Capamonkeyboy.com

Let’s start with the disclaimer, I am not saying that VOIP is the end all fix to everything. It is a useful tool for reducing cost or improving connectivity. What I am going to cover is the easiest (and hopefully cheapest) path between a new user and the ability to actually test a VOIP system.

What you are going to need:
A spare computer to act as the VOIP server with an ethernet port.
Minimal knowledge of linux command line, remember, when in doubt, google
trixbox 2.4, we will be going over how to get the trixbox 2.4 software.
Access to your router and internet device, namely the ability to open incoming ports.

The first thing we are going to do is download trixbox 2.4, this step is less trivial than one would think, but has been made easy by the availibility of the .iso on this site. The trixbox site only hosts the latest version (2.6 at the time of this writing) which gave me a lot of bugs upon first install.

Download the iso from either this site or another site.

Install trixbox 2.4 on the server, the details of this step are outside the scope of this writing. But can be found on the trixbox website.

Once installed, the trixbox server will be set to an automatic address on your local network, the issue with this is that getting to the web interface is more difficult. If you have a IP scanner on your computer, use it to find the IP of the trixbox server. If you still cannot find the IP, I suggest googling the commands for looking up the IP address directly from the server.

Now that we have found the ip address of the server, use your favorite web browser to access the server. Type the ip address of the server directly into the browser address. (i.e. http://192.168.1.25)

The web interface will give you a screen that has a link in the upper right corner called “switch”, click this and you will be prompted for a username and password. The username is ‘maint’ and the password is ‘password’. Enter these values and click OK. You should change these to prevent hacking.

Close the registration window. You are now logged in as the administrator, look for a link called ‘Asterisk’ and click on ‘FreePBX’.

This will take you to the FreePBX administaration screen. Here we can create the user accounts/extentions and configure the SIP Truck which handles calls to the outside world.

We will first start by setting up an extention in FreePBX. Click extensions, then click submit. This will set up a new SIP extension, which is what your computer will use to connect to the trixbox server. Give the first user an extension number (201 works good) to start, this is the number you use to dial this user internally. Next select give the account a display name and a password in the ’secret’ field. For a basic extention this is all we need so click submit. Add at least one more for interoffice testing.

We now have the server set up for basic interoffice communication. Time to set up some user computers.

download X-lite from http://www.counterpath.net/X-Lite-Download.html , Install it, run it. Under SIP account settings, add a new account. In the account properties, create a display name, this will be the name that will show up on caller ID. The username will be your extension, the password will be the value you entered for ’secret’ and the domain will be the IP address of the trixbox server. click the register with domain and receive incoming calls checkbox and select domian. then click OK.

If you have done everything correct, Xlite should discover the network and prompt you saying ready and listing your extension. You can now make calls to and from extensions on the local network. Try dialing another extension you have set up and see how it works.

Next step is to add the ability to call outside your local network, this includes dialing out, and with the right customer plan, dialing in. So far we have not actually signed up for any service, all we have done is install server software and played with it to allow dave in accounting to talk to jill in marketing using their computers.

We need to get a service provider for incoming/outgoing. This tutorial will be using voicepulse so from here on all SIP trunking will be related to setting up service with voicepulse. If you do not like them, have a great time on your own. I spent two weeks stuck using vitelity and hated them. So I use voicepulse.

First, we need to sign up for an account with VP. Go to https://www-business.voicepulse.com/Secure/SignUp/SignUpWizard.aspx?sp=trial , use Trixbox CE as your PBX. Set up an account, they will give you information on how to download the voicepulse module.

Once you have downloaded the voicepulse module, get back into FreePBX, then click Tools, then Module Admin. Next click Upload module. Next find the file you downloaded and select it to be installed.

Once installed, enable the module. Once enabled, a voicepulse menu should show up in the left hand menu when you click setup. Start by clicking status, this should give you a basic idea of what they are doing for you. Next click troubleshooting and find what is and is not working. There should be at least one thing not working.

When I installed my trixbox, it said I needed to install the curl library. To do this, you need to login using SSH to the server. once logged in, follow the directions given to you by the module. (i.e. ‘yum install curl….’)

once this was installed. It all ran smoothly. I was able to make calls. This meant anywhere in the world as long as I was willing to pay. I did add the ability to block 411 calls and a dummy least cost routing mechanism. Otherwise, that is about it.

1.Download X-lite from http://www.counterpath.net/X-Lite-Download.html
2.Install X-lite
3.Start X-lite
4.At the top of the program, there are three buttons, click on the leftmost button and select “SIP Account Settings”
5.Click on “Add…” in the upper right corner
6.Enter the information given to you by the system administrator.

example:
Display Name: John Smith
User Name: 2xx (this value will be your extension)
Password: xxxxxxxx (supplied by provider)
Authorization user name: (leave this field blank)
Domain: example.com
OR
Domain: xx.xx.xx.xx (use this if you are on the outside of the network)

7.Click the “Register with domain and receive incoming calls”
8.Make sure domain is selected and click apply.

