Asterisk is an Open Source PBX which provides almost everything anyone could need from a PBX in hardware, so it’s more than enough for my needs.
Everything started in the
Wireless Meeting I assisted the week before, someone was talking about this fantastic piece of software and how they’ve managed to get interconnected between some towns over Internet using IAX. That made some people start to discuss some points on how Asterisk and WLANs could work together to help zones, rooms, shops, etc where the phone line is not available.
Then
pof started to work on it, looking for services using IAX to call land lines, mobiles, other IAX users, etc. from your PC or even from a SIP phone which could be plugged into your LAN. Also Asterisk allows you to work with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk’s sponsors,
Digium. So everything seems possible!
Finally last Friday, I was in pof’s home, like I use to…, then he started to show me how Asterisk was working and how it helps to save money using VoIP providers like
VoipJet with very nice prices,
look what they’ve got.
With all this fun…you know what’s coming, don’t you? I had to start playing with it, but where? all my parent’s home is under a chaos of builders, painters and a long etc., so my laptop seemed a good place at least just for starters. I followed pof’s step-by-step guide so I got it working quickly and Saturday night I was talking with Asterisk’s echo service 
.
On Sunday morning I wanted to flash my Linksys WRT54GSv2 with
OpenWRT because it has lots of features I’d like to check, also I wanna give a try to
Wi-Viz a very nice application which is able to provide a map, drawing your wireless network without interfering in the normal operation of the router. There I was…putting away
HyperWRT and flashing the new image to the router, learning how to configure it without the web interface, updating packages, etc. Then I realized someone had built Asterisk packages for this firmware and installed them without losing a moment.
The package system adopted by OpenWRT is ipkg (very common on such devices), it seems to have some problems tracking dependencies (I don’t even know if it should do so…) cause I had some shared object not found problems, solved by installing libpthread and libncurses both were available to be installed from OpenWRT’s repositories.
And there I was again talking with Asterisk’s echo service…:PP but now running it on low-end hardware designed not to do PBX tasks! I’d like to thank from here all the people is working on hacking all those little thingies that are running around these days with Linux inside 
Finally, after playing for awhile with OpenWRT I got problems, I installed
DropBear I set the root password, rebooted the box and … I can no longer login into the router. Telnet service has been disabled auto-magically (:P) after setting up the password and my SSH client is not allowed to login. I still don’t know why…but I hope re-flashing it will solve the problem. I will try to use pof’s instructions to upload the new image via TFTP.
I was yesterday in
EUPMT because a wireless meeting organized by
Mataro Wireless where my friend
pof had to talk about the wi-fi pre-standard 802.11n which is not even a draft yet but he believes it’ll be in a near future.
I also listened three more speakers :
- Xavier San Sebastián/Pere Mindan:
They made an introduction to Wireless LANs talking about topologies, little bit about WEP/WPA, a very important point health and some configuration samples.
- Pau Oliva (pof):
He talked about 802.11n, he gave a non very technical explanation but he was good enough to provide the needed points for everybody understanding.
- Jordi Clopés:
He made a presentation about
Mataro SenseFils a group of citizens from Mataro who try to interconnect the whole city and provide some services like
Jabber, radio cast, etc. They try to keep in the open source way like in the freedom way providing a free network for the people and by the people based on collective knowledge.
- Frederic Monpeat:
Who talked about
WiMAX explaining that if it finish to be like their developers are promising it’ll be wonderful, but seems to be to much promising yet…and also it is supposed to be for exclusive using on service providers.
The following links provide more info (mostly in Catalan) and some pictures I took:
Meeting program
Pictures
I bought my first NDS game, Super Mario 64 DS. It was 34.9€, not too bad and it is really nice I’ve taken a few
pictures of it. I’ve been playing a little during this weekend and seriously, I insist the touch screen is so great 
.
Also this weekend I had some weird problems using
Gentoo Linux, I hope they’ll be fixed tomorrow I am re-emerging the world because I think it has something to do with
this bug, my crashes came with
MPlayer and many others using ALSA. I know I could re-compile only those packages with alsa-libs as dependency but I didn’t feel like looking for them in about 475 packages installed on my box here you are the error logged by the kernel:
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000000
printing eip:
c01cda13
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0002 [#1]
PREEMPT SMP
Modules linked in: nfs lockd sunrpc isofs nls_base zlib_inflate rtc button non_fatal cpufreq_nforce2 eeprom w83l785ts asb100 i2c_sensor i2c_nforce2 snd_mixer_oss raid0 raid1 md siimage mga usbmouse tuner tvaudio usbhid bttv video_buf firmware_class i2c_algo_bit v4l2_common btcx_risc i2c_core videodev snd_intel8x0 snd_ac97_codec snd_pcm snd_timer snd soundcore snd_page_alloc nvidia_agp agpgart ehci_hcd ohci_hcd usbcore 3c59x ide_cd sr_mod cdrom
CPU: 0
EIP: 0060:[] Not tainted VLI
EFLAGS: 00210212 (2.6.10-ac12)
EIP is at memcpy+0x23/0x60
eax: 00000010 ebx: d6164d60 ecx: 00000004 edx: 00000000
esi: d9191f10 edi: 00000000 ebp: d9191f20 esp: d9191ed8
ds: 007b es: 007b ss: 0068
Process gmplayer (pid: 9804, threadinfo=d9190000 task=df5825a0)
Stack: d6164d60 d6164ce0 ffffffea dfc622e4 ffffffea e09a1ddd 00000000 d9191f10
00000010 d6164d60 e09a2c99 d6164d60 d9191f10 00000050 00000006 00000000
00000000 00000000 00000005 00000001 00000000 00000000 00008002 00000000
Call Trace:
[] snd_timer_user_append_to_tqueue+0x3d/0x50 [snd_timer]
[] snd_timer_user_params+0x239/0x240 [snd_timer]
[] snd_timer_user_ioctl+0x150/0x270 [snd_timer]
[] sys_ioctl+0x171/0x270
[] syscall_call+0x7/0xb
Code: 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 83 ec 14 8b 44 24 20 89 74 24 0c 89 7c 24 10 8b 74 24 1c 3d ff 01 00 00 77 26 89 c1 8b 7c 24 18 c1 e9 02 a5 a8 02 74 02 66 a5 a8 01 74 01 a4 8b 44 24 18 8b 74 24 0c
Let’s see tomorrow…it’s really bothering, I can’t run anything using ALSA as output driver. First I thought I had corrupted files because my machine froze twice today and I’ve done two hard resets but I’ve recompiled all my kernel modules and all alsa-* packages and nothing changed.
LJ2ME is a LiveJournal client that uses J2ME technology and I’m using it from my tungsten C right now to write this post. It is really great, now I can post anywhere with a WIFI connection and my TC! Its built-in keyboard is nice but still not as a PC one to write a long post but…it’s worse when you can not do so.
