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Build Your Own PBX
Kerbo writes "Kerry Garrison has written up a complete guide to building your own PBX with Asterisk@Home to create your own working PBX system. In the article, he shows how you can build a complete, working system for under $20 (assuming you have some old hardware laying around the house)."
For those with extra hardware to run Astrerix@Home, consider running Folding@Home! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
So now when people call me they can go through auto attendent hell just like the big companies.
Ours (done in a modern machine, so it would have PCI 2.2 for the cards to drive Plain Old Phones) has a (not hard to do once the basics are working) callpath that's a caller-ID whitelist.
Calls from numbers "on the list" ring the phones, then go to voicemail, like "normal" calls would. Calls from one of our cellphones tell the caller how many new voicemails are waiting, then distinctive-ring the phones, then go to voicemail. Calls from unknown, private, or not-on-the-list numbers go straight to voicemail without ringing the phones.
You'll pry it out of my wife's cold dead hands...
For those that don't know...Private Branch Exchange[wikipedia.org]
It you just opened your own cottage industry style consulting business out of your home, something like this could make you look like a bigger business. I could see the advantage to that. The features of the system would be handy too for a new and very small business.
http://www.busyweather.com/
I've already got a highly effective PBX firewall in place. It's called "leaving the phone off the hook", and it's very effective around dinner time to ensure we don't get snowed by phone calls to our teenage daughters.
Even better, it comes with a highly effective content filter. Callers with truly important news will, upon finding the house phone is engaged, call one of our mobile phones. However, teenagers, with their inherent lack of cash and memories of past confrontations with parents over mobile phone call costs, will instead retry the home phone approximately every 60 seconds. I can guarantee that, from the instant I replace the phone after dinner, it's never more than 60 seconds till it starts ringing again.
DO NOT BOOT THE Asterisk@Home ISO !!!!!!
IT WILLE AUTOMATICALLY FROMAT YOUR / PARTITION WITHOUT AKSING YOU A THING.
OMG this is freekin' Unbelievable!!!
I've downloaded the Asterisk@Home and like every other n00b around I just booted up from it (no I've not read any warning s or FULL documentation). I bet 98% of people around to the same thing. After the kernel boot and X detection phase it started formatting my / partition. NOT even a ONE question asked. Of course it screwed my system.
The good part is that I booted from this ISO in a virtual machine (not my real box) and I just lost a default Debian installation (installed on a virtual machine).
Is this the latest way to distribute bad things on the net? Post an article regarding an open source project that do a lot of good things after it FORMAT your / partition?
Please if you wanna try Asterisk@Home ISO do it in a blank new virtual machine not your development/home primary box.
Regards,
the3ngineer