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.

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/

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

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