Comments on: Why Wait? Build Your Own Skype Gateway to Asterisk

By: Dallas

Dallas — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:15:47 +0000

Never mind… the "static skype" works fine.

By: Dallas

Dallas — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 07:24:24 +0000

I’m a little late to this and now I find that Skype has taken down the CentOS rpm. I tried the FC10 rpm but it complains about needing qt4-x11. I have the rpmforge repo enabled but can’t find qt4-x11. Any suggestions?

By: Mr Bear

Mr Bear — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:36:10 +0000

Hi there great guide 😀 however it has come to my attention that my pbx is running in a vmware environment on esxi and is without a sound card 🙁 is there anyway to make this work without one or am i gonna have to dig around for a physical box to reinstall on…

By: Todd

Todd — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 11:11:33 +0000

You guys make this too easy!!!! Thanks for all the great scripts and instructions.

Some notes . . . if you are trying this (as of) January 2010 you might have to upgrade your Xorg server via yum. You might also need to alter the startup script to add credentials to it . . . "echo username password | skype –pipelogin &" if you are running the new beta version of skype (and as mentioned, the centos version is no longer there–just use the static compiled version on the site and as already mentioned copy the files as specified in the README file.)

By: CK

CK — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:08:04 +0000

I used the "static skype" download not the rpm for Centos 5 – un’tar’ed and executed – Perfect

By: James

James — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:12:10 +0000

Ward – I just got around to trying this and the skype centos rpm is no longer available. Do you have any suggestions on how to get this working now?

By: p

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:34:46 +0000

Don’t suppose anyone can offer some advice on how this will work if the Asterisk instance is running from a Xen Server VM? my concern is the audio device, as i dont know if Xen supports presenting Soundcards to guest Linux OS (CentOS)

any tips would be greately appreciated.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:56:16 +0000

Here's another tip for setting up speeddials for Skype instead of creating extensions. All speeddials are stored in the internal db "sysspeeddials". Go into Asterisk CLI, type in "database put sysspeeddials ## SkypeID", where ## is the speeddial #. Precede the SkypeID with * or 8 or whatever code you use in the Skype Outgoing prefix. E.g. "database put sysspeeddials 99 *echo123". Then use the regular speeddial code *0 followed by 99 will call the Skype echo123 test line.

By: ward

ward — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:25:38 +0000

For those having problems building this gateway on systems other than PBX in a Flash, take a look at this excellent FreePBX tutorial which builds upon our initial work.

By: Rrichiez

Rrichiez — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 06:22:20 +0000

Hi my question is will this slow asterisk down? if i do thiere upgrade will i have to reconfigure this again? linux and asterisk are always upgrading and dont want to be having to reconfigure all the time also want to know if this will take up alot of resources from the box? skype is very cheap….

[WM: Will Skype slow down your Asterisk system? Good question. Kinda depends upon the horsepower of your system, the current load on your server, and the number of Skype calls going in and out. My best guestimate is that a Skype calls consumes slightly more processing resources than a SIP call using a compression codec. Best way to find out is obviously to try it. You can always disable it if performance becomes a problem.]

By: marc

marc — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:20:21 +0000

http://www.skypeforsip.com/

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:49:20 +0000

Just tried installing the skype gateway on a clean install of PIAF 1.4_X64 today but am getting the following errors when trying to install the skype client:
root@pbx:~/skype $ rpm -ivh skype*
warning: skype-2.0.0.72-centos.i586.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID
d66b746e
error: Failed dependencies:
libXv.so.1 is needed by skype-2.0.0.72-centos.i586
libasound.so.2 is needed by skype-2.0.0.72-centos.i586
libasound.so.2(ALSA_0.9) is needed by skype-2.0.0.72-centos.i586
libasound.so.2(ALSA_0.9.0rc4) is needed by skype-2.0.0.72-centos.i586
root@pbx:~/skype $

Any ideas? I followed the instructions listed but no joy. TIA.

