Well haven’t I been slack. Quick recap time.

1) I’ve updated all my home systems from CentOS 5.6 to Scientific Linux 6.0. Its the same code base as CentOS - however the release of CentOS6 has been slipping and slipping. I’ve been more than happy with the results at this stage.

2) I did a solo navigation exercise from Melbourne to Brisbane a couple of weeks ago. Clocked up 19.7 hours command time. Was an awesome trip and great experience. Did most of this using just the magnetic compass and my watch - nothing beats the basics.

3) Got my CSU and RG endorsement.

Thats about it for me at this stage, now back to work ;)

I’ve been tinkering around with a Cisco 7970 IP phone. After spending 3-4 days of trying to get SIP working on this device, I gave up hope and started working with SCCP. The good news is that it worked straight away!

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!

Well, it took a few days to figure out how, but just about everything at home is now IPv6 enabled :)

I’m using a 6to4 gateway that tunnels every ipv6 packet to the anycast gateway at 192.88.99.1. Thankfully, my local gateway resides within PIPE Networks - which means most of the ipv6 traffic comes up as free on my ISPs plan!

The final touches were added today with fully functional DNS - I wonder how long it will be until I get my first email via ipv6 ;)

Ok, so I admit it - I love the movie War Games. I recently built a new PC and on it went 3 x 23” LCD screens running 1920x1080. My girlfriend noted that it looks like ‘the computer from that movie’. I knew she was talking about. She was talking about the WOPR - which became the name for this new machine. She has now inherited the Mac Pro known as Enigma.

I hunted around for a bit and couldn’t find a suitable background to use for this and came up empty. So I created my own. It’s attached for anyone else that would like to use it.

It’s native at 1920x1080 resolution and should hopefully bring back a few memories :)

For those of you lucky enough to have 3 x widescreens - here is the whole thing stitched together…

It’s been a while since my original script to use greypag.es for Australian caller ID lookups and since the online database disappeared, my script went into the archives.

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!