Asterisk

It’s been a while since we posted about anything important. Sorry about that guys, some other stuff is taking off and haven’t had much time to devote to this site. Today we present you with a little article about war dialing. If you’re not familiar with war dialing, it’s a term from the BBS era, when we’d use things like Toneloc, and Bluebeep to search for modems that answered. This would give us huge lists of BBS’s, banks, government offices and all sorts of cool things we could try to login to, or just share with friends....

Tonight we were debugging a customers PBX system for them because of what seemed like a really simple issue with their company directory. As they are located in a bi-lingual area they wanted to have english and french menus available to them. They use a combination of Asterisk 1.4 and FreePBX 2.5. With this software they already had the Languages module available to them, so they were able to create one main IVR, and then several branching IVR’s dependant on the language that was selected....

One of our clients recently had a question about his system using FreePBX 2.5.1 and Asterisk 1.4 regarding using specific lines to reach staff. He runs a support queue for his company. During the day he has a regular IVR with Call queues enabled to handle customer calls and direct them to the appropriate staff member to deal with customer inquiries etc. After hours the menu functions the same way, however there are less staff to answer the phones so mainly the emergency extension is the only one being monitored, for – well, emergencies!...

Following this tutorial on how to get Chan_Mobile working with Asterisk for Bluetooth support for our headsets and mobile phones we worked out how to get it working on Asterisk 1.6. We figured we would share this information with our readers incase they were interested in Bluetooth for Asterisk and the capabilities it will open up to their system. Just think, the server will know when you’re in the room or out of the office and other fancy things....

Here’s an update to our popular article Asterisk 1.4 with SNMP and Cacti using a remote box. This howto will be a little different in that it will be using Asterisk 1.6, the latest in the pipeline for Opensource PBX solutions from Digium. This process should be a little easier than it was last time, however will sacrifice a little bit of the “cool factor” (ie: security, etc) because it will be running local to Asterisk....