Making progress again ..

The Dell machine arrived. After much faffing around trying to get Windows 98SE running on it (it's a pig, it can't find all of the device drivers for the network etc), I decided to go for a simpler solution. I found this FreeDOS thing, which at first sight seemed to be ideal.

So, I downloaded FreeDOS onto a bootable CD, booted the machine with that and created a 2GB (cuz that's how big a normal DOS partition could be) partition.

I then installed Linux on the beast, running dual boot so I could get the machine on the network, and copied over the files from the Fireball server on to the DOS partition. (Linux can write FAT file systems, you know).

I then ran FreeDOS up, so I could try to run LIFUTIL - and was shocked to find it works. Now all I had to do was to find a 720K diskette, format it in LIF format, and then put the right driver for the 1GSa/s card on. I went through all the files, and eventually found that the SYSTEM_0.13 file was the correct one (by a process of hex editing the files and looking for the description string), put that on the disk and moved it over to the HP 16500A front drive.

Wow. We have a working scope.

.. and we are live with Asterisk!

I solved the issue with the analogue phone lines by getting rid of them. For the princely sum of 5.95 per month, Sipgate offer a trunking service, which means you can get your Virgin Media provided phone number transferred to them, and they will forward all calls to that number back to your own Asterisk system.

I've not done anything too complex so far, but it all works. If someone calls, then the VoIP phones (the Cisco ones) ring - first the main ones, then if they aren't answered the ones in the office and craft room get added on, and then if they are not answered, the mobiles ring!

If the call drops through to voicemail, the message is sent via an email attachment to us, so we can pick it up on our mobiles wherever we are as well.

Now Virgin Media charged me 17.95 a month for the privilege of a phone line. Since I don't need that any more, I wonder what their reaction will be when I ask that I have that money taken off my bill?  (Please note this only works if your current provider doesn't use the phone line to provide your broadband. Obvious when you think about it!)

All bets taken. Mine is that I might get a discount of a fiver after months of haggling.

*** Wrong again. After haggling, VM tell me that it is actually more expensive to change package to stop paying the line rental than it is to keep it. We need a bit more OFCOM legislation I feel. 

Asterisk and stuff

One of the other fascinations I have is with telephone systems. I have a Cisco 7940, and a 7970 in the house, and I have a Sipgate account for VoIP. It was working fine with one phone, but then I thought I wanted both phones working. SIP is a strange protocol, and is hugely flexible so you can spend happy hours playing with all kinds of things to get it going. The phones are different as well; Cisco rely on having a TFTP server in the network for the phone to boot from, which contains most of the phone configuration. Each phone has a SIP<macaddress>.cnf file in the tftpboot directory that it looks for, to bring up the phone. I had some happy times with Wireshark to find out what was going wrong. Having fixed the 7940, the 7970 uses a similar approach, but a completely different format for the configuration file - now in XML! The phones also have their own web services built in ..

So having the phones working individually, I needed something so I can use them both. There is a lovely bit of Open Source software - Asterisk - that can run on Linux to provide a local PBX solution. So, downloaded that, and it now functions to manage calls coming in and going out on the SIP line.

I then installed Zoiper on all of the mobiles and tablets in the house, and that works well - so I can now call Trish from the office to her mobile, without the call going out over the air - and therefore is free. So far so good.

What I want to do next is to receive incoming calls on the house phone, and send them out to the SIP phones. So, how to solve this?

I did the usual, searched with Google and decided from a ten minute bit of research that the SPA-3000 device, available for pennies from eBay would be a good bet. Ah. Now the real fun begins.

I found the manual online, and there is a very comprehensive Asterisk book for download. I am still struggling though - this is a key part of the home phone strategy, so I can use the existing analogue handsets over DECT to ring them (assuming the phone call is from someone I like - telemarketers will get a very long message advising them that we don't accept unsolicited marketing blah blah on the phone). I will post more as I find out more, but this is a nightmare so far. There are literally hundreds of settings for the SPA-3000.

I may have to sell the little darling and buy a better interface.