[WM: See this message thread on the PBX in a Flash forum.]

By: ward

ward — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:20:06 +0000

You now can try out this new service by calling nerdvittles from your nearest Skype telephone. :-)

By: J

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 07:06:18 +0000

One more small tidbit for you: If you add this line in /siptosis/siptosis.cfg ….. from_url="SkypeCaller" <sip:Skype_Caller@127.0.0.1:5060> ….. when a call comes in from a Skype user to your Asterisk box it will show the Skype user name in the Caller ID Name field, and “Skype_Caller” in the Caller ID number field. I don’t know if any phone displays will barf on letters where numbers are “supposed” to go, but if that is an issue just change “Skype_Caller” to something numeric. [WM: Thanks very much for all of your work on this. We've now incorporated all of your config changes in the siptosis.tgz download.]

By: Henry

Henry — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:03:17 +0000

J
Thanks for sharing how you configure the siptosis gateway, those tips are truely useful

By: J

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:41:24 +0000

Here's a couple more hints (sorry about the numerous posts but I have to post these as I figure them out or I forget them!)

I'm up to four changes in /siptosis/siptosis.cfg now:

enableSkypeDtmfDetector=yes
inbandFullTimeDtmfDetection=yes
concurrentcalllimit=1
is_registrar=no

The first two I covered in my previous post. The third is needed because if you are on a Skype call and another comes in, and this setting is > 1, the first call will be put on hold and connect the second one put through. Since there's probably no way for either of the parties to the first call to take it off hold, the effect from their standpoint is that the call was cut off! The fourth line is to stop the SipToSis program from printing 'WARNING: file "users.db" not found: created new empty DB' every time it starts. I do like the other autostart method shown, but for those who want to run vncserver (at least for a while) I forgot that I might have modified my /etc/sysconfig/vncservers file. The two uncommented lines I have are these:

VNCSERVERS="3:root"
VNCSERVERARGS[2]="-geometry 800x600 -nolisten tcp -nohttpd -localhost"

The first line may be part of the reason that the vncserver is on port 5903 - I think the port is 5900 + the screen number (but don't quote me on that).

But I do like bbhenry's method (in the thread you posted) for once you know everything is working as it should be.

By: J

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:53:41 +0000

Me again – I think I have solved the touch tone problem and also have figured out how to start everything automatically at reboot. Once again this was on an Elastix box, so things may be different on other systems.

To get the software to pass touch tones through to Asterisk (so you can direct Skype callers to an IVR) I had to change two options in /siptosis/siptosis.cfg:

enableSkypeDtmfDetector=yes
inbandFullTimeDtmfDetection=yes

At least for me, this got incoming tones working reliably. Note that if you are using this for incoming calls from Skype users you may not know in advance, you might actually have to tell them (in the IVR recording) that they need to click on the "More" button, then "Toggle Dialpad" in order to make a selection.

As for getting it to start up at reboot – the only way I could get it to do so was as part of the vnc server startup. So you do have to have a vncserver installed (I’m assuming that "yum install vncserver" would work, but it was already present on my system). So this is what I did:

First I used Webmin (System|Bootup and Shutdown) to start vncserver at bootup – just check the box next to vncserver and click "Start on Boot"

I then edited /root/.vnc/xstartup to make sure the following was at the end of the file (don’t duplicate the "twm &" line if it’s already in the file, and don’t include it at all if you are using some other window manager):

twm &
skype &
sleep 5
cd /siptosis
./SipToSis_linux >> /var/log/siptosis

Note that I put in a five second delay to give Skype time to fully start before SipToSis_linux starts (don’t know if that’s necessary but seemed logical), and also, because when starting this way there’s no visible window for SipToSis, I send the output to a log file called /var/log/siptosis

Since I don’t want that log file to just grow forever I used Webmin (System|Log File Rotation|Add a new log file to rotate) to rotate the log file. The settings I used were:

Log file paths: /var/log/siptosis
Ignore log file if missing? Yes
Re-create log file after rotation? Yes, with mode 0644 and owned by user root and group root

I left all other settings at the defaults, though you might want to do a daily rotation on a high traffic system (ours isn’t so I left it at weekly).

