Category: Products and services

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Blog Knowledge Base System Status

Telehouse outage 21st July 2016

Again today at 8am we started to see alarms coming in from customer sites. The effect seemed more widespread today with Zen inially posting they had issues and some ITSPs posting that they also had issues.

The outage appeared to have started at around ‘7am'(we saw first alarm at 8am , with at least one network at Telehouse North falling over due to a reported loss of power. The situation had mostly been resolved by around 11am, though are still seeing some flapping of services.

Like Wednesday’s outage, it appears that BT has a significant amount of networking equipment at Telehouse North. The has affected an unknown number of BT and Plusnet broadband subscribers, plus other smaller ISPs and services such as Zen Internet that make significant use of BT’s backhaul network.

We can confirm though we have slowly seen all customer alarms clearing. As many customers are aware that we operate a 24×7 monitoring platform so saw this issue start and checked that there was nothing we could do in most cases but also contacted key customers to warn them that they might be issues.
Therefore, any issues that Customers have experienced this morning when connecting to services using BT connectivity (including quality issues) should now be resolved. In the event that issues are still occurring, please reboot equipment on the BT line such as Firewalls or Routers and retest. Nagios monitor screen

If you have any questions whatsoever please do not hesitate to contact us, Also if you are a
Asterisk / Freepbx reseller or user and would like affordable monitoring please get in touch as we provide Asterisk Monitoring from £25 per year.

 

UPDATE ON 20th July issue

Tt looks like a power failure at Telecity Harbour Exchange, where BT and some other ISPs join the LINX peer exchange, is at least partially to blame for the major outage on Wednesday morning.

Service disruption as a result of the Telecity outage lasted for about an hour, from just before 8am until 9:15am, when full connectivity was restored.

LINX said in a statement:

This morning between 07:55 BS and 08:17 BST, one of the datacentres that houses equipment for The London Internet Exchange (LINX) experienced a partial power outage. This affected only one of a number of Internet peering nodes that LINX operates at the facility, and service was fully restored on the LINX network at 09:15 BST.

Several reports claim that this outage affected British Telecom and their services at LINX. While several networks connected to LINX were indeed affected, BT was not one of them. LINX provide two fully redundant platforms to offer better resilience to the UK’s Internet infrastructure, the second platform was not affected by this power outage.

 

 

Categories
IPPBXs Sangoma

The FreePBX Appliance

Introducing the FreePBX appliance! The FreePBX appliance is a purpose-built, high-performance PBX solution. Designed and rigorously tested for optimal performance, this is the only officially supported hardware solution for FreePBX. The appliance comes preloaded with the FreePBX Distro and includes a one-year warranty!

appliances-header

Featuring the FreePBX Distro, this appliance is an ideal fit for businesses looking to get more from a PBX. With millions of deployments throughout the world, FreePBX is relied upon daily by everyone from enterprises to startups. Leveraging the power of FreePBX has enabled businesses to grow while keeping communication expenses minimal. The FreePBX Distro has made deploying, configuring and using a PBX system easier than ever! With an easy-to-use GUI (Graphical User Interface), getting started is a breeze!

Current Models and System capacity:

The full datasheet can be downloaded from here

Categories
IPPBXs Software

FreePBX

With over 1 MILLION production systems worldwide and 20,000 new systems installed monthly, the FreePBX community continues to out-perform the industry’s commercial efforts. The FreePBX EcoSystem has developed over the past decade to be the most widely deployed open source PBX platform in use across the world. The openness of the project allows users, resellers, enthusiasts and Partners to utilize the FreePBX EcoSystem to build robust communications solutions that are powerful but at the same time easy to implement and support. Sangoma is proud to be the sponsor of FreePBX project. If you are new to FreePBX you can get started quickly by downloading and installing the FreePBX Distro. The FreePBX Distro is an all in one platform that installs everything you need to build a phone system. Once You have a basic PBX in place you can add commercial modules to add advanced features to an already feature rich base install of FreePBX.

 

As an open source GPL, web-based PBX solution, FreePBX is easy to customize and adapt to your changing needs. FreePBX can run in the cloud or on-site, and is currently being used to manage communications of all sizes and types of environments from small one person SOHO (Small Home, Small Office) businesses, to multi-location corporations and call centers. The FreePBX ecosystem provides you with the freedom and flexibility to custom design business communications around your needs.

FreePBX Commercial Modules are add-ons that enhance the already feature rich base install of FreePBX! These modules are not Open Source GPL and are only designed to work with CentOS or RHEL systems. The FreePBX Distro is already preconfigured to work with these modules. For custom installations please see: Install Commercial Modules on CentOS and RHEL based systems

The FreePBX appliance is a purpose-built, high-performance PBX solution. Designed and rigorously tested for optimal performance, this is the only officially supported hardware solution for FreePBX. The appliance comes preloaded with the FreePBX Distro and includes a one-year warranty!

