As some of you know, over the past 9 months, I’ve been heavily involved in the establishment of Humbug. For those who may not know, Humbug is a Call Analytics and Fraud Analysis SAAS. Now, differing from many of the current telephony SAAS projects, we are not based on Amazon EC2 or some other public cloud infrastructure, we build our own cloud environment. Why do we build our own cloud? simple, we need to keep your data secured and confidential. At Humbug, we see ourselves as a cross between Google Analytics – in our ability to analyze and handle data and Verisign – in our security and confidentiality requirements and methodologies.

Question be asked, why do people trust Verisign to provide SSL certificates around the world. What makes Verisign’s CA better than a privately owned CA – the answer is simple, it’s a third party 2 entities can entrust at the same time. Humbug aims to provide the same lever of trust, simply because we regard your data as sacred and valuable.

Since about 2 months ago, we’ve been contacting various Asterisk integrators around the world, inviting them to evaluate Humbug services. Now, while some integrators and vendors were somewhat reluctant, others were more than happy to join. We now have over 250 monitored systems around the world, with system being monitored and analyzed in Israel, USA, UK, Brazil and more.

The thing that amazed me in regards to some of the integrators who decided not to participate was that they claimed: “we provide our customers our own brew of fraud analysis service, we don’t require your SAAS”. Now, while I can accept the fact that an integrator would offer such a SAAS as an in-house service, I can’t see why a customer would rely on these services. In my view, relying on your integrator to provide fraud analysis services is like relying on the integrator of your alarm system to provide hired guard services – it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why doesn’t it make sense? in Hebrew we say: “Go prove that you have a sister”. Imagine that your PBX integrator offer you such a service, then, in some obscure manner, your PBX gets hijacked and you get slammed with 50K$ worth of phone calls to Somalia. Now, your integrator would say: “Hmmmmm… that’s odd, we didn’t even get those CDR events to our system… you really got hacked bad…” – sure, if you only rely on CDR records to do your analysis (which is what 99.9% of integrators do). There is much much much much more to fraud analysis than just CDR analysis – if it all began and finished with CDR analysis, then by far Cvidya, Verint, NICE and many others would have been made redundant.

Allowing your integrator to provide you with fraud analysis SAAS is like putting the fox to guard the hen house, when things louse up (and they may), he’s the first one to bail out saying: “It’s not my fault”.

Humbug takes a totally different approach to fraud analysis, specifically, in the way we regards the various PBX systems and integrators. We are vendor agnostic and integrator agnostic – we will provide you with the clear and concise information you require in order to make an educated decision as to how you were de-frauded (if de-frauded) and provide you a faster alerting and response time. Our recent adventures had lowered our fraud alert response time from 60 minutes, down to 14 minutes in some cases. Most fraud analysis system carry a 24-36 hour turn around time, by that time, you can be out of 50K$ – our aim is to lower that number to no more than a 100$ in the worst case. Ambitious? yes, down right crazy? probably so, but we always say: “Aim for the moon, you’ll land on a star!” – so we know we’ll get there.

Well, it’s been almost a month since I’ve started writing about the humbug project. Now, it’s time to actually get you people involved, at least in the initial levels. We are looking to add 10 additional members into the humbug call analytics suite. Currently available analytics during the alpha testing is inbound call analytics.

Our aim is to gather as much information as we can and as much user requests as we can, humbug is a community oriented project, thus it relies on community oriented input and feature requests. Participating members will  be granted access to the humbug analytics portal, allowing them to gather statistical information regarding their inbound call hits and their top ten DID numbers – we are working on additional statistics. As new stats will become available, we’ll role those out into the service as soon as possible.

In order to participate in the closed alpha testing, please send an email to alphatest at humbuglabs.org, and we’ll send you a short piece of dialplan code to insert into your Asterisk server. Technically speaking, we’ll send you a short AGI command that looks like this:

exten => _X.,n,AGI(agi://somehost/DataReceiver,some_unique_ident)

The above line needs to be inserted into any place you would like to generate call analytics from. We’ll also enclose configuration steps for FreePBX (and other FreePBX compatible distributions). We are hard at work for creating a FreePBX integrated module, so you can do a one-click install.

When most of us think about PBX systems, we usually associate these with cumbersome usage, confusing dialing codes and in most cases – a PBX system is automatically associated with the annoying task of transferring a call from one handset to another. Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about how people use PBX systems, is this really the only way to use a PBX system? is there something else to the mix? can we really enrich one of the oldest operational paradigms in the world? – and for that matter, can the public be re-educated to assimilate a new breed of PBX systems or services?