If properly configured, the unit should now be set up.

So last weekend, I managed to get 4th and 2nd at the Roswell motorcycle event. This puts me, in a situation where in order to win 1st for the year, I have to place in the top 3 at the december event. I am not too worried about doing so, it just makes me think about what I have to practice. Finals in school apparently go hand in hand with trials.

I found a way to put Win XP on my desktop, I am using nLite to do so. The issues stems from the ability to install XP on a computer using SATA, a standard not supported by the original version. nLite solves this by allowing drivers to be installed while the instal utility is being loaded, very cool.

I am playing with VoIP, Trixbox, Asterisk, Digium, and FreePBX right now. I actually found a way to connect my office and my apartment to the same phone network, so now I call the office using an extension, NO PHONE BILL! It is pretty cool. It also means that I can get rid of our Qwest phone lines in favor of VoIP, it is way cheaper and there is less issues, I am looking at saving about $100 a month in phone bills by switching.

Today I started my summer calc 3 class. Anyone who has had to repeat a class knows how utterly boring the first week or so of a class is. Once it picks up, it is not so bad but what makes this class worse is the fact it is FOUR HOURS LONG, it runs from 10am to 2:30pm twice a week for 8 weeks. I have already almost fallen asleep three times in the first day.

Recently I started a small to medium php system called smooth that is designed to allow anyone using php and mysql to create configurable forms using xml and css. This means that anyone with a little html and css knowledge can make a custom form for their site. Much like the code snippets that make up wordpress and drupal, smooth is designed to be fairly easily configured by the end user. I am not up to the drag-n-drop stage of development using javascript and ajax, (this would mean I would have to learn ajax modules) but the idea is sound, make a system that allows for more general application of the code.

The vacuum truck biz has been fairly busy, we have made about $6000 so far this month and have a job planned for tomorrow. We will be digging holes for PNM to set new electric poles in where their equipment is not powerful enough. As much as it is hard, nasty work, it make money and at the end of the day, you really feel like you have accomplished something.

Nine Inch Nails
Category: Music

For the Record, there are two BIG names really into the internet downloading of music. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

I put radiohead first because they were first. They offered their album “In rainbows” on a pay whatever basis, the internet community took this and ran with it. Downloading for as little as the base fee (around $1) all the way up to $300. Which I bought in stores for around $11

This trend was then emulated by trent reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
Selling the 36 track acoustic album Ghosts I-IV for $5. Which I bought online.

Today Trent topped good ol radiohead by offering “Disipline” on his site 100% free.

Here is the link: http://dl.nin.com/discipline/nin

I have to say that I have been a believer in the idea of free music and free software, if you enjoy doing something, share it, don’t put limits on it, but I also understand that there are people who can’t do what they want and still affort to do it.

I endorse anyone making something for free, and giving it out for free, those who want to pay for a Cd, pay for it! No one is stopping you, I might buy it on Cd just to support the idea of getting it out there and giving the artist a good reason to keep doing it.

Grab it, like it, hate it, whatever. – I like it.

Happy New Year!, considering that this is the first post of this year, it is the new year for capamonkeyboy.com, it is also about a year old! Well, I have been hella busy with servers and School and finding a new roommate, oh my! Over the weekend, I moved up to sportsman in trials, that means upper class, and got 4th in the last comp, I will need to work harder at my skills to be ready for semi expert and expert, but I feel that I am on the right track. I also have a new server, but I will post the details for that later.

With the exception of Photoshop, all of these programs are available on the net. Enjoy.

Firefox

You would be amazed at how many of your pages can look normal in IE but look like crap in firefox, that is usually 30% of your views are getting looked at wrong. Get it, love, it live it.

FireBug

This little baby is an add on to firefox, it allows the user to edit the code of any page while looking at it. Ever wanted to see what a different background looks like on your myspace without actually changing it? This program is for you. You can even edit CSS and javascript. Best part is, all the changes can be copied and pasted into your actual page and saved.

FireFTP

This is another add on for firefox, It is a ftp program that comes up as another tab in firefox, this means you save ram and space.

Photoshop/Imageready

Sorry to put a non-free software on the list, but PS is a staple of attractive pages. Many fades and other great portions of websites have been done in PS. If you have linux, grab GIMP and enjoy the fun. Imageready is especially wonderful if used in conjunction with clean code, you can end up with a page that is both sleek and loads fast.

Textpad

When you have to actually read the code, this is a life saver, it provides most features associated with word in a code oriented fashion, including copy and paste and code highlighting. It does highlighing for css, php, java, js, html, perl…. you can even make your own hot tags.

If anyone else has suggestions, give me a heads up, but this is all I use and I know it it helps my productivity.