Featuring the FreePBX Distro, this appliance is an ideal fit for businesses looking to get more from a PBX. With millions of deployments throughout the world, FreePBX is relied upon daily by everyone from enterprises to startups. Leveraging the powappliances-headerer of FreePBX has enabled businesses to grow while keeping communication expenses minimal. The FreePBX Distro has made deploying, configuring and using a PBX system easier than ever! With an easy-to-use GUI (Graphical User Interface), getting started is a breeze!

Sangoma IP Phones Designed Exclusively for FreePBX are Designed to work with FreePBX, Sangoma IP phones are so smart you can quickly and easily use them right out of the box. Each phone in the series features industry standard Power over Ethernet, so no power cable or outlets required. They have full duplex speakerphones, dual Ethernet Ports, multi-way conference calling, high definition voice quality, and they’re Virtual Private Network (VPN) capable.

Full Integration with FreePBX, FreePBX phone apps are available right on the phone, straight out of the box with no requirement for additional licenses. Users can control complicated features directly from their phones. There’s no need to remember feature codes. User applications include: Call Parking, Follow Me, Do Not Disturb, Conference Rooms, Call Forwarding, Time Conditions, Presence, Queues, Transfer to Voice Mail, Visual Voice Mail, and Log in/out.

Why is Sangoma Zero Touch Better? VoIP telephones can be complex to install, and manually configuring many different parameters and hundreds of extensions can take hours. When you buy and install your Sangoma IP phones, the redirection server automatically points the phone to the Sangoma FreePBX for configuration. Other vendors have redirection servers, but they have to be programmed with the details of the IP PBX. Only Sangoma can provide Zero Touch provisioning with FreePBX.

EndPoint Manager Included When using a Sangoma phone, EndPoint Manager software inside FreePBX is automatically enabled. This lets your users control global settings, program their phone keys, map extensions, upload images, download new firmware, and much more.

 

 

Categories
Applications FreePBX Products

Zulu UC by Sangoma

Zulu UC is a unified communications desktop program that interfaces with FreePBX and PBXact. It provides call notifications, SMS, faxing capabilities and much more! Supported applications include Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

User connections are available in 20-seat packages, so get yours today by visiting the Store tab in your FreePBX Portal!

Browser Plug-ins

Zulu UC is currently supported for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome on Windows machines. Make sure to install the Zulu Firefox Plugin or the Zulu Chrome Plugin before you start using Zulu UC in your browser. Support for Mac OSX is coming soon.

DataSheet can be downloaded here

Categories
FreePBX Knowledge Base

Post call emailing of Call Recordings in Freepbx

In freepbx there is a feature that is quite well hidden but actually does a very useful job.

In The “Advanced Settings” page if you enable both “Post Call Recording Script” As the name suggests this is a script that run after a recorded call has ended. We created a script called postrecord.sh and in the text field on the menu we have put as below. This emails both inbound and outbound calls.

For calls to and from an extension we can pull the email address from the voicemail.conf and send the email to that address.

Its also set to delete the wav file away after a defined number of days.

/usr/local/sbin/postrecord.sh ^{TIMESTR} ^{FROMEXTEN} ^{CALLFILENAME} ^{UNIQUEID} ^{ARG3}

The Script below will first convert the recording then email it to you or your customer.

A couple of prerequisites are required, these are sox and lame. sox is probably already installed, lame maybe not.

Installing Lame is simple for centos as below.

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/files/lame/3.99/lame-3.99.5.tar.gz tar -zxvf lame-3.99.5.tar.gz
cd lame-3.99.5
./configure
make
make install

The script is fairly simple as below. the main variables are passed to it but we build the directory structure on the fly and file extension is fixed as wav. you can set the file_age variable to delete the wav file messages over that many days old.

  • Be careful if cutting and pasting this scripty as wordpress may have wrapped some lines
#!/bin/bash
#This script emails the recorded call right after the call is hung up. Below are    the variables passed through asterisk
# $1 - Time String
# $2 - Source
# $3 - File
# $4 - unique id
# $5 - Destination
# $dt - Date and Time
/bin/nice /bin/sleep 3
dy=$(date '+%Y')
dm=$(date '+%m')
dd=$(date '+%d')
file_age=35

dtpath=/var/spool/asterisk/monitor/$dy/$dm/$dd/
/bin/nice /usr/local/bin/lame -b 16 -m m -q 9-resample $dtpath$3.wav  $dtpath$3.mp3
/bin/nice /bin/chown  asterisk:asterisk $dtpath$3.mp3
dt=$(date '+%m/%d/%Y %r');
id=$(mysql -uUser -pPassword -s -N -e "SELECT descr from asterisk.queues_config where extension = $5");

email=recordings@yourdomain.com

file=$dtpath$3

if [ "$id" = "" ]; then
     direction=callers 
            id=$(mysql -uUser -pPassword -s -N -e "SELECT name from asterisk.users where extension = $2");