As to answering the question of re-educating the public, I guess I’ll have to leave that question to the head shrinks. As to answering the latter, enriching the PBX experience is both achievable and advisable. When I say enriching, I mainly talk about your ability to bring to the IP phone functionality usually not associated with it. Imagine to have the ability to receive a stock exchange RSS feed to your phones idle screen, notice that you stock is either rising or falling, and by the flick of a button – either sell or buy. We’ve all come accustomed to IP phones that look like the one of the right. A whole bunch of buttons, that in most cases have no direct use when our phone is utilized using a single account. However, these buttons can be externally re-assigned and re-programmed to achieve greater functionality – surpassing the normal behavior of just making phone calls.

The technology involved exists on almost every high-end IP phone on the market (well, at least those made by SNOM, Aastra, Cisco and Polycom – most of the Chinese makers don’t have this) – it’s called a Mini Browsers. Mini Browsers are exactly what they are called, these are simplified versions of your typical Internet browser. Some vendors had produced their own XML based Mini browser markup language (SNOM, Cisco, Aastra) while others had decided to provide a sub-set of XHTML (Polycom). The variations between the vendors are at the neck deep of the problems of using Mini Browsers, and that is that the formats are considerably different. Sure, SNOM had more or less adopted Cisco’s general structure, however, it still varies.

Through the utilization of this technology, it is possible to create phone based browser applications, that seem native to the phone user, as the general interface resembles the native phone interface. It is now the developers job to make the web interface displayed to the user as seamless and as native as possible, keeping in mind that the developer must remain agnostic to the information retrieval layer. Most companies leave their phone systems and these tasks to their system administrators and infrastructure team, however, this task is far beyond their capabilities and skill set. Creating an agnostic IP phone minibrowser dislplay layer, capable of utilizing multiple vendors and models, is a question of content management and content rendering, very must similar to the content transcoding problem that is common to the mobile content world – in other words, a sys-admin will create an ad-hoc solution, a programmer will create a proper, well structured, well designed solution that carry the enterprise beyond its initial needs and requirements.

A short example of how these interfaces work can be found here – on my company blog.

A while back, John Todd from Digium, had posted an entry on the Digium blog web site, regarding how to be a successfull Asterisk consultant. While I completely agree with John’s views on the matter, from obtaining a dCAP certificate to the involvement with the community – there are a few points missing from that post, at least in my view. I will try to add some additional information here, in the hopes that it may help you build your business.

Point 1 – Stay Focused

Most of us Asterisk consultants come from diversified areas of expertise. Most of us are plain old IP sysadmins or network managers who got thrown into the Asterisk world due to a requirement – got hooked on it and simply continued onwards. Some of us are developers, some web oriented, some core oriented, but developers yet. The diversity of most Asterisk consultants skill set can easily side track them.

When I say side track, I don’t meant that they don’t know what they are doing, I mean – it’s easy to try and swallow more than they can chew at one time. For example, example a sysadmin turning into an Asterisk consultant, after installing over 200 Asterisk systems. Now, a customer comes to him and says: “Well, I’m gonna give you the work, but I want you to also take over the various IT management aspects of the system.” – If at this point you will say: “YES” you are more of less dooming your business. You are an Asterisk consultant, no matter how a talented IT sysadmin you are, going about and taking both roles on your self would render you in a situation where you, at some point, will be in a situation where you are handling an extreme IT condition at that customer, rendering completely incapable of rendering services to your other customers. Remember, stay focused on what you do, you won’t run into a situation where you will be forced to hurt a customer.

Point 2 – Earning more is sometimes loosing money

This point relates directly to the previous one. Let us imagine that I’m an Asterisk developer with a background of Web development. When confronted with a project that may include both Asterisk and Web Development – the most logical answer would be “YES” – however, web developers tend to forget that they are working autonomously. Most web developers are backed up by teams of graphic artists, database developers, database managers and IT managers. Thus, a web application is much more than the web logic involved with it. Are you an all encompassing developer, capable of cater to all aspects of a web development project and an Asterisk project? if you have your own in house DBA and other resources, you should be fine, however, if you don’t – at some point in the project – you will be forced to outsource the work to a 3rd party – thus, lowering your net income on the project. So, by taking such a project you believe you will be earning more money, while in fact, at the end of the project you may end up in debt to 3rd party sub-contractors you hired.

