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?”

I run Asterisk 1.8 at home for my own amusement.  I’ve just got a SIP trunk running again to SIPGate which had stopped running for some reason.  I’d set the DID for the SIPGate number to check for faxes and then, if it’s not a fax, go to my MOH application, but for some reason it didn’t work.

I also couldn’t access voicemail from the SIPGate trunk either, but I could get it to work with a phone connected to an ATA.

I had a look in the logs:

channel.c: Unable to find a codec translation path from 0x100 (g729) to 0x40 (slin)

Since slin is, I think, the Asterisk native format this is quite bad.  My assumption is that SIPGate sends through G.729 encoded audio regardless of whether you want it to or not (as configured in your allow/disallow lines for the SIP trunk PEER).

G729 from SIPGate works to the ATA because the ATA supports G729 and G729 to G729 pass-through works without any extra requirements from Asterisk.

So – in order to get SIPGate to Asterisk apps working again I installed the G729 codec binaries from here:

http://asterisk.hosting.lv/

and restarted Asterisk.  Now a:

         core show translations

shows I can convert between G729 and loads of other codecs.

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.

I got hold of a couple of LiebertPSP UPSes and connected to my servers.  They’re perfectly good for what I need them for, namely stopping my servers having the rug pulled out from underneath them with no notice if there is a power cut.

They don’t appear to have advanced functions like switching off the load independently of the supply which means you can’t power down the servers and then have the UPS switch them back on again once the power is restored and the battery has had a chance to charge, but I can live without that sort of thing.

I assumed that something somewhere would support these, and for the most part NUT does a bang up job.  It’s a bit advanced for my needs but most of the work has already been done.  In NUT the LiebertPSP is sort-of-supported by the Belkin USB driver with a few notable exceptions:

• The Online/On Battery indication doesn’t work
• The numeric values don’t work for things like Output Voltage

The numbers I can live without but the Online / On Battery is really rather important.

So I’ve cobbled together a new sub-driver using the tools supplied with Nut.  It’s far from complete but it does fix most of the annoying problems.

http://www.whizzy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/liebertpsp.tar.gz

You’ll need to download the Nut source and put the .c and .h files in the above tarball in to the drivers directory, then you’ll need to apply this patch in the drivers directory to get the new driver included in the build and to stop the native Belkin driver from claiming the ID of the LiebertPSP:

http://www.whizzy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/liebertpsp.diff

Then recompile Nut.

If everything works you should see a bit more info from your UPS:

battery.type: PbAc

device.mfr: Emerson Network Power

device.model: LiebertPSP

device.serial:

device.type: ups

driver.name: usbhid-ups

driver.parameter.bus: 004

driver.parameter.pollfreq: 30

driver.parameter.pollinterval: 2

driver.parameter.port: auto

driver.version: 2.4.3-2519M

driver.version.data: LiebertPSP HID 0.1

driver.version.internal: 0.35

ups.input.frequency: 50.0

ups.input.voltage: 243

ups.mfr: Emerson Network Power

ups.model: LiebertPSP

ups.output.percentload: 54

ups.output.voltage: 240

ups.powersummary.capacitygranularity1: 1

ups.powersummary.capacitygranularity2: 1

ups.powersummary.capacitymode: 2

ups.powersummary.configvoltage: 12.0

ups.powersummary.designcapacity: 100

ups.powersummary.fullchargecapacity: 100

ups.powersummary.imanufacturer: 19

ups.powersummary.ioeminformation: 19

ups.powersummary.iproduct: 1

ups.powersummary.presentstatus.batterypresent: 1

ups.powersummary.presentstatus.belowremainingcapacitylimit: 0

ups.powersummary.presentstatus.charging: 1

ups.powersummary.presentstatus.discharging: 0

ups.powersummary.presentstatus.needreplacement: 0

ups.powersummary.presentstatus.shutdownimminent: 0

ups.powersummary.rechargeable: 1

ups.powersummary.remainingcapacity: 100

ups.powersummary.remainingcapacitylimit: 38

ups.powersummary.voltage: 14

ups.powersummary.warningcapacitylimit: 38

ups.productid: 0001

ups.serial:

ups.status: OL

ups.vendorid: 10af

Search hints:

Vendor ID: 0x10af

Product ID: 0×0001

Why is one of my boxes reporting SMART data in the LogWatch and the others not?

I’d installed smartmontools but it just doesn’t seem to be working.

Finally sussed it. Have a look at /etc/default/smartmontools and enable deamon

The Nova-S Plus is a  good card.  http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_novasplus.html

But, it would appear there is a defect in these boards, or at least a strange design, which means that they won’t lock on to some frequencies which require the 22kHz tone sending to the LNB with new drivers because there’s no link between the flange and dolphin-points.  There’s plenty to read about here:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9476

And there’s a patch which fixes the problem by controlling the tone generator directly but it’ll never get in to the main kernel.  For your convenience here is a link to a binary driver built for Ubuntu Lucid kernel version 2.6.32-23-generic:

http://www.whizzy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/isl6421.ko

Replace the current isl6421.ko from /lib/modules/2.6.32-23-generic/kernel/drivers/media/dvb/frontends/isl6421.ko with this one.  It might also work for newer kernel versions, or not.  Who knows?  Not me.

I’ve also got a Hauppauge S2 HD and this patched driver doesn’t seem to effect it.

Search hints:

Hauppauge Nova S plus linux won’t lock horizontal 22khz tone can’t pick up some channels

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.