Using Asterisk 1.6.2.17 and the greatly improved chan-sccp-b project, the majority of the features work out of the box.

While the concepts of sccp are a lot different than using separate SIP accounts, sccp is much more like standard phone system operating on lines instead of accounts. If you are struggling getting one of these devices working on Asterisk via SIP – save yourself the hassle and get it running using SCCP!

Now its back.

Thanks to the API functions offered by Reverse Australia we can now have caller ID lookups back in Asterisk!

You’ll need a few things to achieve this:
1) Obviously a Linux PC running Asterisk
2) Asterisk::AGI Perl module
3) LWP::UserAgent perl module (should be included with your distro)
4) A running MySQL Database
5) My cid-lookup-v4.agi script.

Setup the MySQL Database with a table called ‘cid’ and two fields called ‘name’ & ‘number’. We use this to store unidentified inbound callers as well as cache looked up details from Reverse Australia. This means you can go edit the details later and have them show as you want rather than as unknown or the content returned from Reverse Australia.

Setup is VERY basic. Throw cid-lookup-v4.agi into your agi-bin directory, then place AGI(cid-lookup.agi) in your extensions.conf where you process incoming calls.

You will need to edit the script and change the setup for your MySQL database – as well as add the Reverse Australia API key.

Looking up calls online is optional.

This has been tested with the following configurations:
CentOS 5.5 with perl-LWP-UserAgent-Determined from rpmforge.
Fedora 14 with stock F14 perl-LWP-UserAgent-Determined package.

If you use CentOS, it is much easier to use the prebuilt perl packages from rpmforge. If you use CentOS, save yourself the heartache and use rpmforge for perl modules!

Sorry Digium but you just can’t compete on this front.

The tech support offered to me after my last post was polite, but you can tell that they are not intimately familiar with every portion of Asterisk and seem to overlook details from previous communications. It was a nice notion by Digium but notions don’t make products work!

For those of you who do a lot with Asterisk, you know how this story goes, those who don’t need a warning!

Digium is the creator of Asterisk – an open source telephony project – and probably one of the worst companies to deal with in the history of computing. The Asterisk open source people are quite – well – disowning of anything done by Digium and it is almost considered a sin to try and get help in the Asterisk IRC channel.

So what makes Digium so bad?

1) Quite a while ago I purchased a number of g729 licenses. These are $10USD a piece and should (in theory) allow you to legally transcode between other codecs and g.729 on your asterisk server. These license for these codecs are tied to the MAC address of your network interfaces.

Sadly, if your network interfaces are changed, or the machine that you run Asterisk on changes, then your licenses are now invalid. If the boot order of your network interfaces change, your licenses are now invalid.

Digium is kind though. If you request Digium to relicense your codecs then they will – once. After that, you need to buy them again. I have had Digium flatly refuse to relicense my g.729 licenses after experimenting with running Asterisk in Xen and needing to relicense 5 times. I now use the fully functional and freely available g729 codecs for asterisk.

2) I recently got a couple of Digum Fax for Asterisk licenses. These are Digiums commercial offering for sending faxes using either T.38 or falling back to g711. You are offered a free license for 1 fax at a time and multiple concurrent faxes can happen at once if you purchase more licenses.

This is all well and good, however when you get a free license, or when you buy these, there is ZERO support. If you try to find somewhere to lodge a support case then you find that it is just about impossible. The support area of their web site tells you that you need to register one of your hardware devices to get support. If you email the address that sent you the licenses, you get told (after a 3-4 day wait):

“This request for technical assistance was sent to Digium Customer Service. Our technical support team can be contacted at +1 256-428-6161 or http://www.digium.com/support .”

My options are to be awake and call them internationally at 3am in the morning, or tough it up and get no support at all. Great customer service!

So what do I need to contact Digium support for? Well it seems there is a SLIGHT bug in their fax product that doesn’t release a license slot when a fax fails under certain conditions. This means if you have 10 licenses and 10 faxes failed in a certain way then the only way you can send or receive any faxes is to restart asterisk – causing ALL calls to drop. This probably should have been picked up by their testers before releasing their commercial offering, but I’m starting to think that their customers ARE their testers!

Overall, my dislike for Digium is growing at a rapid pace and wonder how long they will continue to ignore their customers with shonky procedures and if it will eventually mean the end of them. Time will tell.

So since I found the Australian gray pages on a lovely web site, I wanted to integrate this info into asterisk. 30 minutes of perl hacking later, and it works. enjoy

The following script & example will enable a reverse lookup of incoming caller ID and replace the name section with the lookup. It also allows you to maintain a comma separated file in number,name format. If this finds a match, it will add the name in the file to the caller ID string. If nothing is found in the file, it will consult the grey pages.

Updated 24/8/07: changed script URL to reflect new grey pages site.

Download this script and put it into /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin.

Create a file /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/numbers.txt and populate it with numbers that you already know in the format of:
number,name
eg: 0390001234,My Pizza Shop

The script will try to match numbers from this file first. If no match is found, it will consult the Australian grey pages for a match. If nothing is found here, it will not change the caller ID strings.

In your extensions.conf, call cid-lookup like so:


exten => 100,1,NoOp(Incoming call!)
exten => 100,n,agi,cid-lookup.agi
exten => 100,n,NoOp(Caller ID: ${CALLERID(all)})
exten => 100,n,Dial(SIP/my-sip-phone,30)
exten => 100,n,HangUp


The code is downloadable here. Save the file to /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/getweather.agi.

To use this script in Asterisk, copy the following into /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf:

exten => 997,1,Answer
exten => 997,2,agi,getweather.agi
exten => 997,3,Hangup


Update 6/6: I’ve updated this script to v1.1 now. I’ve fixed up a parsing error and also added more wind directions – the BOM add more than I thought