Last December the IC3 issued an alert for Asterisk users whch can be seen here.

This initially caused a panic amongst the developers as it wasn’t really clear what the alert was about. It turns out that it was for a vulnerability that was indentified and patched by Digum 9 months earlier. IC3 issued an updated buliten shortly after describing the issue a little better which can be seen here

I’m still seeing this alert being used to try and discourage people from using Asterisk but as far as I can see it’s just a normal security warning that was quickly identified and fixed by the software developer.

If you’d like to read more information there’s a good post here regarding this – http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/asterisk/digium-responds-to-fbi-vhishing-security-warning-about-asterisk.asp and, as always, keep your software patched!

DISA is great!

It allows you to call in to your Asterisk server, get a dial tone, and then dial back out as if you were using a normal extension on your system. I use this lots to make cheap international calls from my mobile phone.

You may also wish to route your DISA calls via A2Billing. If you’ve integrated FreePBX and A2Billing as described here it’s a simple case of changing one setting on your DISA setup in FreePBX.

Continue reading ‘Using DISA with FreePBX and A2Billing’ »

Please note that if using Asterisk 1.6 or later the pipe (|) symbols below need changing to commas (,)

There are several reasons you may want to integrate FreePBX and A2Billing. Whether you’re just using FreePBX to setup trunks for your a2billing calling card system or you use FreePBX and want to route the outbound calls via a2billing to do least cost routing.

There are 2 things you need to do to integrate the two. The first is to add the following to extensions_custom.conf

Continue reading ‘Integrating FreePBX with A2Billing’ »

A2Billing is a great piece of call billing software for Asterisk. It can be integrated with FreePBX and used in lots of different ways.

I run my own Asterisk system with FreePBX and use a2billing to do least cost routing. It’s possible to import rate tables from many different voip providers and then let a2billing route the call based on the cheapest route.

One of the things you need to be aware of is that a2billing will route based on the ‘best matching’ rate. So, lets say you are trying to call +17061234567 and you have rate cards for 2 providers. If provider_a has a rate for +17061 at $0.02/min and provider_b has a rate for +1706 at $0.01/min, a2billing will choose the more expensive provider_a as the rate is a better match. This could require some manipulation of the rate tables to get things to work how you want.

As I said a2billing can also integrate with FreePBX so that you can pass all outgoing calls from FreePBX to A2Billing to allow it to do the routing. You also get the benefit of better CDR reports.

So, if you’re looking for something to do least cost routing for Asterisk then it might be worth checking out a2billing!