I was looking for a way to bypass my menu tree, for friends calling into my line. I didn’t want them to have to listen to my menu each and every time they call. Since I have my own CID Rolodex using the Asterisk Database, I figured I could quickly bypass the menu for any entries already in my “known friends” database. With a little help from the asterisk users mailing list, I got this all sorted out and working like a charm....

Looks like the 8.2 series of firmware still doesn’t register properly with asterisk. Though the phone can make and accept calls, I am still seeing the dreadful “little red x” on my extensions. Hopefully Asterisk or Cisco will fix something soon! Firmware load seems successful so far. Although MWI still does not seem to be working. Grrr! What did they break between 8.0.2 and 8.0.3/8.0.4/8.2!! More updates to follow..

Found some new firmware was released on Dec 10th for the 7970 series of phones. This brings it up to 8.2 instead of the 8.0 series. Lets hope it fixes the MWI issues we’re all experiencing. I haven’t finished my full testing of this firmware yet, however it does seem to boot on the phone. I also noticed that in order to perform the upgrade, and if your tftpd server is running on linux, you will have to rename a file to a different case to get the phone to recognize it, and load it....

Not that this is VOIP related, it is related to our field I think. I myself am one of the people who tend to stay up all night and sleep during the day. Well, at least I used to until I went out on my own to field work. Most people are day-walkers so I’ve had to adjust my schedule somewhat to accommodate. Which is all well and good for getting normal daytime things done, but I still need some nights to “stay up late and ponder things and hack”....

Asterisk Numbers Guessing Game Howto First, we have to grab the sound files guessit.tgz ** note, lost backups, no file. You can create your own :) Now, we copy these to our asterisk sounds directory # mv guessit.tgz /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/ Now we must untar the sound files into the guessit directory # cd /var/lib/asterisk/sounds# tar xzvf guessit_sounds.tgz You should have files like the following # cd guessit # ls goodbye.gsm input-number.gsm input_number....