I stumbled across this little nugget in the Asterisk docs, and I thought other people might find it usefull as well.

I remember buying one of these for my dad for his POTS line a while back (heh, 10 years) , from Radioshack of course. The idea is simple, a tone played down the line makes the autodialers believe your line has been disconnected.

This functionality has been built into Asterisk, here is the dial plan code:

[incomimg]
exten => s,1,Zapateller(nocallerid)
exten => s,n,Playback(enter-ext-of-person)

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/asterisk/bluewave-telecom-hosted-asterisk-solution.asp

Thats a great post and offers real insight, although a bit dated by 'net standards, on one aspect of the Asterisk revolution that has failed to bring to the table a real player.

Asterisk is fairly painless to to get up and running, and with a little time and effort, to tweak out for a decent size deployment.

If your looking for clustering and imaging over VM's using say, vmware (my weapon of choice) after the template is mapped out, custom kernel built and its screaming, your a step or two away.

Now rolling that into a slick interface with monitoring and fall back for the images is going to take a bit of doing. A single install with preconceived images that covers these bases, man, thats the ticket.

Now if you can imagine multiple 'blade servers with this config, being deployed with PXE install, and you begin to see the advantage. Scalable, redundancy, and ease of deployment, you can't ask for much more then that.

I think I feel a side project brewing :>

Doug

The people in the Asterisk Doc project have published a book via OReilly, and it's pretty damn good.


I am absorbing it now, and I'll post some feedback in a bit.


You can find it here: http://www.asteriskdocs.org/


Doug

One thing I have not found is a decent open source IRC message client.

This site, http://www.mibbit.com/

is a great interface, and support most platforms, not a client really, but its a decent stop gap when I need it.

Doug

Sometimes you store volatile chemicals next to your server room.

Sometimes those said chemicals explode, and melt the server room.

oy

Check it out Here

I am always of the mindset, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But with technology there is a trade off, and that sacrifice is compatibility.

So you waited and waited to upgrade your blog, only to find out that your database is completely different then the newer version that you want to use.

For Wordpress the solution is rather simple:

First grab a plugin that allows the older version to output to a format the newer version can import, in this case a xml file.

The plugin to do this is located here

Follow the directions for install , then export from your old blog, import to your new one.

Took me a few hours to figure this out, hopefully this post will help you compress that time a bit.

Doug