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Sun, 26 Feb 2006My wife's phone broke after about 3 years of life. The hinge gave way, and it was in two pieces. She usually takes the car during the day, and I just gave her my cell phone for "just in case" purposes. At least it sounded like a good idea at the time. After work, I took the bus home, stopping at Frys to pick up a replacement handset for my wife. I jumped back on the bus and then realized something really silly: she has no idea where I am going to be and at what time I need to be picked up. No worries, I can just find a payphone, right? HAH! Bzzzt...WRONG! I got off the bus at Kent Station, a new shopping center in the Kent area. Someone thought it was a bright idea to build a completely outdoor mall with no covered walkways in the Northwest. Its winter, its raining, and nobody wants to really be there. The only good thing is in the middle of the plaza is a giant gas firepit that becomes almost the centerpiece of all activity. The Kent Station shopping center lacks a lot of things. There are no ATMs. There are no payphones. Infact, its amazing how hard it is to find a payphone these days. They are all gone. Thats okay, I have the internet, right? Kent Station is supposed to have WiFi, but it doesn't work. The coffee shop has WiFi, but it doesn't work. There are no outlets to plug my WiFi/cellular hotspot into, my PCMCIA slot isn't working, and I have 5 minutes of battery left. And there I was, in the rain, with a cell phone box in hand, uncharged of course, and no way to activate it even if it was. Spent a few hours combing Kent for a damn payphone, and I finally found one. Dialed my 800 number, which is forwarded to all my phone numbers. Guess what answers first? Yup -- the broken cell phone's voicemail popped up before it even could ring any of the other numbers in the list. Great, now I could talk to no one. But it also has a credit card slot. I swipe my card, it wants to bill $7 for 4 minutes. Uh..no. But thats okay, I have change. Now its just $1 for 4 minutes. Come on guys...I can buy those minutes for $0.01-0.02/min with 6 second rounding from like 20 different providers...I bet they get it even cheaper. What made me even more mad is that I spoke of changing my 1-800 number to our dial back system on the VoIP server during hack night -- and just didn't get around to setting that up :/ But, I was able to get ahold of someone and have someone finally pick me up. What really upset me is how disconnected and isolated someone can be without their cell phone. It seems like the world does not work without them. I have been battling a couple of issues on our VoIP server. Its actually quite funny, because when I started this project, I figured I would be able to get this out of the box and going in production in about a weeks time. That doesn't really seem to be the case. Just when I thought I had asterisk mastered, I realized how taking it out of your home and putting it into a multiuser service environment changes everything. Outstanding issues:
Okay, and now its time to speak of a very embarrassing story about what not to do with asterisk.. I have an asterisk server at home, and the sip.seattlewireless.net server up in the Westin. Things were going great, and I had a wonderful _X. line in my configuration that would route all the calls from my SIP phones to Seattle, because this is where I wanted all my calls to be handled and processed for PSTN/other users/etc. What I totally forgot was there was an inbound SIP number from the past pointing at this asterisk box (KGRG streaming audio) with IPKall. The extensions.conf configuration was completely different than what had the streaming audio, but the contexts matched up to make this call complete. At the time of the IPKall number setup, I thought it might be a good idea to set the IPKall number to dial on my asterisk box the same as the PSTN number (ie: dial extension 3601112222). You might see where this is going. One day, my brother decides to call in to listen to KGRG on his phone. Naturally, my home asterisk box is going to match the number dialed (3601112222) to _X. because I deleted the streaming audio number out of the inbound call context I use. This sent the call to Seattle. Seattle goes, "Oh hey! 3601112222! that goes out to the PSTN through VoIP provider X". It routes the call to 3601112222 over the PSTN, and goes back to the asterisk box at home. It did this over and over and over and over because neither provider apparently has any simultaneous call limits. Several hours later, I attempt to make a call, and VoIP provider X mentions that my prepaid minutes are all gone. I look at the logs..and yeah...lots and lots of calls for a long period of time..each stacked up against the other. DAMN! Moral of the story: Don't set yourself up for call routing loops. There's no TTL! For past blog entries, check out the archive on the side or click here. |
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