Asterisk Geekz » Projects

How to run 100+ USB sticks as asterisk trunks.

admin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 06:16:51 +0000

Hi everyone,

Please guide me on the below configuration:
I want to configure on asterisk 1.6 & 100+ USB sticks as asterisk trunks.The stick is E1550E1552.
Also how to add module to change IMEI number on the above configuration.

Thanks & Regards
Admin

How to configure SpanDSP configuration & calls to be placed via T38

admin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 06:08:08 +0000

Hi Everyone,

Cd you please help me in this regards:
I want to configure SpanDSP configuration & should allow all calls to be placed via T38, on Asterisk 1.8.
Thanks in advance.

Thanks & Regards
Anil Mistery

How Asterisk communicates with database (with API & without API) ?

admin — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 11:50:05 +0000

Hi Everyone,

I want to know the communication functionality of Asterisk application & database (with & without API).
Please help me in this regards, thanks in advance.

Regards
Admin

How To Put Click to Call On Your Website-Step 1

SK — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:23:03 +0000

Upto this i assume you have sound knowledge of a linux system and have an Asterisk PBX running.If not, lets first check how this WIFI technology work from here

Create a new directory, under your main www directory, called "clickcall". Create a new file in there, called "clickcalltest.html". Copy the following code into that file. You will need to change "example.com" to your own domain.

Code:
 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <script language="javascript"> // VoIP User Click To Call System 1.0 BETA // AJAX Main Functions // From http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_9696.html // May 2007 // // Set up our XMLHttpRequest Object var XMLHttpRequestObject = false; var currentStatus = 'offline'; var newStatus = 'offline'; if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari... XMLHttpRequestObject = new XMLHttpRequest(); } else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // Internet Explorer try { XMLHttpRequestObject = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP"); } catch (e) { try { XMLHttpRequestObject = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } catch (e) {} } } if (!XMLHttpRequestObject) { // Remove this once you're done debugging and let failures go. Worst case, the visitor just won't see the button // Some users disable Java in their browsers. Not a great deal we can do about that. alert('Failed to create XMLHTTP instance.'); } // This function checks the presence flag on the webserver and outputs the button, or not function getData(dataSource, divID) { if (XMLHttpRequestObject) { var obj = document.getElementById(divID); XMLHttpRequestObject.open("GET", dataSource); XMLHttpRequestObject.onreadystatechange = function () { if ( (XMLHttpRequestObject.readyState == 4) && (XMLHttpRequestObject.status == 200) ) { if (XMLHttpRequestObject.responseText == 1) { newStatus = 'online'; } if (XMLHttpRequestObject.responseText == 0) { newStatus = 'offline'; } if (currentStatus != newStatus) { if (newStatus == "online") { obj.innerHTML = '<a href="http://www.example.com/clickcall/callme.php" target="_blank"> <input type="image" src="http://www.example.com/clickcall/click.jpg" alt="Click To Call" name="clickTocall"></a>'; } else { obj.innerHTML = ''; } currentStatus = newStatus; } } } } XMLHttpRequestObject.send(null); } var timerID = null function StartTimer() { getData('http://www.example.com/clickcall/getstatus.php', 'targetDiv'); timerID = self.setTimeout("StartTimer()", 500); } </script> <body onLoad="StartTimer()"> <div id="targetDiv"> </div> </body> </html>

How To Put Click to Call On Your Website-Introduction

SK — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:13:25 +0000

This question has cropped up a number of times in the forum and I felt it was time to address it more fully and present an open-source solution.We’ll also be using AJAX to control an active “presence” system for the on screen button.

Let’s have a look at some click-to-call background first and for the moment I’m going to assume that you’re some kind of ecommerce webmaster using Asterisk or TrixBox for your VoIP PBX. You may be an online store or site providing an online service. Whether product or service, you may be thinking that if you could get your visitor on the telephone, you’ll convert the sale or convince them they need your service. This is really the only consideration when analysing click to call as a commercial tool – will you generate more sales.

