For those who did not see this post at Digium great advice on SIP security.

When they speak of different peer and extension names this translates to device and user mode in trix/FreePBX speak.

Congress recently passed the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Did you happen to notice the incentives for businesses to invest in their phone systems?

We didn’t either.

Therefore, Digium® is launching its own worldwide Telecom Stimulus Program to help businesses
invest in their most important piece of office equipment…their phone system!

Here’s the scoop…

Buy a Switchvox® appliance with SMB software and at least 20 subscriptions between
March 1st and April 30th 2009 and receive up to a $1000 rebate!

See the details at these links:

• Stimulus Package Program Documentation
• Rebate Claim Form

This really is a great deal…check it out today!

Digium is pleased to announce the release of 1.3 software for the AA50.

Users may download the update directly from Digium’s AA50 downloads portal

Users who have registered their AA50 hardware and their subscription, as included with their AA50 purchase, at http://www.digium.com/register may visit the Asterisk Business Edition download portal at https://be.digium.com. Once logged in, you will see a “Downloads” link. Click it. Then, you’ll see a tab called “AA50 Files.” Click it. You will now see a 1.3 Folder. Go there. Inside of this folder, you will see a Changelog file that contains information about what’s new in the release and the new firmware itself - a uImage file. You may download this uImage file to your local PC.

Once you have downloaded the uImage file, reboot your AA50. After it has finished, log into the web UI for your AA50. Once there, go to the “Updates” menu. There, you will see a form that allows you to upload to the AA50 the uImage file that you’ve downloaded to your local PC. Once you’ve uploaded the uImage file, your AA50 will need to reboot. The upgrade process can take about 8 minutes, so go grab a cup of coffee. When you come back from your coffee, log into the web interface again and the upgrade process will be complete.

AA50 Software Release 1.3

The new AA50 1.3 software release includes a number of enhancements and bug fixes, but is primarily a feature release that provides significant new features spanning multiple areas. Key new features provided include: G.729 support, Paging and Intercom, Findme/Followme, Custom Feature Codes, a new IVR application, a new real-time status page to see who’s on the phone and how much voicemail they have, the ability to do Bulk Adds, the return of the Active Channels page and the ability to manipulate VoIP phone digit mapping and digit timeout.

Additional New Features:

• Registration tool support for registering g729 licenses has been added to the GUI.
• Ability to upgrade Polycom firmware through GUI.
• Added the ability to assign multiple line keys to a user on a Polycom phone.
• Added digit mapping option for Polycom phones.
• Added Backup Options - A check box has been added in the AA50 GUI. Backups now have the option of including voicemails and custom prompts.
• Added ssmtp authentication option for emailing voicemails.
• Added the ability to view DHCP assignments\leases in the GUI, to assist administrators with managing phones, etc.
• Added the ‘tcpdump’ utility, accessible via the CLI.
• Added DTMF Detection via Features.configuration.

Enhancements

• Added the ability to select format in which to record custom prompts.
• Parked calls and conference calls are displayed on the “System Status” page of the GUI.
• Added an ‘Update Timezones’ button to the GUI

Other Stuff

In addition to the changes listed above, we’ve done a number of other things:

• Upload functionality now works for IE6 and IE7.
• Corrected erroneous “unregistered” display of IAX2 trunk on AA50 GUI status page.
• Corrected an issue where it was possible for a corrupt filename to occur when uploading a backup file into the AA50 using Internet Explorer.
• Corrected issue where calling inbound to an AA50 extension produces an inconsistent ring-back.
• Corrected display of IAX2 trunk on AA50 GUI status page

We get many feature requests from customers every day, and we get reports of bugs, too. We’ve done our best to address some of those requests and issues that we think will have the largest impact on the customer base. Your feature requests and issue reporting are important to us and we’re always interested to hear your suggestions.

Thank you and I look forward to speaking to all of you again in the not so distant future.

Howdy,

Long time no blog, for me anyway. It’s nice to speak to everyone again.

I’m blogging, because today I am a solicitor - not in the legal sense, thank you. I’m soliciting testers for a new Asterisk fax product. This fax product improves upon existing Asterisk fax products by offering better multi-page performance with fewer failures, better compatibility with older fax machines, and lower bit-error rates in noisy environments.

Qualifications:

1. High Degree of familiarity with Asterisk dialplan construction.
2. Time to test. We need people that can hop to it, and test quickly.
3. Ability to devote a server and some Digium boards (supplied by you and already at your disposal) and / or fax-enabled VoIP service provider accounts (also supplied by you) to the testing.
4. A good usage case for using fax with Asterisk.

Interested parties may e-mail me directly, responding to each of the four above qualifications. That’s my first name, my last initial, at digium.com -that’s malcolmdREMOVEthisPART@digium.com.

