DeJardin Data Center - phase 2.a
asterisk, brenda, pbx, sipura, telephony, trixbox June 9th, 2007
Pictured here is a Sipura SPA-3000. The company was acquired by LinkSys at some point, but I’m not certain how long ago. It’s a very simple device with two phone connections, an ethernet connection, and a browser based configuration designed to make you hate everything about the device over the span of several days.
But once you have it configured properly it will act as a “hop-on hop-off” adapter to convert plain copper phone service to SIP and back again. One of the phone jacks is connected to the line bringing dial-tone into your home, and the other is connected to your house wiring, and the Ethernet brings the VoIP via SIP to your Asterisk PBX and back.
And why would you do such a thing? One reason you may be thinking of would be the old mountain climbing adage: “because I’m a masochist.” But that would be wrong.
With Brenda’s mother in law Rebecca staying with us at the house, and Alex now receiving more phone calls from his school friends, the real reason is this:
I’m sick of answering the phone.
It’s ringing off the hook and although I get literally no phone calls during the course of the week I get in trouble if I don’t pick up.
So here’s how it’s tricked out. A caller to our house will hear one ring and the message, “You have reached the DeJardin household. Press one for Brenda, two for Rebecca, three for Alex, or four for Louis.”
Once the selection is made the caller-id is prefixed with “Alex:” or “Lou:” or whatever, and the home phones ring a distinct pattern per person. Alex’s friends call in with three short rings for example. My pattern isn’t really important because we literally never hear it. If the call is not answered we each have a dedicated voice mail box.
Brenda’s virtual extension has a special feature also - after four rings the Asterisk PBX will dial her cell phone and bridge the connection to it. It’s really neat actually. Even though the land-line is off-hook with an incoming call there are VoIP services like SIPPhone and FreeDigits that allow you to use a broadband connection to place calls onto the normal phone network. (1.9 cents a minute I think).
Now I will admit that last little trick I put on because it was cool, but it turned out to have a great side-effect too. Because the calls will forward automatically even if I’m at home and Brenda isn’t I still won’t get into trouble if I don’t answer her calls.
So I’d say it was worthwhile but the SPA-3000 + Asterisk PBX configuration is one of those things that’s difficult and specialized enough that if you ever set one up prepare yourself for a weekend of Google-hunting for little clues buried in forums and newsgroups. You’ll also end up knowing the factory reset sequence by heart.
June 9th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Congrats on the IP phone deployment. I’ve considered doing this so often, but it scares the crap out of me that I’ll be on a biz trip and the phone will crash.
Plus, we get very few calls. Perhaps when Mazie gets older it’ll drive me nuts — but I think I’ll just get her an iPhone and call it done.
PS - Alex isn’t txt’ing like made?
June 10th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
I know what you mean. In my case with Brenda I was assuming it was going to be a one-strike-and-it’s-out policy. Before I left it on I had a few weekends of “silent launch” on the system.
For example we have three phone numbers now… The standard line we’ve always had and two more very cheap numbers from sip services… So I was able to get the whole layout tested by calling those numbers.
Another nice feature of the Sipura is the fact the two phone-jacks will essentially hardwire to each other if there’s a power or system outage. So until I was confident enough in the system I would simply pull the power from it’s jack every night I was done working, and the phones in the house got dialtone from the telco like they always did.
I’m sure that one strike is still waiting out there though. She likes the system a lot now that it’s in place, but the real test will be the first time Brenda has to go downstairs herself to pull the plug to make a phone call.
And oddly no… Alex has a few friends but they’re pretty much connected by land line, or online with games like WoW or on xbox, but he doesn’t have or seem to want a phone. Maybe it’s a boy thing.