Point 3 – Be true with yourself

Always be true and honest with yourself and always ask yourself: “is this really a deal that will advance me? or may it actually set me back?” – failing to answer these two questions for every project you are about to take on will end up with some disappointment. Remember, you can fool all people some of the time, you can fool a few people all the time – can you can’t fool yourself! You are your own worse judge, jury and executioner. If you end up doing a project that doesn’t feel right for you, or something with the various aspects of the project troubles your no a moral ground, at some point in time, it will creep up on you and bite you back in the ass.

Point 4 – Use it, don’t abuse it

We all deal with various aspects of the Asterisk project, an Open Source project at its core. It’s very easy to become side tracked by large sums of money, in order to either violate a GPL code or doing something which is completely negated to the Open Source spirit or the Asterisk community. Sure, you will abuse Asterisk and/or other Open Source Asterisk related projects, however, at some point, it will be discovered and your name will be smudged. For example, if you integrate ViciDial to a customer, tell them it’s ViciDial and don’t change its logo to something else. Same applies to FreePBX, A2Billing or other Asterisk related packages – at some point your customer will find out you integrated Open Source – and you will be branded a cheat.

For example, 2 weeks ago I was at a call center, where one of Israel’s leading Asterisk integrator had built a dialer platform for the call center. The call center manager told me that they paid a sum of about 120,000 Israeli Shekels (approx 30,000$) for that dialer. I was really interested to see the product, while the only thing I saw was a “logo” modified “ViciDial” with a couple of hooks into FreePBX (that also had its logo changed to the company logo). The customer was sure he was getting a personalised job, while actually, the entire amount of work done can be amounted to about 12-16 hours of work. Ok, so the hardware costs about 8000USD – still, 22,000$ for installing and modifying two pages on ViciDial – you can’t say that is right – is it?

Conclusion

Always be true to yourself, to your customers and to the community – you’ll never loose.

A few weeks ago I had posted one of my usuall “Open Source License” rants, where I explained and ranted about the state of Open Source license enforcement in Israel. A recent study by the IIPA (International Intelectual Property Alliance) had positioned Israel as the number 1 copyright piracy country in the world!

When you think abuot it, it’s a little strange, as Israel is fairly small. However,  in relation to the number of Internet connected users in Israel, the number of downloads of pirated software or other copyrighted material in Israel is of the highest percentage in the world. Sure, we all download a movie or episode here and there, but, some people in Israel go about and completely utilize pirated material only. Sure, I like watching my weekly episode of Fringe, but what can I do that no network in Israel is broadcasting it. So, I download the episodes via Bittorrent and watch them as they are published. However, on the other hand, I do purchase Microsoft licenses for my PC’s (yes, I have a Windows XP and a Windows Vista box - running Windows and Office), I did purchase a Mandriva PowerPack package for my Linux destktop and notebook and yes, I did purchase my books about DOJO, PHP and AJAX – so, I can honestly say that my utilization of pirated material is that for things I can’t obtain in Israel at all.

One would argue that it is still piracy, well, there is a certain point in that – however, if there is no one to pirate from where you are located, how can you pirate something? according to the dictionary, the noun priate means:

1. One who robs at sea or plunders the land from the sea without commission from a sovereign nation.
2. A ship used for this purpose.
3. One who preys on others; a plunderer.
4. One who makes use of or reproduces the work of another without authorization.
5. One that operates an unlicensed, illegal television or radio station.

When I last reviewed the PIKA WARP Asterisk appliance, I  named the post “Pokemon Asterisk” – today I’ve decided to review the PIKA WARP Asterisk appliance again, only this time, with the newly released Asterisk GUI 2.0 release – our cuddly Pikachu is now a Raichu (relax, it took me about 30 minutes to find out what a Picachu evolves into).

The new PIKA appliance now boasts the new star fangled Digium Asterisk GUI 2.0, which takes the old Asterisk GUI (which was OK, but still had some miles to go) and more or less throws it into the waste bin. The new GUI is far more useful, far more usable and most importantly – makes life way easier for the integrator. While the previous version of the PIKA Warp appliance was targeted for developers, the new version of the WARP is aimed directly into the heart of the integration scene.

