As well as the US based servers sip.callwithus.com, east.callwithus.com and west.callwithus.com you can now use uk.callwithus.com. I now get sub 6ms pings from my Asterisk server in BlueSquare to the CallWithUs server.

I’ve been using CallWithUs for a while now and they provide very competitively priced DIDs and termination rates.

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Please see here for details - http://sysadminman.net/uk-voip-vps.html

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If you’re thinking about signing up with CallCentric please use my referral link here. Thanks.

Please note: the above number starting 1777 is your account number and not you DID number

You also need to add 2 lines to one of the configuration files to correctly extract the DID number from incoming calls.

Edit /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf

Add the following lines

Then restart Asterisk

You should now be able to create Inbound Routes based on you CallCentric DID numbers

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Please use the contact form here if you would like to take up this offer.

Some of the services offered by CallCentric are -

• US DID numbers from only $2.95/month
• DID numbers in cities all over the world
• US calls at only $0.0198 per minute
• UK landline calls only $0.0198 per minute
• Unlimited calling or pay-as-you-go plans

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For anyone else looking to use Sipgate with Asterisk/FreePBX here is my trunk setup

If you are using NAT between your Asterisk box and Sipgate you will need “canreinvite=no” and “nat=yes” or you will probably get one way audio only on your calls

Edit: context changed to “from-trunk” to make the post clearer

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Asterisk and FreePBX combined make an extremely flexible and easy to manage “virtual telephone system” and A2Billing is a billing application enabling you to charge for calls made using your system if required.

Some possible uses of an Asterisk VPS are -

• Small businesses wanting to manage a collection of SIP extensions
• Reselling calling cards or VOIP termination
• People who do a lot of traveling and want to stay in touch wherever they are
• Route calls based on time of day, DDI, CLID, etc…
• Provide contact telephone numbers in cities around the world all routed to your local phones over the internet
• Voicemail to E-mail

See here for more details and have you have any questions please get in touch

Matt

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Asterisk is a OpenSource telephone system that runs on top of Linux. Asterisk can be quite difficult to manage as it involves editing text based configuration files. If you don’t want to do this you can install a web based management interface called FreePBX. This provides lots of management functionality from a nice web based GUI.

Here are just some ideas for how you could use your own phone system -

Cheap calls abroad from your cell phone

Asterisk/FreePBX provides a feature called DISA. This enables to dial into your Asterisk server (via a local access number available from an ITSP such as CallWithUs) and then dial back out again (again via an ITSP). This would enable to call anywhere in the would at a local rate, right from your cell phone.

Conferencing

With call conferencing you can have many callers all connected to the same call. These callers could connect via a softphone on their PC, a SIP handset or via a regular phone calling a regular phone number (available from an ITSP)

IVR - Digital Receptionist

In FreePBX you can create Digital Receptionists right from the GUI interface. This would be great if you ran a business where you had a single telephone number but wanted to route calls based on what the caller pressed (Press 1 for sales, Press 2 for support, etc…). This is surprisingly easy to setup.

Ring multiple phones/extensions from a single incoming call

Would you like to never miss an important call? FreePBX has a feature called Ring Groups. This enables you to ring multiple phones/extensions from an incoming call. The call is put through to whichever phone answers first. Or you can choose to have it ring your work phone first, then your home number, then your cell phone and divert to voicemail if none of these answer.

Voicemail

FreePBX includes a flexible voicemail system which includes being able to forward your voicemail to an e-mail address and web based access to manage your voicemails.

Sell calling cards or cheap phone calls

When combined with a billing system such as Asterisk2Billing (a2billing) you are not only able to make cheap phone calls yourself, you can sell them to other people. A2Billing includes everything you need including managing customers, accepting payments (though PayPal etc), configuring your charge rates, selling local telephone numbers …

A2Billing is configured through a web based GUI.

What you need?

These are just some of the things that you can do with Asterisk. To run Asterisk you will need a Linux server and a pretty good internet connection (depending how many concurrent calls you want to be able to make). You will also need to sign up with an ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Provider). Your ITSP will connect you to the regular telephone system for both oncoming and outgoing calls.

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The only issue I really had with the service was trying to cancel it recently. I couldn’t find a link in my control panel, or on their website, to cancel the service so I opened a ticket asking them how to cancel my service. For 2 days nothing happened and then, with no communication, my access stopped working.

I have since e-mailed them asking if the would confirm that, in fact, my service has been terminated but no reply.

So, I can do nothing but cancel my PayPal subscription and assume that that’s the end of it.

A real shame of a way to end what was a reasonably pleasant experience.

I don’t think I’d go back to them. The service worked pretty well but I can do without the hassle of trying to chase them up over account queries.

So, fusionxhost, if you’re listening out there please let me know if my account has been canceled! 

Update: fusionxhost did contact me about a week later to apologize and confirm that my account had indeed been canceled. Who knows, maybe this post even helped 

So, would I recommend them? Maybe. The service was pretty good, I never had any problems with it.

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I used the following iptables rules on the OpenVZ host node to accomplish this -

The ip address is the ip address of the VPS. The optional log rule in the middle (that’s commented out) is useful when you are setting this up so you can check that packets are actually begin affected by the rules.

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As we had not yet tested replacing a ‘live’ drive the disk was pulled from the system before running any commands to remove it from the pool.

You can run the following command to see the status of your pools -

Our pool was showing as degraded and that a spare drive had been brought online -

To remove the failed disk from the pool we ran the command -

Now our pool showed as being online and all that was left to do was to set up the replaced drive to be a new spare.

First we have to configure it in Solaris. To check that the system is seeing the drive run -

and there was our new, unconfigured drive -

To configure the disk in Solaris run -

and then just add it to the pool as a spare -

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