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.
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Tags: Aastra Technologies, Asterisk, Cisco, Cisco Systems, digium, Fonality, FreePBX, freeswitch, Markup language, Nortel, Polycom, sangoma, SIP, TrixBox, User interface, VoIP, XHTML, XML
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:
Tags: Asterisk, ASTERISK BUSINESS EDITION, BITTORRENT, COPYRIGHT, digium, Elastix, FILE SHARE, FreePBX, FRINGE, Movies, P2P, RECORDING SYSTEM, TrixBox, TV SHOW
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.
Tags: Asterisk, Asterisk At Home, FreePBX, Linux, open source, PBX-in-a-flash, php, TrixBox
So, you want to replace your office PBX system with an Asterisk server – CONGRATULATIONS!
Now, before you go about downloading AsteriskNOW, installing your newly purchased Digium hardware and going about starting your work – take a moment to consider the hardware you’re about to use. Over the course of the past 5 years, I’ve conducted hundreds of Asterisk installations, utilizing various brands.
No matter what brand I used, be it generic Intel’s, HP or IBM, I always got similar results. There was only one brand that always stood out with non-similar results. And it’s not only that the results were not similar to the other brands, I’ve had different results when using 2 machines of the same model – even when sourcing the two units at the same time. The vendor is DELL, I guess that DELL believes in the model that says: “No two computer are made alike” – and indeed, no DELL computer is ever similar to another DELL computer. Two people can purchase the same server from DELL, and each server will be completely different from the other – how can you manage an infrastructure when the hardware vendor keeps changing the spec and implementation?
Just to give a small example, the same customer that I was talking about before had to have the entire motherboard and raiser board changed, 2 times, before Asterisk started running smoothly on the DELL 2950 server that they had purchased. Motherboard, we’re talking about motherboard, raiser boards, power supplies, the only thing that remained from the Original server was just the chassis and the CD-ROM – how funky is that.
So, if you really like brands and you want to use Asterisk, make sure you’re using an IBM or an HP, at least these companies don’t cut corners like DELL – and makes each server unique, by saving a couple of bucks here and there. No wonder Fonality/TrixBox teams up with DELL, DELL wants to say: “We’re compatible with Asterisk!”, so they teamed up with the crew that closed a configuration that works on some measly server, and now, they are pushing this garbage to people over the Internet – Way To Go DELL!
Tags: Asterisk, DELL, Fonality, HP, IBM, TrixBox
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:
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Subject: SS7 on Sangoma a101D
Why are you trying to do this? Is your goal to terminate SS-7 trunks to an Asterisk box at some point?
Your exercise sounds academic, ISDN User Part is essentially SS-7 and besides who trunks Asterisk with PRI’s
The last guy that asked these questions was working on a University project, if this is what you are doing then do your own homework. If not please explain your application so I can make a few suggestions.
aka “Skyking”
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Ok, putting aside the discussion of Digium vs. Sangoma (It’s a well known fact I’m a Digium fan), I think I hadn’t seen any remark on any Asterisk forum which was rude as this one. The fact that TrixBox is not something you would naturally use for SS7, the fact that it’s Asterisk based simply makes it possible. Why does the responder care “Why the user wants SS7?” – it doesn’t matter one bit, he wants to do it, he has his reasons – just give the guy an answer and help him out.
Our responder says: “… and besides who trunks Asterisk with PRI’s …” – well, I can number multiple situations when Asterisk was required to be trunked with PRI circuits. For one, security measures sometime insist that you interconnect Asterisk with PRI circuits and not over IP. For example, one of my customers, a company in the defense industry required a secured VoIP connection to a provider, without exposing it’s internal network on the physical layer – the only way to do it was to interconnect Asterisk via a PRI circuit.
“… if this is what you are doing then do your own homework …” – That’s even worse than saying RTFM. In the Asterisk world, and especially in the SS7 world, nothing is straight forward and usually, things are slightly more complex than anticipated. Saying something like: “Do your homework” is like saying, “I know how to help you, it’s complex, but I won’t tell you”.
The good old saying says: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything” – it applies well to mailing lists and forums.
I admit, I had been known to throw a flame or two here and there – however, it is always related to a specific issue, and is usually related to non-technical issues being published on a technical list.
Tags: Asterisk, digium, FreePBX, GPL, Kerry Garison, Sangome, TrixBox, VoIP
hello
i have a two running trixbox server with sangoma a101D cards in them. i want to connect these two servers with each other over a SS7 link. i have installed wanpipe utilities and using T1 cross over cable. both card are showing green light and also there is no alarm in the system. now i am trying to install some ss7 library in the system. i have tried both chan_ss7 and libss7. chan_ss7 didnt work in any way.
so i am trying to use libss7.
with new asterisk 1.6 and libss7, digium says it will supports mtp2 signalling. just need to add command
signalling=mtp2. but they also said that only digium card will support this feature. can i use direct mtp2 signalling on sangoma cards or is there is any other way around???????