Asterisk GUI 2.0 on PIKA WARP

Now, I have to admit that after upgrading the system to the new PIKA WARP cuImage I had some issues logging into the system. So, what I did is more or less hack myself in via ‘single user mode’. Here’s a small guide on how to do that. Before we being, you will require a serial cable connection to the WARP appliance in order to do this, which means, this is more or less a hardcore procedure.

The PIKA WARP Serial Connector Port

When the system boots up, and you are confronted with a message saying “Hit any key to stop autoboot:” simply hit any key on your keyboard, and you’ll be fronted with the “=>” prompt, indicating that the boot loader is now waiting for information. Now, we need to tell the PIKA WARP appliance to boot into single user mode.

To do so, we need to modify the ‘ramargs’ environment variable of UBOOT, to indicate that we want to start single user mode. Enter the following command:

setenv ramargs setenv bootargs root=/dev/ram rw ramdisk_size=130000 single

This will indicate to the UBOOT loader to initiate a single user mode bootup. Once in single user mode, you can use the ‘passwd’ command to change the root password of the PIKA WARP appliance. This procedure can be used by an other PIKA WARP based appliance.

Once of the nice additions in the new Asterisk GUI 2.0 is the support for Class of Service, which doesn’t really exist in FreePBX. In many offices, managers like to restrict various extensions from accessing different parts of the telephony system – that is performed utilizing the Class of Service screen.

Class of Service management

The “Class of Service” management enables you to create groups with access to specific trunks or PBX functions, thus, enabling you to seperate users and groups of users from specific PBX resources. For example, some users can be completely restricted from using outbound trunks, while others can be restricted to using a single FXO interface out of 4 connected FXO interfaces. In general, this is one of the best features in the GUI yet in my opinion.

I’m currently reviewing the new version, so once I have new information I’ll post my findings.

As if my previous post was’t enough, this week the ever annoying bad rep of Open Source in Israel showed its face yet again. This time, I’m talking about a recent talkback on the thecom.co.il online magazine website. The talkback was related to an article relating to various telecom tenders currently in progress in Israel. As part of the article, the authod mentioned the existance of a new Call Center solution for Asterisk from EasyRun – one of the world’s better known call/contact center solution providers – being in the market for over 15 years now.

Here is a screen shot of the post:

http://www.thecom.co.il/article.php?id=6178

For those not speaking Hebrew, I’ll translate. Talkback number 1 is from Alexander Argov, CEO of Tikal Networks informing the public that Tikal Networks also has a call center solution based on Asterisk, with a link to the demo. In itself, there’s nothing wrong there in my book – however, it would appear that others don’t agree. Number 3 says: “Well, if you are a part of this party, why do you need to advetise in a talkback?”, only to be followed by: “Well, Tikal is a Me-Too as always – nothing new there”. Well, comments will be comments and talkbacks will be talkbacks. However, numbers 6 and 7 are something else. Number 6 excuses Mr. Argov and his Sales VP (a Mr. Harari) as providing poor service and a poor product, warning people not to purchase Tikal based prodcuts. Now, number 7 goes the distance saying: “Selling a product that costs a single shekel for tens of thousends of shekels and giving poor service is something any 7th grade student can do. Don’t touch the solution provided nor any Tikal product”. Number 7 is currently simply stating: “Don’t touch Asterisk, the service is not good”. Number 7 seems to be incapable of distinguishing between the Tikal product line and Asterisk, and for him, they are one and the same. The end result is a bad rep for Asterisk, while the bad rep is actually intended to the solution provider in this case.

It would appear that in Israel, people mix up FreePBX, Asterisk and the solution provider as one and the same. The solution provider goes about saying: “I’m selling an Asterisk product, I’m state of the art!”, using the Asterisk name to leverage the sale. The customer belives that what he’s buying is actually Asterisk, while the only thing he’s actually buying is the integration service and support service. As long as people in Israel don’t realize that Open Source solutions mean: Free Software (Free as in Beer), Paid Support and Professional Services – the situation will remain the same for ever.

The Open Source movement had been in existence since the 60′s, and we can surely find its roots somewhere along the hippie culture and movement. While Free-Love had transcended to Free-Code, or to be more exact – Free-Knowledge, the question of the sources for your Open Source is still questionable. Comparing it with the Sixties, it’s easy to compare the various “Free-Love” movements with the various “Open Source Paradigms” of today. While GPL, BSD, MPL, ZPL and others preach for Open Source adaptation – each one took a different path.