Parties accepted into the beta and who provide useful assistance and feedback will be compensated with a free license of the Asterisk fax product upon its release.

Thank you, and I hope to speak to all of you again shortly.

We are pleased to announce a major new release of the Digium G.729 codec module for Asterisk. This release incorporates a number of changes, and in addition, includes a new performance testing tool which will make it easier for users to choose the best ‘flavor’ of the module for the particular system they are installing it on.

The changes are:

- Version Numbering

The module’s version numbering is now more in line with our other products; the numbers will be in the form ‘X.Y.Z_A.B.C’, with the ‘X.Y.Z’ component representing the version of Asterisk the module is intended to operate in, and the ‘A.B.C’ component representing the actual version of the codec module code itself. Please note that the 1.6.0 modules will work in any Asterisk 1.6 release from 1.6.0 onwards, until such time as a new version is needed; when that occurs, we will provide 1.6.0 modules *and* modules designed for the later releases.

- Optimization

The new modules were built using the latest (4.3) release of the GNU C compiler, and use a number of new optimization methods available in that release to significantly improve encoding/decoding performance. In addition, we now build the modules in both 32-bit and 64-bit varieties for each CPU flavor that support both modes, so that users with 64-bit CPUs running a 32-bit Linux installation can still have a version of the module optimized for their CPU type. GCC 4.3 also provides optimizations for some newer CPU families (Intel Core2, AMD Barcelona, and others), so we’ve made those flavors available with this release.

- Performance Testing

In the past, we’ve offered different CPU flavors of the module to hopefully provide the best encoding/decoding performance, but it was up to the user to install and test each flavor to determine which one provided the best performance. This process is difficult and time consuming, and did not always provide reliable results. To help with this situation, we’ve now released a tool called ‘benchg729′, which can be run on the target system and will execute encoding speed tests (using a real audio sample) for each CPU flavor that we offer for that platform, and then report the results and suggest the best performing module flavor for that system. Note that the use of this tool requires that the system have at least one valid channel license for the Digium
G.729 codec installed; it will not run without a license.

The new codec modules and benchg729 tool are now available at:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/codec_g729

New codec modules are available for Asterisk 1.2, Asterisk 1.4 and Asterisk 1.6.x on both x86-32 and x86-64 Linux platforms, and the benchg729 tool is also available for x86-32 and x86-64 Linux platforms.

We hope these product updates improve your system performance, and as always, we thank you for supporting Asterisk and using Digium products!

As hopefully everyone knows, there is an upcoming Digium/Asterisk World that will be at the ITEXPO show starting on February 2nd in Miami.  What will be happening?  Lots!  We have a great line-up of speakers across the three days.  With a single track each day, it’s a bit less intense than Astricon but has a wider range of offerings from the rest of the ITEXPO show and conference.

I’ve been helping with the line-up of speakers, and I think we’ve got some great topics on tap for the conference from both the business and technical camps.  Here’s a quick sample of some of the talks:

   - Nir Simionovich (GreenfieldTech) will be talking on virtualization of Asterisk for contact centers, which is a hot topic this year.  Perhaps he’ll have some additional details in his talk on the Amazon EC2 tests that he and Ronald Lewis have been doing, but certainly he’ll be speaking about some of the other non-cloud virtualization implementations he’s worked on for multi-seat contact centers.

  - Bryan Johns (Shelton|Johns) talks about the ROI on Asterisk systems, and how this allows resellers to make their case on the value of Asterisk-based platforms when comparing against proprietary platforms.

  - Our all-star panel on Monday will interact on the subject of “Lessons Learned” in the Enterprise/PBX environment, to instruct attendees on what to do when implementing Asterisk in a large environment (and probably what NOT to do, which is equally as important!)

There is a whole day dedicated to Resellers, to Enterprise/PBX users, and to Contact Centers.  No matter in what area your Asterisk interests are, there are bound to be talks that you won’t want to miss!

PS: The high temperature on Saturday in Miami is predicted to be 74F/23C.  As if the conference wasn’t attractive enough!

digium: Digium’s Telecom Stimulus Act http://tinyurl.com/b8kaxh

digium: Digium AA50, 1.3 Software Release http://tinyurl.com/c3oxo3

digium: Way to go Danny http://twurl.nl/nrq27c

digium: ITEXPO East 2009: A recap http://twurl.nl/k6kh30

digium: IP PBXes Gaining Unified Communications Capabilities http://twurl.nl/7wrgl1

digium: Digium|Asterisk World at ITExpo Miami 2009 Interview with Digium CEO/CTO, Danny Windham/Mark Spencer http://twurl.nl/zp2qu1 #daw09

digium: Why is IP Communications Thriving? http://twurl.nl/vr402p

digium: Digium G.729 codec module updated and new performance testing tool released http://tinyurl.com/cfr5ur