Here are some numbers* from a report which are worth considering:-
* a 22%-25% reduction in Website abandonment from pages with click-to-call services
* as much as a 100% increase in transaction conversions from click-to-call users compared with toll-free callers
* 88% of click-to-call users say they are more likely to contact a company that offers a click-to-call service than one that does not
I’m not talking here about telephone lead generation, which is something that works much like AdWords. As opposed to clicking through to a website, the user engages on the telephone. Google do have a program for this which they’re rolling out extremely slowly. It has taken two years to date. The Google program may interest you and be available in your country. You can check if it is here if you’re interested.

The real benefit of telephone lead generation is that it doesn’t require a website. But that’s out of scope here and not what this article is about.

This is also not what I call a “true” click to call system, this is a “click, give us your number and we’ll call you” type system. “Click to Call” has become a generic expression and the system described above probably should be called “Click to Speak”.

The click to callback type setup I’m describing here is similar to the commercial offerings from the likes of Estara. But I’m going to be talking about doing this in a completely open-source (free) environment, using a combination of Asterisk, AJAX and PHP.

If you want true click to call, using an embeded VoIP softclient within your page, you’ll need a widget.
So, you want to go ahead with this and put click to call buttons on your site and start seeing how it performs for you? There are a couple of immediate things to consider and we should look at some of the theories first.

Presence and Availability

Nothing would be more annoying to a site visitor than to see a click to call button, click it, and the phone just rings and rings. What’s critical therefore is some kind of presence management system.

There are three basic presence states with click to call – (1) you’re available, (2) you’re away, and (3) you’re there, but on the phone and already engaged. We can combine states (2) and (3) into one “away” state.

Visitors will sometimes land on a page and spend some time reading it – the “presence” indicator needs to be dynamically generated. Hence I’m using AJAX to allow a “real-time” presence update when a call is routed and answered (you’re “engaged”) or you’re “away” and unable to answer. We’ll do this in a very simple fashion to start with – if you’re away or engaged the button is going to disappear from the page, on the fly. This could be easily adapted to display a different button or alert the viewer in any way you choose that there’s been a change. For the usability reasons stated, it is important to do indicate presence somehow.

Security

You can’t just let any Tom, Dick or Harry onto your Asterisk box via the webserver. Nor can you allow any other webmaster put your button on someone elses site. So you need to ensure that the button will only display and operate on your pages, and you’ll ignore any calls to it from any other referrer.

The referrer field, part of the HTTP Header Specification, is not 100% reliable. Some browsers will not forward it to the server. In my experience, it’s about 95% reliable. You will need to assume 5% of calls or clicks on the click-to-call button are going to break. You can, however, detect that a header is invalid and send back a nice message.

You also need to restrict the call back number, assuming you do not want to pick up the cost of international calls to mobiles. Ian has done this within the Asterisk portion of code, allowing, in this example case, calls to the UK only. You’ll need to adapt this call plan as you see fit, and we can have some further discussion on doing that later in this thread.

The theory and code presented here should scale easily enough to a multiple person/call centre type arrangement. The theory and considerations are the important part. This warrants much further discussion and I invite you to that in this thread.
OK let’s get stuck in with some code. As this is likely to be adapated and improved, we’ll call this starting point the VoIP User Click To Call System 1.0 BETA.

If you’re not familiar with AJAX, you might want to read the starter guide here. There are plenty of additional AJAX resources on the web if you want to search around. We’re a VoIP forum and specific advice on AJAX should be sought elsewhere. But I will give a basic overview by way of comments within the code.

We need some way to store the 2 basic states of presence that we’ll be using. We’ll do that on the webserver, assuming, as should be the case, your webserver and Asterisk box are running on two different servers. Asterisk is going to talk to the webserver, to update the presence status flag, as and when calls are routed or something changes. We’ll drive the actual page the viewer sees with a 500ms Java timer, checking the presence status flag by calling a GET once every half a second. If you put something like this on a high traffic site, bear in mind the number of HTTP requests that will get generated by this timer and adjust the interval accordingly. Anything down to 2 or 3 seconds should be fine.