After a reboot I could connect using a vnc client to port 5903 – I’m not exactly sure why 5903 rather than 5900, 5901, or 5902, but you can try ports starting at 5900 if it doesn’t work the first time. However, it appears you don’t actually have to have a VNC client connected for this to work – the main thing is that you must start the vnc client first, then let the vnc client’s xstartup script start up Skype and SipToSis. When I tried to start the latter two programs directly in a Webmin startup script it didn’t work. It goes without saying that if you do this you want to make absolutely, positively sure that the vnc server port is not accessible outside your local network, particularly since this stuff is running as root!!! It would probably be a good idea to protect access to the VNC server in some way (require a strong password or a SSH connection from the client) but at the moment I’m not sure how to change that.

By the way, if Webmin doesn’t already have a Bootup and Shutdown action for vnc, I’d be suspicious that it had not installed properly, but if you think it has you could probably try using something as simple as "service vncserver start" for the bootup and "service vncserver stop" for the shutdown.

[WM: Great tips. For another autostart solution that’s a little less complicated, see this thread.]

By: J

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:38:04 +0000

Okay, I finally have this running on an Elastix system. Here are some of the things I had to do, in no particular order:

1) Install additional packages:

yum install libXv.so.1
yum groupinstall "X Window System"

The first must be done before doing rpm -ivh skype* in your instructions.

2) To start X server at bootup, went into /etc/inittab and changed the line id:3:initdefault: to id:5:initdefault:

3) In /etc/X11/twm/system.twmrc I had to add the line
RandomPlacement
after top comment section
and then copy that file to /root/.twmrc
This is because if you don’t have any other window manager X windows seems to use twc, and twc has a quirk where it won’t actually show the box that pops up when a call is placed or received until you click on it (until then it shows a grid outline), but if that box doesn’t show all sorts of weird and undesirable things happen. The "RandomPlacement" tells twm to just pick a place randomly and show the box!

4) In order to get outgoing calls to work I did have to edit /siptosis/SipToSkypeAuth.props and change the last line from *,*,127.0.0.1,calleeid to *,*,*,calleeid – I made sure that port 5070 is not open in the router so no one from outside my local network can misuse this. Sorry, but it’s the only thing that worked.

5) This may be system-specific, but in the Skype client itself, I had to go into Options|Sound Devices and change the Sound Out setting to an actual hardware device instead of Default Device (I just picked the first one on the list).

I also have a question – is anyone else having issues with touch tones not being able to activate an IVR selection? This works fine as long as I route it to an extension, and if the Skype caller uses their touch tone pad to hit some tomes I can hear them loud and clear, but when I route calls to an IVR they don’t do anything. I went to the SipToSis site and noted that in their forum they say that SipToSis Skype Gateway Bridge Update 20090217 includes this change: "Change (again) rfc2833 DTMF encoding for compatibility issues with some SIP servers." I just wondered if your download is based on that version or an earlier one (not that I would know if that would affect this issue), or if anyone else has had the touch tone issues and found a workaround?

By: Henry

Henry — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 02:17:51 +0000

do I "have to" launch the SipToSis_Linux under the siptosis directory. I tried launching it form / with the following command: /siptosis/SipToSis_Linux But it keeps looping and gives me errors, and force me to reboot the machine to stop it from looping. Does anyone have a good way of launching the service at boot? [WM: Keep an eye on this thread.]

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:41:49 +0000

Works just fine. Is there any way to auto run ./SipToSis_Linux? Now on every reboot i must run it manually.

Great job!

