + icon to add a new account. To set up your softphone, you need 3 pieces of information: the IP address of your server (Domain), and your Username and Password. In the World of Wazo, you’ll find these under IPBX → Services → Lines. Just click on the Pencil icon beside the extension to which you want to connect. Now copy or cut-and-paste your Username and Password into the Accounts dialog of the Telephone app. Click Done when you’re finished, and your new softphone will come to life and should show Available. Dial the IVR (4871) to try things out. With Telephone, you can use over two dozen soft phones simultaneously on your desktop.

For everyone else, we recommend the YateClient softphone which is free. Download it from here. Run YateClient once you’ve installed it and enter the credentials for the Wazo Line. You’ll need the IP address of your server plus your Line username and password associated with the 701 extension. On the Wazo platform, do NOT use an actual extension number for your username with Wazo. Go to IPBX Settings → Lines to decipher the appropriate username and password for the desired extension. Click OK to save your entries.

WebRTC allows you to use your Chrome or Firefox browser as a softphone. Extension 701 comes preconfigured for WebRTC access with Incredible PBX for Wazo. It shares the same password as the Line associated with extension 701, but the username is 701 rather than the username associated with the Line. You can decipher the password by accessing the Wazo Web GUI and then IPBX → Services → Users → Incredible PBX → XiVO Client Password. Or log into your server as root using SSH or Putty and run: /root/show-701-pw. Wazo introduces several new features to WebRTC including support for the awesome new Opus codec plus voicemail management and even Gravatar support. It’s all preconfigured!

Special Note: Beginning with this version of Wazo (17.02), WebRTC is fully integrated with NGINX on your server, and a simplified method for configuring WebRTC users has been added. When you create a new User account, simply choose the SIP (WebRTC) Protocol when creating a new user account, and all of the Advanced Line options required to support WebRTC will be preconfigured for you.

To use WebRTC, you first need to accept the different SSL certificates associated with the WebRTC app. From your browser, go to the following site and click on each link to accept the certificates. Once you’ve completed this process, visit the Wazo WebRTC site.

Before logging in, click on the Gear icon in the lower right corner and then click on the Pencil icon to edit your Settings. Fill in the public IP address of your Wazo server and specify 443 for the Port. Leave the Backend field blank and click Save. Now login to your WebRTC account with Username 701. The Password is the one you obtained running show-701-pw. The IP Address (if required) is the address of your Wazo PBX.

Implementing FollowMe Roaming with a CellPhone

In addition to ringing your SIP extension when incoming calls arrive, Wazo 17.02 can also ring your cellphone simultaneously. This obviously requires at least one outbound trunk. If that trunk provider also supports CallerID spoofing, then Wazo will pass the CallerID number of the caller rather than the DID associated with the trunk. Incredible PBX for Wazo comes with cellphone support for extension 702 ready to go. To enable it, access the Wazo Web GUI and go to IPBX → Services → Users → Incredible PBX and insert your Mobile Phone Number using the same dial string format associated with the trunk you wish to use to place the calls to your cellphone. You then can answer the incoming calls on either your cellphone or the registered SIP phone. If you answer on your cellphone, you will be prompted whether you wish to accept the call. If you press 1 after observing the CallerID, the caller will be connected. If you decline, the caller will be routed to the Wazo voicemail account of the extension.

Activating Voice Recognition for Wazo

Google has changed the licensing of their speech recognition engine about as many times as you change diapers on a newborn baby. Today’s rule restricts use to “personal and development use.” Assuming you qualify, the very first order of business is to enable speech recognition for your Wazo PBX. Once enabled, the Incredible PBX feature set grows exponentially. You’ll ultimately have access to the Voice Dialer for AsteriDex, Worldwide Weather Reports where you can say the name of a city and state or province to get a weather forecast for almost anywhere, Wolfram Alpha for a Siri-like encyclopedia for your PBX, and Lefteris Zafiris’ speech recognition software to build additional Asterisk apps limited only by your imagination. And, rumor has it, Google is about to announce new licensing terms, but we’re not there yet. To try out the Voice Dialer in today’s demo IVR, you’ll need to obtain a license key from Google. This Nerd Vittles tutorial will walk you through that process. Add your key to /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/speech-recog.agi on line 72.

Adding DISA Support to Your Wazo PBX

If you’re new to PBX lingo, DISA stands for Direct Inward System Access. As the name implies, it lets you make calls from outside your PBX using the call resources inside your PBX. This gives anybody with your DISA credentials the ability to make calls through your PBX on your nickel. It probably ranks up there as the most abused and one of the most loved features of the modern PBX.

There are three ways to implement DISA with Incredible PBX for Wazo. You can continue reading this section for our custom implementation with two-step authentication. There also are two native Wazo methods for implementing DISA using a PIN for security. First, you can dedicate a DID to incoming DISA calls. Or you can add a DISA option to an existing IVR. Both methods are documented in our tutorial on the PIAF Forum.

We prefer two-step authentication with DISA to make it harder for the bad guys. First, the outside phone number has to match the whitelist of numbers authorized to use your DISA service. And, second, you have to supply the DISA password for your server before you get dialtone to place an outbound call. Ultimately, of course, the monkey is on your back to create a very secure DISA password and to change it regularly. If all this sounds too scary, don’t install DISA on your PBX.

