OpenSUSE Linux Rants

For the past two weeks or so, I have been working on asterisk-related projects. PBX in a Flash and Google Voice come together very nicely to allow one to have a free home phone line. Now, I just have to get Elastix set up and working for my employer. Slightly bigger project. But that’s why I’ve been kind of quiet the past few days.

Should you wish to take a stab at a free home phone line, you will need a Google Voice number, PBX in a Flash, and an extra computer (a machine that is a decade old will work perfectly). I was even going to put it on my openWRT router (thanks Steve), but decided against it.

The tutorial on how to set it up is found here: Introducing the Orgasmatron V, Google Voice Edition

A couple of things that I couldn’t find in that tutorial but are required:

• You will need to have ports 10001 to 20000 forwarded from your router to your asterisk machine. I just set my asterisk box as the DMZ machine.
• Also, edit a file called /etc/asterisk/sip_nat.conf. You will need to put your external IP address in there, along with your local subnet.

Not doing those things caused me several undesireable problems.

I used twinkle as my softphone. Since my desktop from where I am making the phone calls is on the same subnet as my asterisk machine, I used the internal ip of the PBX in a Flash box to configure twinkle.

The call quality seemed to be at least 90% or more of what a regular phone call is. Some people could not tell that I was not on a regular landline or cell phone.

Anyway, take a look at it, see what you think. Instead of using a softphone, you can also purchase sip phones that will work with your PBX in a Flash system.