Now Lets dive into the topic more deeply and right some codes Step 1

Installing Linux for Asterisk

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:50:34 +0000

In order to use Asterisk you are going to have to use Linux. If you are a Linux ‘guru’ then you might want to skip this section and just take a look at the dependencies. This section deals with installing a Linux system for use with Asterisk. I make no excuses or arguments for the chosen distribution, Red Hat 8; I have no intention of discussing the pros and cons of the many different distributions available. In other words, if you don’t like Red Hat, stop bitching and find a windows user to torment.

Getting the ISO images

I’m not going to tell you how to create the CD’s required to install Linux, there are other sites for this. You can find the ISO images required from places like http://www.linuxiso.org. Download the ISO images and burn them. For This installation you only actually need disks 1, 2 and 3 (the assumption is you are using the default language settings)– If you are pushed for a network connection you can get away with only downloading and burning those, however, I would recommend getting the whole set for the sake of completeness.

Installing Linux

The first step is to insert CD 1 of your freshly burned ISO images into the target machine’s CDROM drive and boot. At this stage I’m going to make an assumption that you are either installing Asterisk on a new machine or overwriting the disks of whatever was there before. If you want to dual boot into Asterisk, please look elsewhere for initial configurations. You might want to consult your physician too. I make no apologies that this section is going to treat you like a moron; this is intentional. Since we want to be sure that you have no problems running Asterisk we need to make sure that your installation matches the one I used to build and run it.

The first thing you will need to do on your target machine is ensure that you can boot directly from CD. Most modern (if not all) will allow this, it is usually just a setting in your BIOS. If you don’t feel comfortable with messing in the BIOS the simplest test you can do to check and see if booting from CD is enabled is, funnily enough, to put CD 1 into the drive and reboot the machine. If the machine starts to boot and eventually shows a screen like the one on the following page, then you are ok. If you are happy fiddling with the BIOS then just enable booting from CD and make it the first device to attempt to boot from.

In either case you should have something like this appear on your screen:

At this point all you need to do is press ENTER. After a short while, you will be presented with the following introductory screen:

Click the NEXT button

Select the language you want to use during the installation. Since I used the default on English, all the following screens will also be in English. Then Click NEXT.

Select the keyboard layout for your particular PC. Most keyboards in the English speaking world tend to be U.S. English but check yours.

Since we are not going to be installing a windowing system on this machine, in all honesty we don’t care about the mouse. Click NEXT.

Since we are going to build a custom installation select CUSTOM and click NEXT.

This bit might seem a little scary, there’s nothing to worry about, since we have already established that we are NOT going to dual boot and there is nothing that we want to keep on the disks in this machine. You did check that right?! Click NEXT.

If you get the previous screen, don’t worry too much just click YES. You many note that the message box refers to ‘hda’ not ‘sda’, don’t worry about this either, it’s just the type of disks you are using. If you have IDE disks then this would say ‘hda’.

Depending on the state of this machine and the disks before you started this install you can either select ‘Remove all Linux Partitions on this System’ or ‘Remove all Partitions on this system’

If the disks have been previously used for another Operating system then select the ‘Remove all partitions on this system’ option. If your disks are brand new and have not been used before then either of the first two options is fine.

The box below these options will list the hard drives available on your system, leave the selections alone.

Click the NEXT button. If you chose to remove all partitions on the system you will see the message box on the following page. Again the disk name /dev/sda may and most likely would be /dev/hda…

Click YES…

You should see the following screen showing how the disks will be laid out, click the NEXT button.

Click NEXT

Now comes the hard part. If you know nothing about your network then we are going to be a little stuck. This is the part that is specific to your installation. I am not going to attempt to explain how networks function, if you have one they you should at least understand the terms in the next couple of paragraphs.

As shown on the screenshot on the previous page, the default for a Red Hat installation is to use DHCP. If you are using a DHCP server on your network then you can click NEXT. If you are not then you will need to click the ‘edit’ button, then deselect DHCP and enter an IP address and subnet mask for this machine. As a side note most home run networks tend to use the address range 192.168.0.x and a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 – The x being replaced with the individual IP address of a particular machine. You can establish this by looking at one of your other machine’s, and its configuration settings. Again, generally, the Gateway and DNS are usually going to be something like 192.168.0.1 for both. This is however VERY SPECIFIC to your network. You much make the setting match your existing network.

