Tom Keating : VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Tom Keating
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Linux

Asterisk 1.6.0 beta5

March 6, 2008

The Asterisk.org development team just released Asterisk 1.6.0-beta5. According to the announcement with beta5 of 1.6.0 the feature-set is frozen. One thing still missing is "caller name screening" where you can screen the call and accept/reject the call. I'd also like to see "voicemail call screening", which would allow me to screen a caller leaving a message and pull them out.

Hosted VoIP Packet Sniffing

January 22, 2008

Packet Island, Inc. today announced that they will demonstrate their latest SaaS-based sniffer product, PacketPro at TMC's ITEXPO conference in Miami. This SaaS-based product has the ability to provide managed service providers and IT outsourcing companies remote visibility to troubleshoot problems in their customers' networks. Many companies don't have the internal networking staff to troubleshoot complex networking issues, especially voice over IP, which is time sensitive traffic. I haven't seen their product demo yet, so I'll be sure to stop by their booth.

Sendio I.C.E. Box anti-spam appliance review

January 16, 2008


The Sendio I.C.E. (Intercept, Confirm or Eliminate) Box anti-spam appliance brings an assortment of weapons to do battle with the evil spammers of the world, including challenge-response (Sender Address Verification (SAV)), silverlisting, SPF, Domain Keys and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) with detailed SMTP protocol checks, and finally blacklisting by domain name or email address on a system-wide or per user basis. Sendio doesn't include spam filters, but don't get Tim Lee Thorpe, VP of Marketing started.

D2 Technologies mCUE mobile convergence softphone launches

January 7, 2008

D2 Technologies today released at CES what they claim is the industry’s first embedded mobile convergence software solution for dual-mode phones.  D2’s mCUE mobile convergence software solution combines a communications user interface with the company’s vPort MP VoIP software platform and is targeted towards OEMs and service providers to help deliver integrated Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) and Unified Communications (UC) functionality.

mCUE provides a complete embedded software framework for multi-mode mobile handsets for enterprise and consumer use, such as dual-mode cellular plus Wi-Fi phones. Its completely Java-based user interface framework for Linux can be ported to other GUI platforms.

“mCUE revolutionizes mobile communications by tying together the best aspects of PC-based communications, such as VoIP, instant messaging and presence support, with the roaming benefits of mobile cellular and connection speed and quality of in-building wireless,” said Doug Makishima, vice president of marketing at D2 Technologies. “It is a complete turnkey solution for multi-mode mobile communication devices.”

mCUE is interoperable with enterprise IP-PBXs and UC systems as well as service provider networks.





Asterisk Security Vulnerability in SIP Channel Driver

January 3, 2008

On December 26th, Grey VoIP reported a security hole in Asterisk - an Asterisk SIP Channel Driver BYE Message Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability. The vulnerability could allow a remote user to send a specially crafted BYE message using the 'BYE with Also' transfer method to trigger a NULL pointer error cause the target service to crash. In just a week, Digium, the founders of the open source Asterisk platform, released an update to fix the problem.

Every IP-PBX will have its share of bugs and security holes, I get Cisco advisories all the time, so I wasn't too concerned when I heard about this security vulnerability in Asterisk. But what amazes me is the fast turnaround to fix it - and over the major holidays no less!

Kudos to the Digium team and/or the open source community which were quick to react to this security issue!



Digium reaches 1 million download milestone

December 19, 2007

Movable Type goes 100% Open Source

December 12, 2007

Wow, just read that Movable Type has gone 100% open source. This from Anil Dash:

As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. Just want the details and downloads?


Nerd Vittles Delivers some Asterisk Christmas Goodies

December 11, 2007

Just last month, PBX in a Flash launched. Well, Nerd Vittles aka 'Santa Claus for Asterisk', has been busy in his workshop building and adding features to PBX in a Flash. Well Nerd Vittles has finally put on his Santa Claus hat today to deliver some Christmas goodies a wee-bit early. (14 days early to be exact.) Oh and if you're looking for the top Christmas gifts of the year, check out Amazon's list of top gifts.

Nerd writes:
Text-to-Speech Returns! If you've been following Nerd Vittles for a while, you already know that our favorite applications for any telephony server are text-to-speech apps.



QueueMetrics launches new features

December 6, 2007

QueueMetrics is a popular call center monitoring application that works with the Asterisk IP-PBX and featuring over 150 quantitative metrics to see what is happening in your call center(s). Some of its main features include the ability to view a detailed report of call center activity, down to each call on each queue, and run reports by single queues, or by user-created queue groups, both on inbound and outbound traffic. You can also listen to recorded calls and see activity statistics and duration by call stage, with daily, hourly (or shorter), weekly breakdowns. Today, QueueMetrics 1.41 was released adding several new features.

Here's what's new:

- New editors for users, classes, queues, agents, locations, call outcome codes and pause codes.



Building Carrier Networks Using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Technology

November 26, 2007

Anyone want to build a carrier-class network? Show of hands - would you rather use "tried and true" hardware gear from Cisco or Juniper Networks and pay through the nose OR would you rather build your carrier network using commercial off the shelf (COTS) components? Well, just a few short years ago, most of you would raise your hands for the former over the latter. After all, who would trust their carrier network using various COTS components from multiple vendors?
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