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Building a Personal VoIP System

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Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#81

Post by [deleted] »

dmpanch wrote: post #76
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.

[deleted]

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#82

Post by jjrh »

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…

You will probably have a harder time finding hardware that won't run asterisk.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#83

Post by TacticalCoder »

revskill wrote: post #73
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.

Well I basically used a a Linux distribution made precisely for this: it was called "RasPBX" back then, IIRC. The hardware was simple: a Pi 1, an external HDD hooked through USB to the Pi and Cisco VoIP phones. That Linux distro already took care of picking software components/versions all working fine together and it was tailor made for the Pi. It was pretty plug and play from what I remember.

I'm a software dev, not a sysadmin, but I can find my way around configure Linux machines.

I don't remember it as being particularly complicated. What I do remember for sure though is that once it worked, it worked flawlessly for years.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#84

Post by pseudostem »

jamesmstone wrote: post #57
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…

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 have setup a PRI to SIP channel before using elastix (now discontinued and bought by 3CX I think).

This needs investigation, but - Over the top of my head, I think you could probably have some kind of a 4G/5G modem hooked on to an SBC (Pi, APU, etc.) and then forwarded to your SIP line which you can pick over IP (Internet), this should work.

One of the child comments mentioned DID (Direct Inward Dialling). I am no expert, but if your Australian provider supports something similar, you will get the number (friend) who is dialling in, instead of your own Australian number dialling in to your receiver phone. This is useful for caller ID, otherwise it's just like a forwarded call.

Hope this helps.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#85

Post by ttul »

If only there was an equivalent for building your own home GSM/LTE network. When around the house, I would love to connect to my own private cellular network. Not only is coverage poor where I live, but this would allow me to route calls in sophisticated and useful ways, because the backplane of modern cellular networks is VoIP.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#86

Post by lormayna »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #55
lormayna wrote: post #32

One of my first job, in 201, was to create a spam faxing machine based on Asterisk. Once the initial setup was completed (T38 is a bit tricky to tune), it was very effective, it sent more than one milion of faxes every year.

Thank you for sharing your experience. How do you feel about it?

I am not the only sharing his experience with Asterisk in this thread. Why this criticism?

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#87

Post by mindslight »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #80
mindslight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had problems with a bunch of places, so it's at least YMMV then. And I'd be wary of transferring an existing number in (as opposed to getting a new voip number and then setting it up).

I'm sure specific services are hit or miss - there really shouldn't be a problem sending SMS to whatever number a user enters, but paternalistic snake oil salesmen gonna be paternalistic.

I've had the least difficulty with Google Voice (I believe it's impossible to tell "Google Voice" usage from bona fide Fi usage where it's really the users' only phone number). Voip.ms has worked very little for me, to the point of that I don't even try it. Heck I even used a voip.ms number for some online classifieds, and another person using Comcast/Xfinity mobile couldn't text me. I'm not saying this as a slight against Voip.ms itself, from what I've gathered most voip providers will be treated similarly.

One of these days when I get around to it I plan on setting up a wireless modem on a $3/mo paygo plan for my SMS nag needs. With a script that automatically brings the number as close to my paste buffer as possible.

What single use SMS service do you use? I haven't really investigated those.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#88

Post by jjrh »

rglullis wrote: post #68
codeslinger wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kamailio is what is called a Session Border Controller. Its primary purpose is to provide protection and some lightweight filtering for the media servers/PBXs behind it. Once you want "advanced" features like voicemail, parking, hunt groups, three-way calling, etc, you will need to use a PBX like FreeSWITCH (recommended) or Asterisk (not) behind it anyway. If you're only running a single machine, an SBC isn't really…

> Once you want "advanced" features like voicemail, parking, hunt groups, three-way calling. Right, but what I am saying is that I don't want any of those features. At least not yet. I just want to give my customers a sip address ( username @communick.com) where they can call other SIP addresses. In that case, is that a PBX still needed?

You certainly can use Kamailio but it will be much easier/faster to get something going in Asterisk.

You don't need to run any of the advanced features in Asterisk (and can completely unload the modules if you want).

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#89

Post by michael_michael »

I've built my own business VoIP system — a few times over. I've used Asterisk and FreePBX (the free-ish GUI built on Asterisk), but settled on Asterisk for stability. At one point FreePBX pushed out an update that took down my system for a couple of days and baffled me until I read the FreePBX forums and saw similar complaints from other users.

If you want a week-ish long project, go for the full mid-2000s, boingboing and slashdot experience: buy the dead tree version of the O'Reilly Asterisk book, which has been kept up to date and is still an wonderful resource. Follow it until you have the Enterprise-grade phone system of your dreams.

I even hired Allison "The Voice of Asterisk" [0] to do our phone tree voice prompts. Her prices were very reasonable for a small batch of prompts, and it’s surreal hearing the same lady that does the IVR for your bank and cable company do your own voice prompts.

I use Twilio for my SIP trunking, and it has nice fallback features in case the Asterisk system needs to go down for maintenance or the like. Costs about $20/month for a dozen or so users and fairly frequent calls/SMS.

[0]: https://www.theivrvoice.com/

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#90

Post by singpolyma3 »

jamesmstone wrote: post #57
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…

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…

This is pretty much exactly the problem that we originally created https://jmp.chat to solve, no sip or complex setup needed these days for that use case.
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