  IN=$(/bin/grep "$2 =>" /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf)
              echo $IN
               set -- "$IN"
               IFS=","; declare -a Array=($*)
               email=${Array[2]}

            else

            direction=customers    
            fi

echo -e "You have a new call recording to listen to\n\n
 The call date and time was: $dat \n\n 
 The call was from: $2 \n\n The call was to: $5 \n\n
 The $direction name was: $id \n\n
 And the unique call id was: $4 \n\n
 Please see the attached file \n\n" | mail -a $file.mp3 -s "New Recording at $dt" $email 

/bin/nice /usr/bin/find /var/spool/asterisk/monitor/  -type f -mtime +"$file_age" |grep wav | \
while read I; do
              /bin/rm  "$I"
done
Categories
Handsets Support

Lifetime Warranty now provided by Yealink

From the 1st September 2015 Yealink units purchased from us as an official Yealink (UK) reseller, will carry a Lifetime Warranty.

This Life Time Warranty will commence from the date of purchase; until 12 months after the official end of life date of that product.

This Lifetime Warranty excludes the following products:

– T18P, T20P, T20PN, T22P, T22PN, T26P, T26PN, T28P, T28PN, T32G, T32GN, T38G, T38GN, EXP38, EXP39, YHS32 and all VP series units.

– All Spare Parts including but not limited to : Network Cable (CAT5), Base Stand, Handset, Handset Curly Cord, Power Supply Unit (PSU)

The products listed above will be covered by the current 12 months from date of purchase or 24 months from date of manufacture, whichever is the longer.

Any extended warranty purchased prior to 1st September 2015 will continue to be honoured until the end of the purchased warranty period.

This warranty covers manufacturing faults and component defects.  It does not cover wear and tear, physical damage, or problems associated with the network or platform it is connected to.

Please contact the distributor or ITSP the unit was purchased from for further details.

In the Event of a Failure

In the unlikely event that you have a faulty unit, you should contact us first.

We may require some additional information or additional testing and procedures to be carried out to establish the unit is faulty and one which they have supplied.

If the unit is deemed to be faulty we will request the unit is returned to us at your cost and subject to further tests, confirming the unit is faulty and that the warranty seal hasn’t been broken, a replacement unit will be supplied at no cost.

If the model returned under the Lifetime Warranty is no longer available we will supply an equivalent or better model.

This warranty is in addition to any statutory rights.

 

Categories
Asterisk Support Knowledge Base

Nagios check_asterisk change for Asterisk 13

We noticed to day after a Asterisk server upgrade the Nagios check_asterisk plugin we use was reporting a”unknown”

It seems there is a minor change in response to the status request.

It was:

[root@elastix24 ~]# ./check_asterisk -h 127.0.0.1 -m mgr -u user -p secret  -vvvv
Running in Manager mode
Connecting to 127.0.0.1:5038
Connected to 127.0.0.1:5038
Asterisk Call Manager/1.1
Action: Login
Username: user
Secret: secret

Response: Success
Message: Authentication accepted
Action: Status

Response: Success
Message: Channel status will follow

Event: StatusComplete
OK  (idle)

Its now with ami 2.7

[root@aubpbx1 ~]# ./check_asterisk -h 127.0.0.1 -m mgr -u user -p secret -vvvv
Running in Manager mode
Connecting to 127.0.0.1:5038
Connected to 127.0.0.1:5038
Asterisk Call Manager/2.7.0
Action: Login
Username: user
Secret: secret

Response: Success
Message: Authentication accepted

Action: Status
Response: Success

EventList: start
Message: Channel status will follow

Event: StatusComplete
OK  (idle)

So the plugin code need a small change to reflect this

diff check_asterisk check_asterisk_old 
162,163c162,163
< &unknown("Unknown answer $response (wanted Message: something)") unless ($message =~ m/^EventList:\s+(.*)$/i);
< &unknown("didn't understand message $message") unless ($1 =~ m/start/i);
---
> &unknown("Unknown answer $response (wanted Message: something)") unless ($message =~ m/^Message:\s+(.*)$/i);
> &unknown("didn't understand message $message") unless ($1 =~ m/Channel status will follow/i);

Once this is made seems to be reporting OK.

