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Building a Personal VoIP System

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Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#71

Post by mindslight »

sgc wrote: post #67
jamesmstone wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a tangentially related problem I have been battling with that you may be able to help me with. I'm moving overseas (Australia to Denmark) and would like to keep my current mobile phone number working for calls and SMS , but use it from afar. I would be able to leave a raspberry pi at a friend's house. Can you use this setup without a SIP provider? Would you need to buy a modem for the raspberry pi?what would y…

I would just port my number to twilio and use/write a really basic twilio mobile app. It's a bit risky to rely on a slightly cobbled hardware/software setup that is sitting across the world with no physical access.

Note that one problem with voip providers is the numbers/lines often won't be recognized as valid by snake oil 2FA and the like. So porting to a voip provider only works if your goal is receiving SMS/calls from actual humans or just parking the number for later. But if you're doing it to avoid having to change your number for every service that has an SMS nagwall, it likely won't work.

You can get a modem that will do SMS (eg a Sierra Wireless card), but I don't know if/how they do voice.

Also, I'd shy away from the RPi based on the unreliability of SD cards. It would/will be pretty annoying for your host to go down and you have to travel back to fix it. I suppose if your friend is halfway handy you could keep an image of the machine as installed. Or even take new images remotely (rsync from the raw device a few times in a row?). If the root filesytem goes wonky, have your friend pull the SD card and reimage it.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#73

Post by revskill »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #15

Ah good memories! Even though I knew nothing about VoIP I installed, years ago, one at my wife's little SME using "RasPBX" (a distro made of Raspbian + FreePBX + Asterisk) running on a... Raspberry Pi 1 (maybe a Pi 2 but I'm pretty sure it was a 1). The Pi was booting from the SD card but everything was running on an external HDD. I did put six Cisco VoIP phones and all was working fine as long as no more than four p…

It's surprising that you could configure everything without hardware/software compatability issues.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#74

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

systems_glitch wrote: post #49

It's worth noting that Asterisk will run on very low-end hardware: for the last 7 or so years, I've been running a small Asterisk box on a VIA C3 Mini-ITX system. System idle power is around 10W. The only reason I chose the VIA C3 system over something newer was that a) I already had it and b) it had a PCI slot (specifically PCI, not PCIe). The PCI slot let me plug in a Digium TDM800P and add eight POTS lines, either…

Today you could have the same average power consumption with an Odroid H3, and probably juggle more quality codecs too. (Well, sans the Digium card; but it’s just mindboggling how far we went with power consumption these days.)

I’m wondering how necessary POTS lines actually are these days (and how many connect to VoIP on the telco side). Should depend on the country.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#75

Post by tomatocracy »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #74
systems_glitch wrote: post #49

It's worth noting that Asterisk will run on very low-end hardware: for the last 7 or so years, I've been running a small Asterisk box on a VIA C3 Mini-ITX system. System idle power is around 10W. The only reason I chose the VIA C3 system over something newer was that a) I already had it and b) it had a PCI slot (specifically PCI, not PCIe). The PCI slot let me plug in a Digium TDM800P and add eight POTS lines, either…

Today you could have the same average power consumption with an Odroid H3, and probably juggle more quality codecs too. (Well, sans the Digium card; but it’s just mindboggling how far we went with power consumption these days.) I’m wondering how necessary POTS lines actually are these days (and how many connect to VoIP on the telco side). Should depend on the country.

The H3 has an M.2 slot and a separate emmc slot. So if you really wanted to use that card perhaps you could use an M.2 to PCIe connector and then connect that in turn to a PCIe to PCI adapter/riser. Power might be an issue though.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#76

Post by dmpanch »

wnolens wrote: post #6

Cool to read someone indulge in this. For others interested with no prior context, also consider FreeSWITCH. Personal experience: I spent about 15 months working for a local telecom company, supporting their asterisk servers and developing interactive voice response applications. I was given the opportunity to build their residential voip service (in 2010?) from scratch and despite asterisk being so dominant I protot…

Asterisk from 12th version supports Asterisk REST Interface, no longer need to write configs.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#77

Post by rjsw »

zokier wrote: post #38

People still actually make phone calls? I mean its neat that you can run your own voip, but I struggle to imagine it getting used much or being worth even $5/month

I'm just about to ask for my landline to be disconnected, no sense in paying for something I hardly ever use, won't bother porting the number to VoIP. Will either just keep the copper pair for VDSL or switch to FTTP.

The only person that I did call using the landline is my father, but his VoIP system is unreliable.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#78

Post by remram »

numpad0 wrote: post #58
astrobe_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One often sees the STUN, TURN or ICE protocols around SIP-based VoIP, I believed they were supposed to help solve those issues?

They don't always work... The idea is if you send UDP packets to destination so arranged by middleman(STUN) or to a proxy so arranged by middleman(TURN) as an outgoing traffic, your Wi-Fi should be smart enough to set up a temporary NAT entry to allow responses to reach your $LOCAL_IP:$PORT. In reality, the Wi-Fi may have short memory or may be dying behind a refrigerator covered in dust and not able to handle all ne…

Why would that be more reliable than TURN? If your router "forgets" about established streams half-way, your VPN will not stay connected either.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#79

Post by remram »

jeroenhd wrote: post #37
stonewall wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author here.) Sadly its a lot less interesting: my home ISP still doesn't support IPv6.

For what it's worth, and if you're willing to tinker, you can get IPv6 for free through a tunnel as long as your router responds to ICMP: https://tunnelbroker.net/ You can get a bunch of /64s and a /48 for free because HE really wants everyone to have IPv6 available already. Picking the right internet exchange to route from and making Netflix not throw a fit requires some minor experimentation but I've found it to wo…

> You can set up advertisements from any Raspberry Pi or other computer as long as it has outbound connectivity.

You mean send the advertisement and do the SIT tunneling on that machine?

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#80

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

mindslight wrote: post #71
sgc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just port my number to twilio and use/write a really basic twilio mobile app. It's a bit risky to rely on a slightly cobbled hardware/software setup that is sitting across the world with no physical access.

Note that one problem with voip providers is the numbers/lines often won't be recognized as valid by snake oil 2FA and the like. So porting to a voip provider only works if your goal is receiving SMS/calls from actual humans or just parking the number for later. But if you're doing it to avoid having to change your number for every service that has an SMS nagwall, it likely won't work. You can get a modem that will d…

I've been using a voip number for all my sms 2fa needs for the last 5 years while living abroad. I have a dozen banks and other financial institutions plus the irs happily accepting it. Some companies, like openai, wont accept it, for those I just buy single use SMS numbers.
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