SYSADMINMAN

EDIT – these test numbers are no longer functional

As a quick demonstration of what you can achieve with Trixbox in a couple of hours I have put together a demonstration phone system.

Trixbox uses Asterisk and FreePBX to provide a richly featured phone system that you can do lots of interesting things with.

For the demonstration I created a phone system with DDI numbers in the London and New York. These phone numbers are provided by future-nine.com.

If you would like do give it a go you can call the system using the following regular telephone numbers -

• UK  xxxxxxxxxxxx
• US  xxxxxxxxxxxx

The system comprises an automated voice menu with the following options -

• Press 1 – for some music.
• Press 2 – for a speaking clock that reads the time in the UK.
• Press 3 – for an echo test. This will echo back everything you say to it, giving you an idea of the delay on the line.
• Press 4 – to leave a voicemail. This will then be e-mailed to me as an e-mail attachment.
• Press 5 – for some current news. This is produced by downloading the latest rss news feed from Yahoo and then converting it to speech using software from Cepstral. It’s certainly not perfect but gives an idea of what is possible. The audio is updated automatically every hour. The main IVR menu speech was also created using Cepstral.

The whole process from ordering the phone numbers from future-nine, to having a functioning phone system, took only a couple of hours and the only part that is not possible to perform via the web gui was downloading and converting the news feed.

As FreePBX forms the basis of most of the Asterisk distributions is just as easy to do the same with Trixbox, Elastix or PBX in a Flash.

Please give it a go and add a comment below to let me know how you get on.

If you’d like more information about virtual PBXs from Sysadminman then click here

“PBX in a flash” has been added to the list of options you can now choose from on a Sysadminman VOIP VPS. This is in addition to the Trixbox CE, Elastix and Asterisk/FreePBX/A2Billing templates currently available.

See here for more details

A2billing is a great open source billing application that can be used with Asterisk for calling card or wholesale billing

The current release of a2billing is version 1.34 but there are a lot of new features going in to the next release – version 1.4

Some of the new features include -

• All of the configuration is now stored in the database  (rather than a2billing.conf)
• Configuration is now editable through the web interface
• New callback module developed in Python
• New agent module
• New auto-dialler module
• Interface is tidier and simpler
• Uses Asterisk ‘realtime’ so no more generating SIP/IAX2 configuration files
• and more …

If you would like to have a look at this development release it is now possible to order a Sysadminman VOIP VPS with it already installed.

The cost is the same as for the Standard Sysadminman VPS – see here for details. For more information please contact us

* Please note that a2billing version 1.4 is a development release and it is not recommended to use it in a production environment. VPSs can be converted to a template running the stable release of a2billing at any time.

When I setup my ratecard here I only created 1 rate to Leicester in the UK. Ok for testing but not much use in the real world! So how are we going to enter all of the rates we need – the answer is to import them. Many ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers) publish a rate file that you can download. I’m going to use the callwithus (my provider) rate file that you can download from here.

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing – Part 5 Importing a ratecard’ »

So we’ve created a trunk to make calls through here, we’ve created a ratecard and call plan here and we’ve created an access phone number here so we’re finally ready to create a customer!

Creating a calling card customer

Click on CUSTOMERS on the left hand menu

Click Create Customers

We get a big list of options but the only things we need to set are -

BALANCE – set the inital balance for the customer

CALL PLAN – ensure the call plan is set to the one we created here

LASTNAME & FIRSTNAME – not required but definitely useful!

Then click on CONFIRM DATA

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing – Part 4 Creating a customer and making a call’ »

Now we’ve got a trunk setup and a rate card and call plan we need a way for our potential customers to actually connect to our system! One way for them to do this is via an access phone number. To test this I’m going to use the IPKall DID we setup here in FreePBX.

This assumes that FreePBX has been setup with some a2billing custom destinations as described here – http://www.freepbx.org/forum/freepbx/installation/inbound-sip-trunk-doesnt-call-extensions. Sysadminman VOIP VPSs are preconfigured for this.

Setting the inbound access number (DID) in FreePBX

This is changing the access DID we created here

In FreePBX click on Inbound Routes on the left hand main menu

Then select “ipkall” (the DID we created here)

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing – Part 3 Creating an access DID’ »

After we’ve created a trunk we need to create a ratecard and assign it to a call plan. This is the main part of the billing application and also the most complicated!

Initially I’m just going to create a ratecard that allows calls Leicester in the UK. The dialling code for Leicester is 0116 so the international prefix would be 44116  (44 being for the UK)

Creating a Ratecard

First click on the RATECARD menu on the left hand side of the screen

Then give your ratecard a name. I called mine “test-rate-card”

Assign the ratecard to use the trunk we created here

And click on CONFIRM DATA

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing – Part 2 Ratecards and Call Plans’ »

In this series of articles I’m going to run through how to get up your a2billing system up and running.  A2billing is an opensource billing application for Asterisk and can be used in many different ways – I’ll be documenting just some examples 

Some of this setup will depend how you have your main configuration file (/etc/asterisk/a2billing.conf) configured. I will not be discussing that here. Also some of the setup may rely on FreePBX and A2billing being setup to work together.

All of this documentation was created on a sysadminman Asterisk/FreePBX/A2billing VPS. See here for details – http://sysadminman.net/uk-voip-vps.html

Setting up a trunk

We need to setup a trunk to be used for our outbound calls. Obviously you can setup more than one trunk and route calls to different destinations via different trunks.

I will be using the trunk that I configured in FreePBX here – http://sysadminman.net/blog/archives/335. As the main settings for the trunk have been setup in FreePBX we can just call the trunk by it’s name in A2Billing. This trunk is with a provider called callwithus.

To setup a trunk -

Click on TRUNK on the left hand main menu

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing – Part 1 Setting up a trunk’ »

One of the great things about voip is that you can make international calls at local rates.  Combine that with Asterisk/FreePBX and you’ve got the ability to make cheap international phone calls using your mobile phone.

To do this we’re going to setup DISA (Direct Inward System Access). This will enable us to ring our Asterisk server, get a dial tone and then dial back out again.

Then I will show you how you can combine this with callbacks if that works out cheaper for you.

Installing the modules

First we need to install the DISA (if it’s not installed already) and Callback modules. See part 5 for more information about installing FreePBX modules.

Setting up DISA

Now we are going to configure a DISA…

Continue reading ‘Getting started with FreePBX – Part 6 Cheap phone calls using DISA and Callback’ »

Setting up an IVR (or auto attendant, digital receptionist) is great idea for small businesses. You can have a single external number for your customers to call but then direct the call to the right department via a simple menu.

First we need some extensions to put the calls through to, then we need to record the menu the caller will hear and finally setup the actual IVR.

Configuring the extensions

Follow the instructions in part 2 to create the extensions that you need. I have created extensions for Sales, Support and Billing

Continue reading ‘Getting started with FreePBX – Part 5 Setting up an IVR’ »