While the paths differ, but the end result is more or less the same, all suffer from a serious lack – a bad reputation. While in the early 2000, Open Source usually meant – highly stable, state of the art technology, increased ROI, lowered TCO and most importantly for many – COOL. Coming 2008, Open Source is starting to get a bad rep, due to the ever increasing simplicity of entering the Open Source world.

I started using Linux somewhere around 1994. My first Linux distribution was a Slackware, with a kernel of 1.0.28 – I needed 99 floppy disks in order to install the system, and it took me a few hours to do so. However, I can’t forget my amazement at seeing the X-Windows environment booting up, and more than that, being completely overwhelmed with the fact that I have a fully functional UNIX environment in my house, just like the one I had in my Army office. Now, I basically had no one to teach me this new environment, so, I had to take my UNIX skills (Solaris and AIX) and adopt to Slackware Linux – it took me a few weeks to get around, but I got around and stuck to it ever since.

Now, let’s jump 14 years forward in time. The year is 2008, a graphic based environment for Linux is no longer a myth and it is getting better and better by the day. People are starting to adopt Linux beyond the academic and the ISP market sectors, slowly integrating Linux based distributions (Mandriva, Ubutnu) on to their desktops and notebooks. Linux is become simple and appealing to everybody.

When something becomes easy to use, people make good use of it – a good example is the Asterisk project. Projects such as TrixBox (AKA: AsteriskAtHome), PBXinaFlash, AsteriskNOW and others had made Asterisk into a simple installation product, that can be installed and managed by any half-decent sysadmin. Problem is, while a half-decent sysadmin will do a fair job of maintaining the system, a shitty sysadmin will crap everything to hell. But hell, that is true for almost anything related to computers or technology – there’s nothing new here! Well, there is nothing new and everything is now new. People who were more or less selling shoes 3 years, then 2 years decided to sell ISP routers, then a year ago started selling IP phones, are now selling Asterisk based systems – using these distibutions, while having no idea what they are selling or promoting. For these people, Asterisk is nothing more beyond FreePBX – once encountering deeper issues, will simply abandon the customer – leaving the Open Source product with a bad rap with the, now disappointed, customer.

I want to believe that other places in the world are different, I want to believe that Israel will reach a point in time when this doesn’t happen – however, I guess that only time will tell and I surely hope this will change in Israel.

As I wrote a couple of days, I’m currently in the process of evaluating the PIKA WARP appliance. As I already said before, the PIKA WARP isn’t a real PBX, but actually a framework for building PBX type appliances.

For me, the entire evaluation process is more or less a process of trial and error, trying to figure out how the box is built, both from the software side and both from the build-tools provided with the appliance.

The process of flashing the new FreePBX based images wasn’t much of a hassle, actually, after more or less fucking up the box a couple of times, I became fairly handy with both the warploader and uboot tools, used to flash the onboard flash memory with a new boot image. After flashing the FreePBX about 3 times, I got it to come up right on my browser window, which produced the following screen:

PIKA FreePBX Screen

Now, it was fairly clear to me that MySQL (a mandatory component of FreePBX) isn’t a shoe in for the WARP appliance, after all, for an appliance it would be a blowtware. So, FreePBX here comes with SQLite, which on the surface should provide for similar functionality. Having worked with SQLite in the past, I knew for fact that some portions of FreePBX will not work – who am I kidding? if they would work it would be the most amazing thing I’ve seen a long time.

Mainly, this is caused by variations between the SQL code and various table management that FreePBX imposes on the FreePBX database structure, when installing or upgrading new or existing modules. For example, trying to go about and install the FreePBX IVR module yields the following error:

FreePBX error on WARP appliance

Well, that’s understandable – basically means that the unit isn’t yet fully useable with FreePBX – but we are getting there I guess, after all, rome wasn’t built in a single day.

As I’ve already posted a while back, I’ve been heavily using a PHP MVC framework called CodeIgniter. While I have to admit that CodeIgniter made my life really easy, quickly building web applications in a very organized fashion – it’s somewhat non-rigid form made it really easy for me to do something really funky stuff – completely breaking the rules of proper MVC development.

About a month ago, while at AstriCon 2008, I had a chance to sit down with Philippe Lindenheimer (of FreePBX fame), and we had a chance to discuss different frameworks. While I brought up CodeIgniter, Philippe indicated that CodeIgniter suffers from a few flaws and also indicated to me a derivative of CodeIgniter, which according to Philippe surpassed CodeIgniter – technology wise that is. The framework’s name in dubbed Hohana (www.kohanaphp.com) – which according to Philippe was better than CodeIgniter.