1. To get started, edit /root/disa-xivo.txt. When the editor opens the dialplan code, move the cursor down to the following line:

exten => 3472,n,GotoIf($["${CALLERID(number)}"="701"]?disago1)  ; Good guy

2. Clone the line by pressing Ctrl-K and then Ctrl-U. Add copies of the line by pressing Ctrl-U again for each phone number you’d like to whitelist so that the caller can access DISA on your server. Now edit each line and replace 701 with the 10-digit number to be whitelisted.

3. Move the cursor down to the following line and replace 12341234 with the 8-digit numeric password that callers will have to enter to access DISA on your server:

exten => 3472,n,GotoIf($["${MYCODE}" = "12341234"]?disago2:bad,1)

4. Save the dialplan changes by pressing Ctrl-X, then Y, then ENTER.

5. Now copy the dialplan code into your Wazo setup, remove any previous copies of the code, and restart Asterisk:

cd /root
sed -i '\:// BEGIN DISA:,\:// END DISA:d' /etc/asterisk/extensions_extra.d/xivo-extrafeatures.conf
cat disa-xivo.txt >> /etc/asterisk/extensions_extra.d/xivo-extrafeatures.conf
/etc/init.d/asterisk reload

6. The traditional way to access DISA is to add it as an undisclosed option in an IVR that is assigned to one of your inbound trunks (DIDs). For the demo IVR that is installed, edit the ivr-1.conf configuration file and change the "option 0″ line so that it looks like this. Then SAVE your changes.

exten => 0,1(ivrsel-0),Dial(Local/3472@default)

7. Adjust the inbound calls route of one of your DIDs to point to the demo IVR by changing the destination to Customized with the following Command:

Goto(ivr-1,s,1)

A sample is included in the Wazo Snapshot. Here’s how ours looks for the Demo IVR:

8. Now you should be able to call your DID and choose option 0 to access DISA assuming you have whitelisted the number from which you are calling. When prompted, enter the DISA password you assigned and press #. You then should be able to dial a 10-digit number to make an outside call from within your PBX.

SECURITY HINT: Whenever you implement a new IVR on your PBX, it’s always a good idea to call in from an outside number 13 TIMES and try every key from your phone to make sure there is no unanticipated hole in your setup. Be sure to also let the IVR timeout to see what result you get.

Implementing HA Redundancy with Wazo

With a business phone system, nothing is more important than never missing a call. Wazo’s High Availability (HA) option makes this a no-brainer, and it’s free! Just set up a second server either in the cloud or in your office and walk through our HA tutorial to set up the second server and activate HA. Even though located just across the border in Canada, OVH is hard to beat at $3.49 a month with 2 gigs of RAM and 10 gigs of storage. Vultr.com and Digital Ocean are also good candidates for a slave server, and the cost is still just $5 a month. Their 512MB platforms work fine with a drive cache, especially for a backup server. To get started, create a new Wazo platform using one of the highlighted links above. Be sure to use the same version of Wazo. Once the server is up and running, go to our Wazo HA tutorial and we’ll walk you through installing the NeoRouter Server and completing the Wazo setup. Be sure to configure Google Voice on the backup server before activating HA!

Test Drive Incredible PBX for Wazo

To give you a good idea of what to expect with Incredible PBX for Wazo, just pick up a phone and dial any toll-free number in the U.S. and Canada using a 1 prefix. We’ve also set up a sample IVR using voice prompts from Allison. Try it out from any phone on your PBX by dialing 4871 (IVR1):

Nerd Vittles Demo IVR Options
1 – Call by Name (say "Delta Airlines" or "American Airlines" to try it out)
2 – MeetMe Conference
3 – Wolfram Alpha (Coming Soon!)
4 – Lenny (The Telemarketer’s Worst Nightmare)
5 – Today’s News Headlines
6 – Weather Forecast (enter a 5-digit ZIP code)
7 – Today in History (Coming Soon!)
8 – Speak to a Real Person (or maybe just Lenny if we’re out)

What To Do and Where to Go Next?

Here are a boatload of projects to get you started exploring Wazo on your own. Just plug the keywords into the search bar at the top of Nerd Vittles to find numerous tutorials covering the topics or simply follow our links. Unless there is an asterisk (*) the components already are in place so do NOT reinstall them. Just read the previous tutorials to learn how to configure each component. Be sure to also join the PIAF Forum to keep track of the latest tips and tricks with Wazo. There’s a treasure trove of information that awaits.

Wazo and Incredible PBX Dial Code Cheat Sheets

Complete Wazo documentation is available here. But here are two cheat sheets in PDF format for Wazo Star Codes and Incredible PBX Dial Codes.

Published: Monday, January 30, 2017

Look Before Your Leap: Don’t Jump From the Kettle into the Fire #asterisk https://t.co/OhXlHzEnvV #Home2RealOpenSource #IncrediblePBX #Wazo pic.twitter.com/cRD2my8JE5

— Ward Mundy (@NerdUno) December 16, 2016

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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