I purchased an IP04 from www.rowetel.com. Had it shipped priority and had it in just over a week all the way from Australia (”aaaaaaah, Crickey!”).

I was overly anxious so I busted open the box while sitting in my car at the post office. Ah, the smell of new electronics. The thing looks just like an 8 port switch you’d buy at your local electronics emporium, but it’s not

The case it comes in is not sealed shut. This is by design. David and the good people at Atcom figure you may want to begin hacking the device immedaitely via it’s serial adapter which unfortunately can only be accessed with the top off and the modular serial adapter plugged in. Strange configuration I must admit. To keep from damaging the board and/or serial pins I would have liked to have seen the device ship with a small ribbon cable you attach to the board’s headers and then to the external 9 pin serial adapter it ships with. Maybe I’ll shoot him my suggestion. We’ll see.

Not knowing it already came preloaded with Linux and Asterisk installed I began reading on how to get it installed. After I powered it on and saw data being dumped to my terminal program did I realize, “Hey this thing is ready to use”.

Excitement Turned To Sadness

Within a few hours my excitement about having a new toy turned to sadness as I began to experience what I call, “Typical Linux Bugs”. Hold on, I love Linux but any true user and developer on any Linux platform has to admit it has its moments where you’re rubbing your temples going, “Ah, this is why it’s free.”

After installing VoipTel’s Asterisk-GUI-1.2.6-1 I began to see things like my configuration disappearing. Not believing my eyes I would uninstall the packages and reinstall them only to have it occur again.

I posted my concern to the Blackfin Koop forums but didn’t get any nibbles. I’m sure they thought I was nuts since I just subscribed and was posting a problem. Not the case. I contacted David Rowe from whom I bought it and he was beginning to see that this does appear to be a problem based on my simple use of the GUI.

I also reported the issue to Voiptel.no in hopes they can track down the issue and fix the bug. Considering this is a brand new release of the GUI only weeks old my money is that they fixed one bug but introduced an even more deadly one.

In case anyone else is having this issue here is a summary of what I had configured, packages I had installed, etc:

Installed Packages:

asterisk-spandsp - 1.4.4-1 -
busybox - 1.10.1-1 -
dropbear - 0.51-1 -
libtiff - 3.8.2-1 -
login - 1.0-1 -
oslec - 1.0-1 -
spandsp - 0.0.4-1 -
voiptel-gui - 1.2.6-1 -
voiptel-ntp - 4.1.1-1 -
voiptel-sounds - 1.0-1 -
zaptel-sport - 1.4.3-1 -

I also had one customer SIP provider configured, 2 SIP users, one Calling and Incoming Call rule. The device also has 4 FXO ports. I added Port 3 as a Service Provider, clicked on ’save’, went to Calling Rules and it told me I had no rules defined. I went back to Service Providers and my primary SIP provider was gone and so was the FXO port I just added.

I had an SSH session open to the box with the Asterisk CLI open. I thought that maybe a reboot would solve it so I initiated that from the GUI and this appeared in the Asterisk CLI:

[Oct 23 20:07:53] NOTICE[377]: chan_local.c:566 local_alloc: No such extension/context executecommand@asterisk_guitools creating local channel
[Oct 23 20:07:53] NOTICE[377]: channel.c:2942 __ast_request_and_dial: Unable to request channel Local/executecommand@asterisk_guitools
[Oct 23 20:07:53] WARNING[377]: cdr.c:760 ast_cdr_init: CDR already initialized on ‘**Unknown**’
[Oct 23 20:07:53] NOTICE[377]: cdr.c:430 check_start: CDR on channel ‘**Unknown**’ already started

The box never rebooted either. I hit the button several times and it spit this same info out each time. I had to reboot it from the SSH session. When it came back up the GUI still didn’t show anything configured other than the phones.

I pulled up my SSH session and looked in the config files and saw everything in there. Asterisk even showed my phones and my SIP peers active. Dialing in or out is dead though.

Bizarre. If anyone has a solution post it. I’m dying to get this fixed so I can finish running this through its paces in hopes of finding a use for it with a couple of my clients (replacement for a Cisco Call Manager Express install that is out of support and maintenance).

I’ve been tinkering with the Soekris net5501 for several months now. In fact I’ve been playing with several different embedded designs (Digium AA50 and Routerboard 532A to name a few) with several different Linux and Asterisk combinations.