By: gnowk

gnowk — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:12:51 +0000

I did mine on a trixbox installation. It didn't have KDE, Gnome or other X desktop software installed. Since I don't have a monitor attached to my box, I used Xvnc instead. It is an X server that you can vnc to. Just do a "yum install -y vnc-server". In addition, you need to run desktop software on top of it. I used xfce, but KDE or Gnome would work to. For xfce, install the following with yum:


xfce-mcs-manager
xfce4-panel
xfdesktop
xfwm4
xorg-x11-fonts-truetype
xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-100dpi
xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-100dpi

yum will pull in other dependencies too. The fonts might be optional, but I installed them just in case. I also modified /etc/fonts/fonts.conf to include "/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF" as a font directory. Modify ~/.vnc/xstartup to include the following:


xfce-mcs-manager
xfwm4 --daemon
xfdesktop &
xterm &
exec xfce4-panel

To start Xvnc, just run "vncserver". I believe it asks you for a password to use the first time around. Just enter one and use that for the vnc viewer later. After which, it should tell you what your DISPLAY variable is (used for X if you need it). This is also the same server value for connecting from your vnc viewer. Connect from a vnc viewer and an xterm should already be started. Continue at step 2 of the article from here on. Hope I didn't miss anything. [WM: Big help! Thanks.]

