gundy dot org

The new version of Asterisk (1.4) is getting a GUI. I’ve known that for a while. I didn’t know, however, that Digium has wrapped the whole thing up as a Distro based on what looks like Fedora Core or RHEL.

From the announcement:

Asterisk® can now be easily configured with a graphical interface. The new site, AsteriskNOW.org, which is still in development, hosts AsteriskNOW™ Beta. AsteriskNOW™ Beta is a Software Appliance; a GUI implementation with the open source Asterisk distribution. AsteriskNOW includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk, and only those components, so installation is easy. You no longer have to worry about kernel versions and package dependencies. Unlike other Linux distributions used to deploy Asterisk, no unnecessary components that might compromise security or performance are included.

I’m usually very suspicious of GUIs used to configure servers, but if Digium is behind it, I’ll at least give it a look. A “distro” based install of Asterisk sounds like a great trouble-free approach when installing for someone that doesn’t have full-time sysadmins.

I’m still going to be using CentOS or RHEL for my personal stuff and wondering about the real question… When will the Zaptel drivers make it into the kernel?

Update: Looks like the distro is rPath Linux.

I never thought I would see this day…

That’s how you know you’re following too many mailing lists.

Software Patents Are Broken!

Please echo this message on your blog if you agree.  Let the message spread exponentially.

I’ve update the Utah Open Source Planet to the latest code and cleared all the caches.  This will make things funky in the short term, but better in the long run.  Happy blogging (and cooking?).

This is my son Jacob’s first crack at mastering the GIMP.

Jorkie the Robot

The pictured hard drive failed and left its owner in bad shape. If anyone has an old disk sitting around that’s the same make and model, it might help up in data recovery.

IBM Deskstar DTLA-307045

The missing text in the overexposed area says “Deskstar.”

If you have one of these, please let me know. We could give you 10X what ebay would give (for one found locally and know to work). Or you could donate it because you pity the guy and have been in this same predicament. :)

Vote because you can. Vote because you should. I don’t care who you vote for, but you have a civic duty to get yourself to the voting both and participate in your government.

Also, with voter turnout as low as it is, I figure there are about 60% of the people who have no business complaining about politics or government officials. More to the point… If you didn’t vote, then shut-up. I stopped caring about your opinion on our government just after you did.

But sadly, it’s unusable for me. It really, really bums me out.

The bugs responsible are here and here. There’s related reading in Google Groups and also a related ticket here.

I want to put out a bounty for this bug, but I don’t want to step on the toes of the developers. Any fix that would be worth paying for would have to be one that the developers would approve of. I don’t even know what work might already be done on it. I guess I haven’t browsed the source yet to see what’s happening lately. That will be the next step.

Does anyone know if any work is being done on this? I have a few projects that I want to get started using Django, but this has taken the wind out of my sails. :(

Update: There are a few more places to find related info.

Things are always harder then they’re supposed to be. Plugging in a SIP client to Asterisk should be easy, right? Well, it is, if everything is just perfect. I took a few notes and a few screenshots to help others if they find this fairly typical setup is more difficult then it should be.

Here are the relevant parts (IP addresses and mailbox number changed to protect the innocent) of my sip.conf:

[general]
port => 5060
bindaddr => aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
disallow => all
allow => ulaw
allow => alaw
context => sip-users
canreinvite => no
nat => no

[gabe]
username => gabe
secret => ****
mailbox => 1337
callerid => Gabe Gunderson <1337>
type => friend
host => dynamic

To to avoid NAT issues (on my side, not the server side), this communication is going over an OpenVPN connection. Make sure your tunnel is up before you start Ekiga and go to the preferences page. Set “Listen On” to tun0 and not eth0 (which is the default). The settings don’t seem to “take” until you restart Ekiga.

I like to keep things simple in the codec department. The VSP we’re using offers only G.711 (U-LAW or PCMU and A-LAW or PCMA). We’re using U-LAW since it’s the standard here in the U.S. and it costs the CPU very little to go from U-LAW < => U-LAW. It’s a little fatter in the tubes, but that’s not a big deal on this particular install.

Here’s a typical Account. I’ve chosen to use names for sip users instead of numbers. It makes the configs a little easier to read and you can always map numbers to names in the dial-plan.

If you have problems, there are a few things you can do to help figure out what’s going on.
Try the following:

• Run Ekiga from the command line with the debug switch:
  ‘ekiga -d 2′
• Or get specific debugging from Asterisk, like so:
  server*CLI> sip debug peer gabe
  SIP Debugging Enabled for IP: aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:5060

I really liked the “unified look” of the bluecurve icon set - 40 years ago, when it was introduced. I now prefer the crisp and clean look of Tango. Why doesn’t Fedora Core ship with it as an option? It doesn’t need to be the default, just an option. Oh well, one more thing to download.