Shortly after coming back from AstriCon, I decided to take a look at Kohana – who knows, maybe I’ll like it?

So, unlike CodeIgniter, the Kohana set of requirements is lightly more advanced than CodeIgniter, mainly, the requirement to use PHP version 5.2 and upwards (made vanilla type CentOS unusable – but Mandriva worked really nice). Unlike CodeIgniter, the people behind Kohana made it both rigid and readable at the same time. What does that mean? in general, PHP suddenly acts like a real programming language, for example, the following loop simply didn’t work in Kohana:

...
foreach ($items as $key=>$value) {
  $output .= "Key: ".$key." => ".$value."<br>";
}
...

The above code simply failed, with a clear error message indicating the that “$output” variable wasn’t previously used/defined, and that the structure is basically in poor programming taste. OK, so no more short hand PHP with Kohana, it actually made the code a bit more organized and readable at the end.The nice thing are the error messages, that clearly indicate to you what the problem is. If you are missing a view or a class definition, Kohana will scream out loud, not letting you continue on your way forward.

The one thing I really like about Kohana is the ability to cascade views. Cascading views means that each view is actually an object, while a view may contain additional view, as child objects. This ability allows for very organized, usable, readable view code to be written – in addition, to being able to separate AJAX calls in views to specific files and objects, making your initial view really small and tight – NICE!

All in all, a nice framework to work with and I admit that I got to like it. Let’s try to see what mileage I’ll get from it.

Ok, it goes without saying: “A2Billing is one of the most complete Calling Card systems in the Asterisk market today.” – on the other hand, it is also true that: “A2Billing is one of the most complex and convoluted pieces of code ever written!”.

The combination of the above makes for a fairly combustible mixture, especially if you have a big system. Now, I recently ran into an issue, where PHP was litterally eating up almost 512MB of ram, in order to run the A2Billing reports. In it self, that didn’t make much sense to me. However, after inspecting the code, and realizing that A2Billing uses GD in run-time to generate images out of thousands of CDR records, it made perfect sense that it may just be eating up memory.

So, increasing the memory on PHP to go up to 512MB of RAM helps, but creates an interesting probelm. Whenever Apache will invoke a script, it will automatically consume a shitload of RAM, and for each time I intiate a new query, it will spawn a new Apache instance, and consume the same amount of memory. That said, after 6 queries of 512MB, about 50% of the machines RAM was already eaten up – and Apache will not free it!

At this point, I had 2 choices:

1. Go into the A2Billing code, change the GD code to work right or simply change it completely to something else (maybe flash).
2. Work around the problem with a mix of proper IT practices.

I admit that I hate quite a lot of things (I won’t list these here); however; nothing ranks up the list as modifying someone elses code, when I know for fact that it will be unmaintainable in the future. So, I choose option number 2.

I’ve being playing alot with Lighttpd lately, and got some really nice performance from it. So, I said to myself, this would be a great test to see if Lighttpd+FastCGI can solve the problem here. I had to work my way around lighttpd to do what I wanted and verify that my FastCGI server in Lighttpd doesn’t consume all memory, however, here is what I got working with A2Billing, and really nice.

Step 1: Enable the required modules:

server.modules              = (

                               "mod_access",

                               "mod_auth",

                               "mod_status",

                               "mod_fastcgi",

                               "mod_accesslog" )

Step 2: Enable the FastCGI Server

fastcgi.server             = ( ".php" =>

                               ( "localhost" =>

                                 (

                                   "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket",

                                   "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",

                                   "idle-timeout" => 30,

                                   "max-procs" => 1,

                                   "min-procs" => 1

                                 )

                               )

                            )

Step 3: Modify user permissions (required if you are using FreePBX)

server.username            = "asterisk"

server.groupname           = "asterisk"

Step 4: Setup authentication and authorization (optional)

#### auth module

## read authentication.txt for more info

auth.backend               = "htpasswd"

auth.backend.htpasswd.userfile = "/var/www/.htpasswd"

auth.require               = ( "/" =>

                               (

                                 "method"  => "basic",

                                 "realm"   => "A2Billing Management",

                                 "require" => "valid-user"

                               )

                             )

The above configuration made the interface spwan a single FastCGI, insuring that memory usage is never over utilized. I still need 512MB of RAM to run the scripts, but at least now it’s limited to only 512MB of RAM, out of a machine that has 16GB of RAM.

