Asterisk

Revisiting A GSM Interface For Your Asterisk Server

Some time ago @Boxdog pointed me to a uCPBX in Bulgaria. They are reselling various small Asterisk systems based upon the Astfin project. They have a few variations on the IP04, including an 8 port variant (IP08 = 8 FXOs) as well as 1 or 4 port BRI capable versions.

ucpbx-astfin-br4-back

The design of the base system supports adding interface ports through the use of little daughter cards. I believe that their daughter cards are compatible with Digium’s TDM-400P card. The cards even use the standard DAHDI driver making installation especially easy.

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No Jitter’s Matt Brunk: SIP Means Change

nortel_lo_ip_phone_1120e copyEarlier this week Matt Brunk penned a post over at CMP’s No Jitter blog entitled “SIP Means Change.” It’s a short piece detailing the contrast between SIP phones, Asterisk servers and legacy proprietary equipment. In particular it dwells on the boot times of the various items. He highlights how anything that takes longer, even just a little longer, ultimately has a higher cost.

Matt points out that the older, proprietary digital phones were effectively instant-on devices compared to SIP phones. This is a little obtuse in that SIP isn’t really the culprit. It’s just a protocol. Cisco phones running SCCP would have similar boot times to SIP handsets. I presume that Nortel phones running UNISTIM would also have similar boot times.

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Inspirational Hardware: The FIT-PC Slim & FIT-PC2

My roots in VoIP are closely intertwined with embedded systems. I really like the idea of small, quiet, lower-power hardware that just runs…and runs…and runs. That’s what drove me to my 2006 article about Astlinux on Soekris hardware and was in part the genesis of this blog.

When I saw the original FIT-PC I thought that it could be an interesting platform for Asterisk. However, with its 400 MHz Geode CPU it wasn’t that much different than the Soekris platform that I was using, so there was little motivation to make the migration.

fit-PC Slim-500

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Fit-PC Slim (pictured above) is now available on sale on Amazon for a mere $159.

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Nerd Vittles Guide to ISN

Over at Nerd Vittles that Asterisk Guru Ward Mundy has posted a great how-to implementing ISN lookups with his popular PBX-In-A-Flash Asterisk distributions. It's a great overview of ISN and ITADs, including Freenum.org. ISNs are a novel approach to bridging…

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