Things I don’t like about it:

• The enclosure it came in. This thing is a god awful off-green/blue/turquoise/whatever color. It’s clear engineers have no taste in color. The picture doesn’t show the color but trust me it’s not good looking

• Again, the case. It’s difficult to open and close

• Wish there were a knock-out for a wifi antenna mount

Things I like about it:

• It’s being widely supported by Astlinux and Askozia
• Small foot print so it can be placed anywhere
• Low power consumption
• The 3.3v PCI slot makes it useful for analog and digital interface cards for SOHO environments
• support of a SATA drive (I bought a 4 gig Solid State Drive instead)

General:

Currently I am running Askozia peering with my SIP account at Vitelity. No real complaints about the device itself which would keep me from using it in other small applications.

My only complaint, and it’s not even a problem with the hardware, are the Linux/Asterisk combo applications available for it and their lack of particular features.

Askozia has come a long way and is using Runnix which makes deploying and upgrading easier. However it’s missing the ability to create custom voicemail boxes which reside on the devices storage. Currently it’s all sent to a single email box. Really annoying for a mutli-user setup.

AstLinux has also come a long way and is nearing a 0.6 release. However it’s GUI looks like it was designed using FrontPage. Sorry guys. I understand it’s still in development and more to the point I think they are aiming a a streamlined interface as opposed to the AsteriskGUI. Personally I love the AsteriskGUI and I’d love to see a developer split off the code and offer two different interface options - one simple and one advanced.

Again, I had no real issues with the hardware. If I were real ambitous I could install Debian or some other distro on it and do a full blown Asterisk install including AsteriskGUI but for my small setup this works just fine.

If you’re the proud owner of a MagicJack or are looking to buy one to hack then this info might be useful if you use Asterisk.

Original article found at: http://revolution.hackthisbox.com/magicjack/readme

Replace EXXXXXXXXXX01 with your MJ number. Include E and 01.

Replace the proxy proxy1.Atlanta.talk4free.com:5070 with the proxy your MJ registers to and change host=67.90.138.70 to host=YourProxyIPHere.

Replace XXXXXpasswordXXXXX with your password. Currently a 20 character string consisting of numbers and letters. Mine is all uppercase.

~~~~~sip.conf~~~~~

register => EXXXXXXXXXX01:XXXpasswordXXXX@proxy1.Atlanta.talk4free.com:5070

[magicjack]

context=incoming

username=EXXXXXXXXXX01

type=friend

secret=XXXXXpasswordXXXXX

port=5070

nat=yes

insecure=very

host=67.90.138.70

fromuser=EXXXXXXXXXX01

dtmfmode=inband

qualify=2000

~~~~~sip.conf~~~~~

~~~~~extensions.conf~~~~~

[incoming]

exten => YourMJNumber,1,Answer

exten => YourMJNumber,2,Dial(sip/sipura,30,r) ;dial someone…such as an ATA

[MagicJackOutgoing]

exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN}@magicjack,30,r)

exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,2,congestion()

exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,102,busy()

exten => i,1,Hangup

exten => t,1,Hangup

exten => h,1,Hangup

[sip]

include => MagicJackOutgoing

~~~~~extensions.conf~~~~~

More hacks can be found here: http://magicjackhacks.blogspot.com/

We recently broke down and purchased an IP04, a Blackfin 532 based IP PBX, from www.ucpbx.com. I’ve read many good things regarding the processor and the work being put in to AstFin, the Asterisk/Linux distro for the board.

I expect many hours of fun exploring the device once it arrives. I’ll post more when it’s finally in my grubby little hands

After running my home Asterisk setup on an old Dell desktop for the past year I decided to take the plunge in to an embedded system - a Soekris Net5501.

I settled on the 5501-60 which comes configured with the following:

• Small form factor enclosure
• 433 Mhz Geode processor
• 256 Mbyte RAM
• 4 Mbyte boot flash
• 4 ethernet ports
• 2 serial ports - one internal one external
• USB port
• CF socket
• 44 pin IDE connector
• SATA connector
• Mini PCI socket
• 3.3 Volt PCI connector

The first thing I did when it arrived was take the screws out of the case and take a look at the guts (Pics will follow in a future post). The footprint of the entire system is the size of a small 12 port switch.

After showing it off to some friends I quickly moved on to getting a combined Linux and Asterisk distro installed. I started with AstLinux.

Check back in a few days and I’ll provide a review

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