Well, it’s quite common to get a flame here and there on any Internet technical maling list, but the following really caught my eye. Here’s an extract from the TrixBox forum:

———————- CUT HERE ———————-

Subject: SS7 on Sangoma a101D

Ok, I admit it, the topic sounds ultra geeky and nurdy – but I can’t help it, there is something about booting up your computer from a USB pen drive, having all your nicely wrapped tools in there and having fun with it.

In this case, my pen drive is actually the driving force behind an extremely powerful call recording system, based on the Asterisk Open Source PBX system. Essentially, the Cruzer boots up a CentOS 5.1 system, fully equipped with an Asterisk + Zaptel + LibPRI + FreePBX. The system is configured to utilize up to 12 E1 circuits, with auto sensing scripts that will automatically configure your system upon first boot-up. Once the system had booted up, it will start identifying your hardware hard drives, and will start cataloging to these hard drives all the recordings according to the pre-determined logic.

I currently use a MySQL database on the Pen Drive to store catalog information only, which is working nicely – but I need to figure out a better way to store more information – 2GB of MySQL storage may be enough for a short while, but serving a large contact center won’t be much of a good idea – I think.

The Pen Drive was created using tools from www.pendrivelinux.com, which contains wonderful information about how to create your own custom Linux based Pen Drive – Excellent!

As some of you noticed, I’ve started a “Say No To TrixBox” campaign. In order toPL go about and monitor the usage of the banner, and it’s deployment across the net, I’ve installed an OpenX ad server to support the campaign. I guess that I didn’t realize what the little campaign would do!

Current statistics show that the banner had been deployed to over 300 different websites across the world, had been viewed over 60,000 times and had been clicked on for about 800 times. Not a bad CTR ratio for a little community oriented campaign.

If you are an Asterisk user, and you are fed up with the way Fonality/TrixBox had been conducting their business over the past 3 years, it’s time to show your support and put this banner on your website. If you have a blog, a company website, an Asterisk oriented business, show your support to FreePBX and other Open Source Asterisk oriented projects and website by showing the world that the community has power.

I am all for competition, as a healthy competition always keeps us on our toes and makes sure we always progress and improve – but Fonality/TrixBox’s actions must be denounced and rejected.

Ok, I’m a consultant and developer, but asking somebody to pay me for 15 minutes worth of work – I feel like a total heel. I’m a member of this Freelancers website called oDesk. Every once in a while I get a notification from oDesk, asking me to participate in an interview – which I usually accept (after all, we’re all looking for work).

I have to admit that most of the people that come to oDesk are usually seeking to outsource some work to somebody, in the hope that it will be for a cheap price. Now, I admit, my services aren’t cheap and that’s because I take high pride in what I do, and I aim to provide a service from A-to-Z. However, I never take a job without clearly looking at what I’m about to take upon myself – and most importantly, I’ll never ever charge for something that takes me up-to 15-20 minutes.

Tonight, I got an interview request from a man in Miami, asking me to look at his FreePBX installation. The man also stated that he required some development work to be done, so I replied positively to the interview request. Shortly after 10 minutes, I got an IM from the man and we started talking. I started looking at his Asterisk box and as I didn’t have any root access at the point, I commented that it may take anything from 2 hours to 4 hours to solve. In any case, we started talking about the payment, which was a little high for the guy, so we agreed on a price – pending that I take a quick look at the server at root level.

I got root access and logged on – after 2 minutes I replied to the man: “Dude, I can’t charge you for this, it will take me exactly 4 minutes to fix, and 2 more minutes to add the feature”. So, I did the change for the guy, who still wanted to pay me, which I replied: “donate the funds to your favorite charity, I can’t charge for this”. Now, everybody would say: “Are you fuck’n mad? taking 200$ for 6 minutes of work, that’s like a world record!”, well, it’s not a world record to me if I feel like a heel. Charging somebody for something has to mean something, I’ve seen people charge other people for nothing, and I believe things shouldn’t work like that. I truly believe in the existence of Karma, and that the world strives for balance. As I do on to others, others may also do on to me – so there is no use to charge somebody for 10 minutes of help, as I may need these 10 minutes of help some day from someone else.