[Telephony] Telephony Meeting Summary

[Alex Randell]

Last night's telephony meeting made some progress. Steve got Asterisk 
(*) running on his laptop and we connected my iaxclient to both his box 
and Scott's server from behind a firewall. SIP client (kphone) 
connection through the firewall proved elusive as the server was seeing 
the client's internal address not the router's external IP. Scott has 
been working on a source rpm for mandrake of the * cvs - so that could 
help alot with the installs - thanks, Scott!

Steve found a site with binary rpms for several distributions:
ftp://ftp.nacs.net/asterisk

They have RedHat 9, RedHat 7.3 and Fedora Core 1 - which covers a few 
people who we didn't think could install *. Tim also mentioned that 
building the source from cvs is easier on Debian if you upgrade the 
kernel/kernel-source first..

Vonage.ca now claims to be out of stock of Victoria phone numbers on 
their website.. I called PrimusTel today and ordered a TalkBroadBand 
package so I should be able to receive calls from landline by late next 
week. Apparently their extra DIDs only cost $4/mo but their LD per 
minute rates suck - so I will be keen to set up a * dialplan that routes 
10 digit calling to my other provider for cheaper LD.

One thing that really suprised me was how resilient SIP can be over a 
bad connection. Shaw is servicing routers in my area and during the call 
to PrimusTel my modem went offline 4 times for over 30s sometimes! After 
the modem re-established internet my call continued as before without 
having to dial again.

Price Note: WRT54G routers are on sale at Futureshop for $99! Tim 
mentioned that there is a new router in that series with more mem which 
may be better suited to the router project - I think it was called the 
WRT54GS.

I was thinking that perhaps once we get more people up with Asterisk we 
can meet on VoIP? Just a pipe dream to ponder..

Cheers,
Alex