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Asterisk Linux Based IP-PBX

New Digium IP Phones Up Close

February 1, 2012

I got to see the new Digium IP Phones up close - sort of. I ran into Digium's Steve Sokol in their ITEXPO booth and proceeded to ask Steve about these new IP phones. I asked him if they were developed internally (yes) or white-labeled, where they were being built (China), and a few other questions.

I was about to ask him to see a demo when a Digium employee interrupted and asked Steve to give a demo to two attendees standing a few feet away.

Posted in Asterisk

Digium Gamechanger! Launches D40, D50, & D70 IP Phones

February 1, 2012

Today, at ITEXPO, the premiere communications event, Digium launched a line of IP phones that work in conjunction with their Asterisk and Switchvox solutions. This truly could be a gamechanger, since Asterisk is a popular IP-PBX solution that popular 3rd party phone vendors such as Aastra, snom, and Polycom offer products for. This move by Digium and the impact on these phone vendors could be quite interesting. This reminds me of 2008 when Aastra, a traditional IP phone manufacturer decided to offer a full-fledged IP-PBX based on Asterisk, called AastraLink. As I said during the AastraLink 2008 product launch:

Aastra Telecom has entered the IP-PBX game with the AastraLink Pro 160.

Posted in Asterisk, ITEXPO, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Esnatech Releases Office-LinX 8.5, a Cloud-based UC Platform

January 19, 2012

Esnatech, today announced the release of version 8.5 of Office-LinX, a unified communications platform that enables enterprises to integrate UC with cloud -based technologies such as Google Apps, VMware Zimbra , Salesforce.com, and Microsoft BPOS/Office 365. Office-LinX is optimized to work in mixed, distributed environments integrating with multiple on- and off-premise telecommunications technologies and cloud-based applications and infrastructure. It can for instance integrate with solutions from Asterisk, Avaya, NEC, Cisco, Toshiba, Panasonic, Shoretel, and more.

The latest high availability (HA) version of Office-LinX supports full virtualization of its voice clusters with VMware vSphere support. With Office-LinX 8.5, organizations have the ability to distribute the application and resources over multiple virtual servers connected to a single or distributed telephony infrastructure.

Posted in Asterisk, Avaya, Cisco, Cloud, Internet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Hacked Asterisk PBX Update

January 12, 2012

I wanted to give an update to my Asterisk Hack Post-mortem article. By the way, I love this image of a hacker sporting a fedora in case you're wondering why I used it in both articles!

I found this interesting error in the logs:
zdump[27161]: error: Bind to port 10001 on 0.0.0.0 failed: Address already in use.

I knew zdump was a Linux command related to timezone stuff, but it shouldn't be taking a port. I found the zdump command:
[root]/var/log/bak2>ll /usr/bin/zdump
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 240512 Jan 6 13:36 /usr/bin/zdump

The date and time were roughly around the time of the hack.

Posted in Asterisk, Linux, TMCnet, VoIP

Asterisk Hack Post-mortem

January 10, 2012

Having your production Asterisk-based phone system hacked is no fun, as I have learned from first-hand experience over the past few days. Even the best of IT administrators taking ever security precaution in the book dreads the day their critical server gets hacked. You hope you've done everything possible to stop your servers from being hacked, but you are never 100% sure. There is always some hacker smarter than you, but more importantly, smarter than the best security practices you put in place.

Posted in Asterisk, ITEXPO, Linux, SIP, Skype, TMCnet, VoIP

Fonality Names Former Microsoft Exec David Scult as CEO

January 10, 2012

Today, Fonality announced it has appointed former Microsoft Exec David Scult (image right) as Chief Executive Officer. This is the second CEO in just a couple years. Dean Mansfield replaced Chris Lyman CEO, the founder of Fonality. I'm a fan of Fonality's Asterisk-based products, especially their HUD client, so I'm hoping things are going well there.

Posted in Asterisk, Linux, SIP, TMCnet, VoIP

Google to Keynote at Super WiFi Summit in Miami

January 3, 2012

TMC's ITEXPO has had its fair share of high-profile keynoters, including Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, Bob Metcalfe, former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, former HP Chair Carly Fiorina, Digium / Asterisk founder Mark Spencer, and of course TMC's very own Rich Tehrani on multiple occasions. We've also had representatives from Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo, Avaya, Nortel, Polycom, and other telecom / wireless heavyweights. Now in 2012 TMC lands a Google keynoter! Google will keynote at ITEXPO's co-located Super WiFi Summit.

Richard S. Whitt is Director and Managing Counsel for Telecom and Media Policy for Google Inc. In that capacity, Rick is responsible for Google’s strategy and advocacy on all wireline, wireless, and media matters before the Federal Communications Commission, other Federal agencies, and the U.S.

Posted in Asterisk, Avaya, Cisco, Google, ITEXPO, Nortel, Skype, Technology and Science, Wireless

Newfies-Dialer Offers Super-Scalable Cloud-based Auto-Dialer Using FreeSWITCH

December 29, 2011

I discovered a new, powerful, open source auto-dialer called Newfies-Dialer that is offered by Star2Billing S.L, and is distributed free of charge, with no ongoing licensing costs. Star2Billing also wrote CDR-Stats, a replacement for Asterisk Stat used in FreePBX, as well as A2Billing. Star2Billing S.L., based in Barcelona, was formed in 2009 to provide commercial support to their range of free and open source products specialising in telephony, billing, and telecoms software development. Freeswitch is often compared with Asterisk, though Freeswitch is more scalable, especially the number of concurrent SIP registrations.

Jonathan Roper emailed me to tell me about this new auto-dialer, which works in conjunction with FreeSWITCH.

Posted in Asterisk, Internet, SIP, VoIP

Microsoft Lync 2010, Asterisk & Skype Integration Tutorial

December 28, 2011

I came across an excellent tutorial on installing and integrating Microsoft Lync 2010, Asterisk and Skype. The tutorial covers installing AsteriskNOW within a virtual machine on Windows, so you don't even have to have spare hardware lying around to install Linux + AsteriskNOW on. The tutorial mentions integrating with Skype using Skype for Asterisk (SFA), which unfortunately was killed earlier this year. You can of course use Skype Connect (formerly Skype for SIP) to create SIP trunks, but the integration isn't as "tight".

Posted in Asterisk, Lync, Microsoft, SIP, Skype, Unified Communications, VoIP

Digium TE820 8-port T1/E1 Card Released

December 13, 2011

According to Digium, they just released their 8-port T1/E1 card designed for high density Asterisk deployments. The TE820 includes eight independently software-selectable digital telephony interfaces, supporting up to 192 channels (in T1/J1 mode) or 240 channels (in E1 mode).

In a Digium email announcement, Digium claims this is the highest single-card port density available for use with Asterisk - though Sangoma's A108 Octal 8-port T1/E1 card might have something to say about that.

Features/Specs of the TE820:

8 T1 / E1 Spans using 4 RJ45 connectors (each supporting 2 circuits). Break out dongles included.
Up to to 192 (T1/J1) or 240 (E1) concurrent calls per card
PCI Express form factor / half-length, full-height card
Interfaces are software selectable (T1, E1, or J1 Mode)
Optional 128ms hardware echo cancellation module

The TE820 card supports industry standard telephony protocols, including multiple variants of Primary Rate ISDN.

Posted in Asterisk, Computer Hardware, SIP, VoIP

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