By: J

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:07:12 +0000

I just wanted to comment that I also had the problem of no xinit, and I triple checked to see that all of the software listed in the article had installed without errors. So I did a "yum list" and saw a package named xorg-x11-xinit.i386, which I suspected might give me the elusive xinit. After doing a "yum install xorg-x11-xinit.i386" I typed xinit and was greeted with this message: # xinit xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): no server "X" in PATH Use the -- option, or make sure that /usr/bin is in your path and that "X" is a program or a link to the right type of server for your display. Possible server names include: Xorg X.Org displays giving up. xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error. I checked and /usr/bin is definitely in my path! What I am wondering is, do your PiaF systems ship with X-Windows and perhaps some sort of desktop environment already installed? If that's the case, that would explain why some people are having problems and not others - I think if your CentOS installation is a basic "server" install - one intended to be administered remotely, such as via a ssh connection - it doesn't include X-Windows or a desktop. This is the impression I get from certain pages I have Googled, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I'd be curious to know if everyone who has got this to run successfully has some sort of desktop such as KDE, Gnome, etc. installed, or if anyone has got this to work on a barebones CentOS server configuration (not PiaF), and if so, what they had to install that's not listed in the article. [WM: Here's a listing of installed modules on a PBX in a Flash system that you can compare.] libX11-devel.i386 1.0.3-9.el5 base libXScrnSaver-devel.i386 1.1.0-3.1 base libXTrap-devel.i386 1.0.0-3.1 base libXau-devel.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base libXaw-devel.i386 1.0.2-8.1 base libXcomposite.i386 0.3-5.1 base libXcomposite-devel.i386 0.3-5.1 base libXcursor-devel.i386 1.1.7-1.1 base libXdamage.i386 1.0.3-2.1 base libXdamage-devel.i386 1.0.3-2.1 base libXdmcp-devel.i386 1.0.1-2.1 base libXevie.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base libXevie-devel.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base libXext-devel.i386 1.0.1-2.1 base libXfixes-devel.i386 4.0.1-2.1 base libXfont-devel.i386 1.2.2-1.0.3.el5_1 base libXfontcache-devel.i386 1.0.2-3.1 base libXft-devel.i386 2.1.10-1.1 base libXi-devel.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base libXinerama-devel.i386 1.0.1-2.1 base libXmu-devel.i386 1.0.2-5 base libXp.i386 1.0.0-8.1.el5 base libXp-devel.i386 1.0.0-8.1.el5 base libXpm-devel.i386 3.5.5-3 base libXrandr-devel.i386 1.1.1-3.1 base libXrender-devel.i386 0.9.1-3.1 base libXres-devel.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base libXt-devel.i386 1.0.2-3.1.fc6 base libXtst-devel.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base libXv-devel.i386 1.0.1-4.1 base libXvMC.i386 1.0.2-2.1 base libXvMC-devel.i386 1.0.2-2.1 base libXxf86dga-devel.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base libXxf86misc-devel.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base libXxf86vm-devel.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base x3270.i386 3.3.4p7-3.el5.4 base x3270-text.i386 3.3.4p7-3.el5.4 base x3270-x11.i386 3.3.4p7-3.el5.4 base x86info.i386 1:1.20-1.26.fc6 base xfdesktop.i386 4.4.2-1.el5.centos extras xfwm4.i386 4.4.2-1.el5.centos extras xfwm4-themes.noarch 4.4.2-1.el5.centos extras xhtml1-dtds.noarch 1.0-7.1.1 base xjavadoc.i386 1.1-4jpp.1 base xjavadoc-javadoc.i386 1.1-4jpp.1 base xorg-x11-drv-i810-devel.i386 1.6.5-9.13.el5 base xorg-x11-drv-via-devel.i386 0.2.1-9 base xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-100dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-14-100dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-14-75dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-15-100dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-15-75dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-100dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-75dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9-100dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9-75dpi.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-Type1.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-cyrillic.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-ethiopic.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-misc.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-syriac.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-fonts-truetype.noarch 7.1-2.1.el5 base xorg-x11-proto-devel.i386 7.1-9.el5.centos base xorg-x11-resutils.i386 7.1-2.fc6 base xorg-x11-server-Xdmx.i386 1.1.1-48.41.el5_2.1 updates xorg-x11-server-Xephyr.i386 1.1.1-48.41.el5_2.1 updates xorg-x11-server-Xnest.i386 1.1.1-48.41.el5_2.1 updates xorg-x11-server-randr-source.i386 1.1.1-48.41.el5_2.1 updates xorg-x11-server-sdk.i386 1.1.1-48.41.el5_2.1 updates xorg-x11-twm.i386 1:1.0.1-3.1 base xorg-x11-util-macros.i386 1.0.2-4.fc6 base xorg-x11-xbitmaps.i386 1.0.1-4.1 base xorg-x11-xfs-utils.i386 1:1.0.2-4 base xorg-x11-xfwp.i386 1.0.1-3.1 base xorg-x11-xsm.i386 1.0.2-4.fc6 base xorg-x11-xtrans-devel.i386 1.0.1-1.1.fc6 base xscreensaver.i386 1:5.04-1.el5.centos extras xscreensaver-base.i386 1:5.04-1.el5.centos extras xscreensaver-extras.i386 1:5.04-1.el5.centos extras xscreensaver-extras-gss.i386 1:5.04-1.el5.centos extras xscreensaver-gl-base.i386 1:5.04-1.el5.centos extras xscreensaver-gl-extras.i386 1:5.04-1.el5.centos extras xscreensaver-gl-extras-gss.i386 1:5.04-1.el5.centos extras

By: gnowk

gnowk — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:06:28 +0000

Ward, I was trying to set up SipToSis just a few days ago and didn’t get very far. I finally got it set up with the help of your tutorial and your SipToSis configs. Thanks!

Not sure if other folks experienced this, but my Skype client kept crashing initially. Turns out my particular setup can’t receive calls with video. Disabling video on my end fixed it.

Also, when I get a Skype call, the incoming caller ID is set to "SkypeCaller". Is there a way to get the caller’s Skype name displayed instead? I am not using PiaF, so not sure if that’s the cause of it.

By: Al B

Al B — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:54:25 +0000

Ward, thanks for the tip on xinit, but unfortunately even that isn’t doing the trick – after creating the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file I still get
-bash: xinit: command not found
So, I am stuck at this point in the instructions, unable to start xinit.

[WM: If xinit can’t be found, then you haven’t successfully installed the X-Windows components listed in the article.]