For a while now, I had not being using FreeSWITCH for my VoIP, but just logging into PennyTel directly with my Nokia E65. It worked OK, but the voice quality wasn’t as good as going through FreeSWITCH.

A month ago my old ADSL router died, so I bought a Billion 5200N to replace it. Since then, I’d been having weird problems with VoIP not working, and the Wifi to LAN bridging stopping dead whenever there was a bit of traffic over it.

It took me a while to sort out all the peculiarities of the Billion.

1. A change of ethernet ports on the router fixed the bridge locking up problem. It took a lot of time and weird theories before I fixed that.
2. When setting up the router from factory defaults, I have to save the wireless interface twice when I change the SSID before it will allow my wireless devices to authenticate.
3. UPnP was interfering with FreeSWITCH, and probably my Nokia. Turning that off on the router fixed FreeSWITCH.
4. Selecting some settings on the router made the routers wireless interface disappear, and the only way to get it back was a factory reset.

So, FreeSWITCH is a breeze to set up for PennyTel now. It takes editing two files.
conf/vars.xml and conf/dialplan/default/000pennytel.xml.

In conf/vars.xml I changed the following

<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_password=whateveryouwant"/>

That password is used for phones authenticating to FreeSWITCH, it has nothing to do with PennyTel.


<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="domain=switch.gruntnet"/>


What the phones use as their realm, it should be in the DNS with the ip pointing to FreeSWITCH.


<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider=sip.pennytel.com"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_username=61281955555"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_password=55555/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_from_domain=sip.pennytel.com"/>
<!-- true or false -->
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_register=true"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_contact=1000"/>


All the PennyTel setting goes above, I use 1000 to receive incoming calls, my only phone on the network.

Then in conf/dialplan/default/000penntel.xml


<extension name="pennytel">
<condition field="destination_number" expression="^(.*)$">
<action application="set" data="effective_caller_id_number=61281955555"/>
<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/sip.pennytel.com/$1"/>
</condition>
</extension>


I recently upgraded to snow leopard and noticed some DNS weirdness. I couldn’t ssh to hosts defined in my local DNS, it wouldn’t resolve, but I could resolve them with the host command.

Turns out Snow Leopard made quite a few changes to the resolver, it no longer uses /etc/resolv.conf but mDNSResponder, at least for apple supplied applications.

Unlike every other OS I’ve come across, including Leopard, Snow Leopard doesn’t use the order of DNS servers as first listed, first used. It swaps which DNS it’s going to use around, seemingly at random times. Some sort of load balancing miss feature?

I had two DNS servers configured, the first one, my local DNS server, the second, my ADSLs DNS server as a backup. The simple fix is to only have one DNS server configured.

There’s more information here Snow Leopard Resolver.

I’m not unhappy with OS X, but lately I’ve been pining to return to a linux based laptop. I think this will be my first and last Mac.

I had a job come in last week for a linux file server to connect a few windows machines together, and a few printers. The client was exposed to a linux file server in a previous job, and wanted something similar.

It was a small business, with not much money to spend, and the server was to be located in the office, no server room. This is the type of job I love doing.

I sourced an ex corporate desktop for about $150 including shipping, I think they can be had for a little less, but this was convenient. It was a P4 with SATA, which is what I was looking for. The ugliest case you could image, but had space for two hard drives. DVD writeable drive, 1 gig memory, built in gigabyte ethernet. It was perfect.

I bought two new 500 gig green SATA drives for RAID 1 configuration, $70 each, and an external 500 gig drive for backup, which ran $100. So about $400 in hardware, but a really nice set up, should be very reliable, and the data should be very safe.

I was a bit of a cowboy when it came to the operating system, with karmic about to be released, I chose it over jaunty or LTS because it had a newer Samba. Turns out the Samba version wasn’t very important as most of the PC’s were running XP home edition, which doesn’t even do domain logins.

I tired to convince the client to get two external drives to keep one off site in case of a fire or something. But instead we are using the DVD drive to write backups for off site storage.

It was a really nice job, gave me a lot of energy and the client is happy. Can’t ask for more than that.

I wanted a few programming projects to do to keep juices flowing. I came up with two twitter ones, http://twitter.com/slugupdates and http://twitter.com/cityrailupdates. Inspired by Lindsay’s bushfire project.

They are both little python programmes.

slugupdates just waits for messages posted to the slug announce list, procmail carbon copies the message and pipes it to the programme, the programme uses the subject as the tweet message.

cityrailupdates scrapes the major delays announcement page and tweets the time and title. It uses python’s beautifulsoup to do the scraping.

Both projects were fun and satisfying. I’ve still got some work to do with cityrailupdates, I want to save the whole message in a database and have a little front end to it for historical data.

Barrang officially opens its doors on the 19th of February, 2009.

Barrang is starting out primarily as a Linux Consultancy mainly targeting local small businesses in south west Sydney.

My primary target market doesn’t have a lot of money, especially in this climate, so I intend to provide maximum value to my clients by using Open Source Software as much as possible and by keeping my rates as low as possible.

My long term goal is to be location independent, that means not being tied to servers located in customer premises. There’s a number of different paths that goal could take, and I will be developing them along the way as I go.

My strengths lie in my knowledge and experience in Open Source Software and networks. My weakness is in social networking and marketing. So if you would like to reach out and make contact, please do, I welcome and encourage it.

There’s no launch party, this post is the cutting of the ribbon.

I look forward to getting to know you more, working together, and making a living doing what I love.