gngtech

Win a trip to space!

grahamodaniel — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:17:47 +0000

I was over on SqlServerCentral.com today and noticed a huge banner at the top for a contest. The grand price: a trip to space provided by the company Space Adventures! I haven’t entered the contest yet but figured I’d throw this on the blog in case anyone else happens to see it.

Here’s the link to the contest site: https://www.dbainspace.com/?utm_source=ssc&utm_medium=pageheader&utm_campaign=dbainspace.

Motorola Droid as SIP phone

grahamodaniel — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:35:07 +0000

If you have an original Droid phone and have since moved on but still wondering what you can do with your old friend, we recently discovered a great option: use it on WiFi as a portable SIP phone around your house and office.

Motorola Droid

The Motorola Droid was originally released in 2009 to Verizon Wireless users and represented one of the first forays by Motorola into the Android smartphone segment, which has grown in popularity ever since as Motorola followed up with several more Android-powered smartphones and continues to this day.

But enough about how the Droid came to be and onward to how you can still use your dear friend.

Required Components:

Droid or other Android smartphone running Android 2.2 or better
WiFi router
SIP server or hosted provider
A free extension
Phone dock (optional)

The Droid shipped with Android 2.1 and has since received updates to bring it up to 2.2 officially. However, the modding community seems to have embraced the Droid as a worthy candidate and now offers all sorts of releases for rooted phones. A rooted phone refers to a hacked phone allowing access to otherwise inaccessible parts of the file system. This allows for replacement of anything from the boot-up animation to the entire OS image (referred to as a ROM). We’ve tried only two so far: Liquid Smooth and currently Miui. Miui has proven to be a really good middle-ground between Android and iPhone interfaces, and one we surely recommend you try. The main reason for using a new ROM is to minimize the amount of bloatware draining the battery as we want the phone to last as long as possible.

With our new OS in tow we moved on to finding a suitable SIP client. It’s no surprise, with the Android Market growing leaps and bounds within the past few years, our quest started in the Market. There’s actually quite a bit of SIP clients, and it appears the number of offerings increases periodicaly, both as free apps and paid-for. The first we tried was Sipdroid and found the interface to be clunky and setup to be troublesome. Next we tried 3CXPhone and found it was okay but didn’t seem to work reliably. We finally settled on CSipSimple with its easy configuration and seemingly reliable performance. CSipSimple also integrates well with the dialer so you don’t have to run the separate app just to make a SIP call.

Shiny new ROM. Check. Reliable client. Check. All engines ready to launch. To get the phone going you need to have Asterisk or some other suitable SIP service running to which you can create extensions. We happen to use Asterisk but there are a number of other SIP provides and servers you can purchase and/or build. Simply go into your SIP account and configure an extension as you would any other SIP phone. Pop the same details into the handy configuration screens in CSipSimple and it should show as registered relatively quickly. From there you can dial your contacts or other extensions just like any other SIP phones on your nextwork. It really is that simple.

Special thanks to the Miui team for providing an excellent OS and the CSipSimple creators for their awesome free app.

Cisco FXO as Trunk for Asterisk

gngtech — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:16:39 +0000

Do you have a FXO card for your Cisco 1760, 2600, 3600? Do you have Asterisk and want to use the FXO card as a trunk? We answered yes to both of these questions and then spent hours trying to make it work. Lucky for you we want to help, so here’s the quick and dirty on what we used.

Components:

Cisco 2651XM with 128 DRAM and 48 Flash
IOS 12.4 (IP Voice)
NM-2V module in slot 1 of 2651XM
VIC-2FXO card in slot 0 of NM-2V
Line from phone company in slot 0 of VIC-2FXO
Asterisk 1.6

Setting up the 2651XM

First off we need to get to the configuration mode so we can put in configuration commands. If you’re familiar with Cisco you probably already skipped passed this wondering why we’d even bother describing these steps. Simple answer: to be complete.

enable
conf t

So now that we’re in the configuration mode it’s time to configure the FXO interface. More than likely you have a 2FXO card in your Cisco. I’ve seen a 1FXO card option but I don’t quite understand why anyone would want one when they can have two. Either way, we put our 2FXO in slot 0 of our NM-2V sled. The 2FXO card has two RJ ports. Through some simple experimenting we determined the right-most port to be a RJ14 (2-line port) and the left-most port is a RJ11 (1-line port). You might think, “wow, does that mean I have 3 lines?” Unfortunately, no. The left-most port shares the second line from the right-most port. Phones that support two lines through a single RJ14 can use the right-most port with a single cord to get two lines, while phones that support only one line can use either port without worry that connecting another one-line phone to the other port will lead to a shared line.

VIC-2FXO image from Cisco

voice-port 1/0/0
description FXO
connection plar 603

dial-peer voice 603 voip
destination-pattern 603
session protocol sipv2
session target sip-server
session transport udp
dtmf-relay rtp-nte
no vad