Categories
Asterisk Support Elastix Support Knowledge Base Support Technical

One way audio with Yealink T23 and Gamma Sip trunks on Freepbx

We recently had a very puzzling issue with a customer who we supplied some T23 Yealink handsets. When making outgoing calls over Gamma sip trunks on their Elastix server we were getting one way audio, This was not an issue with their existing Snom handsets or a problem for internal or incoming calls over the same trunks. It also wasn’t an issue when using iax2 trunks.

It seems that there is some interoperability issue when using sip trunks and these handsets. and seems to be a little known issue as only affects a few operators.

It seems to addressed in 44.80.0.20 version software that isn’t on the Yealink UK site yet but is available here and should be loaded on all T23 handsets as they are being delivered as 44.80.0.5 firmware at the moment.

Categories
Elastix Support Knowledge Base Support

Converting recordings to MP3 in FreePBX and updating mysql CDR records

In FreePBX users can listen to wav file recordings via the “Call Recordings” tab, This uses a field in the mysql cdr table to say where that recording is and what its called, They are now stored in year/month/day directory structure under /var/spool/asterisk/monitor so if the end user wants the recordings in mp3 format as many do its not just a case of converting them its also a case of updating the database.

Luckily this is fairly straight forward, its just a case of doing a quick query and then converting the file and the updating the database. First you have to install lame, This can be done simply with yum then write a script.

In FreePBX advanced settings, you need to enable “Display” and “Override” readonly settings and then add

/usr/local/sbin/postrecord.sh ^{CDR(linkedid)} to “

The script I use is simple with a bit of basic logging.

#!/bin/bash
. postrecconfig.sh
date >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
pcmwav=$(mysql -u$user -p$secret -s -N -D asteriskcdrdb<<<"select recordingfile from cdr where linkedid LIKE '$1' AND disposition = 'ANSWERED'  ORDER by calldate DESC LIMIT 1");
mp3="$(echo $pcmwav | sed s/".wav"/".mp3"/)"
nice lame -b 16 -m m -q 9-resample  "$path$pcmwav" "$path$mp3" >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
touch -r "$path$pcmwav" "$path$mp3" >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
mysql -u$user -p$secret -s -N -D asteriskcdrdb<<<"UPDATE cdr SET recordingfile='$mp3'  WHERE recordingfile = '$pcmwav'" >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
echo $pcmwav >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
echo "--------||-------" >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
date >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
echo "Done" >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
echo "--------||-------" >> /var/log/asterisk/mp3.log
exit 1

The postrecconfig.sh file looks like

user=freepbxuser
secret=secret
receptemail=info@youremailaddress.com
file_age=35
dy=$(date '+%Y')
dm=$(date '+%m')
dd=$(date '+%d')
path=/var/spool/asterisk/monitor/$dy/$dm/$dd/



As can be seen it steps through entry by entry converting and updating the DB, This example is cron'd to run hourly but does not delete the original wav file, this would be done in a separate script run weekly to remove old files. The reason to keep them is so that a backup of the original is held for a period in case of errors.

Hope this is of help to you and your users

Categories
Asterisk Support Elastix Support Knowledge Base Support

Multiple Dynamic features with Asterisk Applicationmaps

Dynamic features are very useful for allowing users access to custom features during calls. These can be loaded individually via the dialplan, but in freepbx based solutions this will mean a bit of hacking of the dialplan using overides and making sure all still works afterwards, or as a global varible.

The easiest way is to load them as a global as is done with apprecord, But if you want to add lots of features then you will have to use a Application Map group. This is done by editing the features_applicationmap_custom.conf  file so it looks like below for example, at the top are your application maps then your group

testfeature => #9,callee,Playback,tt-monkeys 
calleehangup => #8,callee,Hangup()
callerhangup => #7,caller,Hangup()
[mymapgroup]
testfeature => #9
calleehangup => #8
callerhangup => #7
apprecord => *1

DO NOT FORGET to add the apprecord to your group.

You then need to edit the globals_custom.conf file and add a line like below

DYNAMIC_FEATURES => mymapgroup

Then reload asterisk and issue the command “features show”

Dynamic Feature           Default Current
---------------           ------- -------
callerhangup              no def  #7     
calleehangup              no def  #8     
testfeature               no def  #9     
apprecord                 no def  *1     
Feature Groups:
---------------
===> Group: mymapgroup
===> --> apprecord (*1,caller,Macro,one-touch-record)
===> --> callerhangup (#7)
===> --> calleehangup (#8)

and to check that they are loaded as a global variable do “dialplan show globals” and near or at the top you will see:-

 DYNAMIC_FEATURES=mymapgroup

And thats all there is to it.