If you are using DHCP then for the hostname you can let DHCP handle it. If not then select ‘manually’ and type a name for this host.

Again, for a non-DHCP environment fill in the Gateway and Primary DNS fields. Do NOT use the settings in the above screenshot unless they match your network. Once you have done this click NEXT

Select ‘no firewall’ and click NEXT.

Click NEXT. If you want to use additional languages, select the ones you want first.

Select your location or at least the nearest place to you that is listed and click NEXT.

Enter a password for the ‘root’ user. If you were unaware, the root user is like the administrator account on a Windows machine, the big boss account.. Use TAB or the mouse to move between the fields. Once you’ve done that (and remembered the password!) click NEXT.

Click NEXT

Now we have to select the applications that we want to install. The only things you need to select are:

· Development Tools

· Kernel Development

· Text Based Internet (optional but advised)

Make sure you also have ‘Select individual packages’ selected (see cursor on previous page screenshot).

Now click NEXT

Select ‘Flat View’ and ensure that the following ADDITIONAL items are selected:

* OpenSSL-Devel
* Readline41
* Ncurses4
* Ncurses C++ Devel
* SOX

Now click NEXT

Ok, this is it, we are about to do the install, Click NEXT

The first ting you’ll see is the disks being formatted and partitioned, once complete the various packages will be installed. You will be prompted to insert disks, change the CD, and then click OK.

You don’t really need to create a boot disk. Select no and click NEXT.

Do NOT remove the CD, the install will eject it for you, Click EXIT and your machine will reboot. Once complete you will be presented with something like:

You may now dance around the room a little; you have completed the Linux install part of Asterisk…

Get a coffee, tea, cola or drink of your choice and bask in this glorious moment. Then read the next section on installing Asterisk.

Voip Predictive Dialer – Build your Call Center

SK — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:37:12 +0000

Today, I will be discussing about Call centers and how small businesses can run a call center with voip predictive dialer. I have always been fascinated by how VOIP can empower some of the industries, especially the upcoming call center and BPO industry which relies heavily on “Making and receiving calls”. A fraction of delay or missed call can cost some $$ to the industry. The Industry is no more in the seed stage and it has grown faster than industry analyst expected.

Although call centers are still costly to maintain, operate or even outsource. Big companies can afford to pay the price but the small companies are often stuck with in-house calling facilities. The in-house call facilities are however not up-to the mark. However with Voip Predictive dialer the picture might be different in near future. People can build their own call center with a easy to use Voip predictive dialer.

Now you must be wondering What is a Predictive dialing? Predictive dialing is simply automating the outbound dialing process to effectively manage your calls with little or no manual intervention. Voip predictive dialer basically does the same thing with VOIP technology as backbone.

some of the common Features in Voip predictive dialer:

* Multiple campaigns can be run simultenously.
* Auto-Transfer calls between agents (based on availability)
* Auto-dialing to customers
* Auto-Scanning Voice Mail system and auto-dialing the missed call numbers
* Call Logging, recording and management

On top of this, the predictive system can be easily integrated with your exisiting CRM system making it easier to control and store data related to your customers. There are many providers who also offer predictive dialing bundled with their CRM products . Although if you buy a standardVoip Predictive dialer , it will cost you anything from $300 ++, which isn’t really a great cost considering you will be able to manage your customers more effectively and data mining could be more relevant.

Most predictive dialers provide most robust, feature-rich, and innovative predictive dialer on the market today. Built on the latest technologies, this cutting-edgecall center solution combines sophisticated VoIP predictive dialing capabilities with a comprehensive lead management system. So, call centers of all sizes can achieve immediate value – operating more efficiently and cost-effectively, while boosting sales, market share, and profits.

Imagine running your business with your own call center like only Cisco or Nortel can think of. You can do it yourself.

In my next series of this article, I will be comparing voip predictive dialer available in the market based on their cost and features.