I was fortunate enough to be introduced to this book by my wife reading it to our son.

Wow – a day of fixing loads of niggling little Asterisk problems!

• Max duration

My calling plan gives me unlimited free calls as long as those calls are under an hour in duration. Pretty standard BT stuff. If you do make a call over an hour you don’t just get charged for that bit of the call over the hour, oh no, you get charged for the whole call.
Anyway – we have the technology to defeat them!

In FreePBX under General Settings change your Asterisk Outbound Dial command options to include:

L(3360000,3240000,10000)

which will drop the call after 3360000ms (56 minutes) and should alert you at 3240000ms.

• Courtesy Tone

The above works very well and drops the calls, but without a bit of extra magic you don’t get the warning in your ear – it just drops the call. To enable the warning tones etc edit this:

/etc/asterisk/features_general_custom.conf

and add

courtesytone=beep

substituting “beep” for what ever noise you want to hear.

• Call Recording

By also adding:

Ww

to the Dial command options in #1 you can press *1 when you’re in a call to start recording.  It plays the courtesy tone to both parties though.

Has anyone got a WAV or similar of the lady from Nortel saying “Meridian Mail. Mailbox?”

The internet FTW.

I’ve been having this odd problem since I got my Asterisk box back up and running in that whenever a call came in and hung up I’d lose internet connectivity for a few seconds.

I tracked it down to the router dropping the PPP connection, which initially made me think that the polarity reversal indicating the call had hung up was causing the modem to b0rk, perhaps due to the distance between the phone socket and the modem, or my dodgy cat5 cabling, or something.

Turns out it was none of the above.  EDIT:  Bit hasty there.  Hasn’t fixed it al all.

This post:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,43733.msg209081.html#msg209081

points to exactly my problem. I disabled the DDoS protection and no more dropped internet connections. I don’t worry about DDoS attacks too much, so for now I’m going to leave it off.

UPDATE:  None of the above actually worked.  In the end it turned out the modem had simply broken.  The NV RAM wasn’t remembering the config after a proper reboot and it was generally broken.  So I replaced the whole thing with a new DrayTek modem.  The old one did pretty well, it worked perfectly for about 3 years non-stop.

Search hints:

DrayTek VoIP Asterisk dropping ADSL PPP drop DDoS SIP

In order to remind myself:

I kept getting this error when trying to send an SMS;

No call scheduled as already sending

It seems SMSq or Asterisk is quite picky about who sends the SMS. If I tired to send an SMS as myself it would fail, and then clog up /var/spool/asterisk/sms/motx with undead SMSes.

If I run smsq as the same user as Asterisk is running as it works (once you’ve deleted all the crap out of motx directory.

Just need to work out why now.

Ubuntu 10.04 doesn’t include the required firmware to get this card to work.  Probably due to some licensing issues.

Although the card gets detected and you get the frontend device and the demod device a scan will fail to detect any channels.

The reason is that the firmware isn’t there.

Solution, copy this file to /lib/firmware/ and reboot

dvb-fe-cx24116.fw

Tsch.  What a bell end.  Instead, install the package:

linux-firmware-nonfree

They don’t go out of their way to draw much attention to it, like telling anybody or anything.

—– SOLD —–

Fancy living in a Grade II listed building? You get a really sweet inglenook fireplace, a garage and an off-street parking spot, a courtyard shared with friendly neighbours, a pretty decent sized garden and you’re right in the middle of town.. Potton is about a 40minute train ride from London and has shops and pubs and everything! A bargain at £180k (seriously, that’s a good price)

Click here to see it on RightMove

Front door:

Lounge:

Easy fix: