Friday Mar 26 beginning at 3AM EST VUC Community Conference

If you would like to participate by presenting your community please let us know

Download Free X-Lite Software from Counterpath. This is the best free program available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Follow these instructions to call Talkshoe free from anywhere.

Join us for a 24 hour VoIPathon and talk about online community

Hosted pbx is a service several companies (called ITSP, Internet Telephony Service Providers) offer to give any individual or business a professional telephony presence using the Internet. Software running on the ITSP network offers to deal with voice and fax calls (and sometimes SMS) in a way similar to what a mail server does for your email.

You can add a normal or a toll-free DID (Direct Inward Dialing) number to a hosted pbx in order to ring multiple phones, accept voicemail messages, faxes or text messages (SMS) from those to whom you provide the phone number. You can also progrtam service with relation to time of day, for example routing calls outside opening hours of your business to voicemail boxes.

Many interesting services are available on a pbx, such as forwarding calls according to time, busy state of a particular phone or decalred availability of an extension. For example at night and during holidays, calls can be automatically routed to a different extension, forwarded to a mobile number or to voicemail.

Pbx, hosted or running on local hardware, are often used a switches, a way to route calls.
IVR, (Interactive Voice Response) can be used to route calls or collect authentication information. On a local pbx, you can require the caller to enter digits or route the calls according to the caller id information they are sending.

I can vividly recall the confusion in my mind when I was first introduced to VoIP through Free World Dialup and other early sites. In the following short article, I'll try to avoid explaining the underlying technology and simply answer the question in the title. If you have any questions, ask me on Twitter: @voipusers


Continue reading "What is a SIP Phone and Why Would You Want One?"

The easiest way to set up a blog or web site is with Posterous. The important thing with a memorial site is allowing people to post as easily as possible.

I received news that my longtime friend drummer Paul Lagos passed away on October 19th, 2009. I wanted to find a way to gather people who knew him to honor his memory and help organize an event for him as well.

Setting up Remember Paul Lagos took less than 5 minutes and has allowed friends and family to post and comment without opening accounts. All they need to do is send an email to an address and their messages are posted immediately (or in this case, with moderation).

What a great, free way to make a memorial site happen. Kudos to Posterous, which I already was using for my "memoirs".

You have joined Talkshoe and you have set your 10-digit PIN.

Download X-Lite for Mac or Windows and install it as you would any program.

Set the SIP settings:



You need to put ideasip.com in the "domain" field. The others can be anything. Make sure "register" is unchecked as in the image and that "target domain" is selected. Click "Apply"





Now you are going to add a contact to phone the Talkshoe server and enter our conference directly:

Put Turkers Talk and anything you want in the tops fields, they don't matter at all.

Under "Contact methods", Select "softphone on the left and enter the sip numner on the right:

Here is the first part of the SIP number : 7463 # 22603 #

followed by your PIN (in the example image, it's 0123456789)

followed by the rest of the sip number @proxy.ideasip.com

SIP numbers (called URI) look like email addresses. Example: talkshoe@vuc.onsip.com is a SIP URI.

Another tutorial here

Join Talkshoe if you're not already a member

Search for Turkers to go to the page from anywhere on Talkshoe

This is the result of the search when we are conferencing only.

Now, click on Talkshoe PRO as below:

You should be prompted to download the software if you don't already have it installed. If you do have it installed, clicking this should start the software running.

Although I have had HTTP running on my local box to provision my Polycom 650, I was always wanting to use the server to update the phone directory and also to be able to see log file. Without PUT capability, I could not write to the server. Here's how I got that working.

Problem: allow Polycom phone to PUT log and updated directory via HTTP.

After some investigation using telnet (the only real value of telnet
these days) and some help from #vuc I came up with
this:

To see if PUT is working on your server, enter these lines from a terminal on the same box (or change the ip address):

telnet 127.0.0.1 80
PUT /path/file HTTP/1.1
Host:127.0.0.1
(CR an empty line here)

If PUT is working read no further.

If you have a problem it is probably because the file mode needs to be
changed either of the file you are putting or of the directory, or PUT
isn't working. The error message you see should tell you which it is.

Anyway, I needed to install WEBDAV in order for the Apache 2 server
installed on this box would handle the PUT method. I was getting a 405
(METHOD NOT ACCEPTABLE).

To make this happen,

1) Load the webdav module in the load section of httpd.conf

LoadModule dav_module libexec/apache2/mod_dav.so

2) Add this line somewhere OUTSIDE any Directory or Location entities:

DavLockDB /tmp/DavLock

Make sure
3) Create the directory
mkdir /tmp/DavLock and
chmod 777 /tmp/DavLock

4) Add the line

Dav On inside the Location or Directory configuration section you want to use


Dav On


5) Make sure any directives are not disallowing the PUT or add
an .htaccess file with a specific

Allow from 192.168.1.xxx
#Your Polycom IP address


6) Close httpd.conf

7) sudo apachectl restart

Start testing and look at the eror and access logs. One test would be
to call up the phone's directory and add an entry while watching the
Apache access log and or looking at the date of the directory file
itself.

Apache Errors:

Unable to PUT new contents for /Polycom/0004f09099858-app.log. [403, #0]

403 = the file mode isn't allowing you to modify that file.

Could not open the lock database. [500, #400] The directory you
specified in the DavLockDB directive isn't right or isn't writable

If I say anything dumb or wrong, please comment and correct it

I have a problem: Excess credit for calls to the USA. I need to find someone serving in Iraq who would know how to install a free software phone on a PC and set it up to use this credit. If the setup is successful, maybe we can even get further donations, but for now I've got about 24 hours worth of FREE calls for servicemen and women to telephone in the USA.

The challenge is to find the person who can set up the software. Please send a D message on twitter to 'voipusers' if you can help.

Or send an email to the temporary address: voip-zeeek (-at-) SneakEmail.com

Or, post a comment here (it won't necessarily be published, but I will see it)

Who do I talk to?

Several months ago I needed to export a blog from Serendipity to WordPress. WordPress has an RSS import that works fairly well, only the images required a little extra work. Yesterday, a former customer asked about exporting their blog content to whatever their new host is using. It turned out to be Movable Type. It also turned out that this company didn't know how to import data into MT.

I Googled for "import to movable type" and immediately got back the results that you can see if you do the same. The MT manual page and data format schema are the first two results.


MT uses a text delimited format for imports, for some reason not caring that most blog software can export to RSS 2.0. Why make it easy if they're leaving us, eh? Because you should care about things like this, that's why.

It took about 15 minutes to write a (bad) php script that would spit out the contents of the blog, which is after all a mysql table like most. Once I did that, a global replace for image URLs would fix most of those. Here's the basic idea (after the connect):

// First the query, which will obviously vary depending on what the source is
$sql="SELECT title,author,timestamp,body,extended FROM serendipity_entries";

$result = mysql_query($sql,$db);

while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
echo "TITLE: " .$row['title'] . "\n";
echo "AUTHOR: ".$row['author']. "\n";
echo "DATE: " .date("m-d-Y h:i A", $row['timestamp']) . "\n";
echo "PRIMARY CATEGORY: $primary_category\n";
echo "CATEGORY: $category\n";
echo "-----\n";
echo "BODY:\n";
echo $row['body'];
echo "-----\n";

etc.

So the Twitter API changed and authentication no longer works in the same way. As a result, if you use Twhirl, you can't post to Twitter. If you are cross posting to Twitter from Laconica, it will still work. The symptom is that if you change your credentials for Twitter (Settings->Twitter) or if you are entering your Twitters creds for the first time, it will appear as if you are not giving the correct password.

A change in the Twitter API broke Laconica and Twhirl last night. Here's a quick way to get the issue fixed in Laconica before the updates are available. Nothing to do for Twhirl but wait.
Continue reading "Twitter API change broke Laconica, here's quick fix "

I was curious how long it would take to install my own microforum using Laconica of which I've spoken many, many times.

It took me about 16 minutes, but I cheated. I've installed it a few times before.

Get the latest version by grabbing the link at http://laconi.ca

Today, at the top of the list: 11/23/2008 Laconica_0.6.3

The version will of course advance as time goes on.
Continue reading "Set up a Laconica Instance in 20 minutes"

You can post to your Laconica instance via email. Extra steps are needed to use email-related functionality.
On *nix platform servers if you are running sendmail email is configured in the /etc/mail directory in files virtusertable and aliases. Skip the rest of this if you run Windows or qmail.

In /etc/mail/virtusertable either modify or add the line to route ANY unrecognized address to the Laconica mailerdaemon, which is not a daemon at all but a filter.

@yourdomain.tld laconica_mail_script

In /etc/mail/aliases add this line using the full path to the file in the Laconica distribution

laconica_mail_script: "|/full_path_to_your_installation_/scripts/maildaemon.php"

Make sure this file is executable and if it isn't, do this:

chmod +x path_to_it/maildaemon.php

What the above does is this: if an email arrives that is not for an address listed in virtusertable, it will be passed to the filter included in Laconica, a file called maildaemon.php

What the filter does is check the address against the list of valid users and if it finds it, and if the email is coming from the associated address, it publishes the email contents as a post.

Note that if your address is compromised, it's trivial to then spoof the From email and post to your account. Laconica should probably add a password to the title of emails sent to it.

Note in passing, you can run several Laconica instances on different domains on one server and use one domain to send the mail. All that is configured in the config.php file.

Speaking of email, Laconica currently uses email to send SMS. On my particular provider, all I get is a free SMS with "you've got mail" heads up, so it isn't too useful, but if your provider allows SMS via email, you might want to try this. In the meantime, the email post allows you to talk to your Laconica instance from your cell if browsing is not comfortable (i.e., you don't have a modern phone, which I do not) or if browsing is too expensive.

Let's back up and look at the most basic uses of a microforum built on Laconica.

Suppose we have a local Alpha-Roméo club. Further suppose they have an active forum built on the excellent the phpBB. What could our Elm Street Alpha Club ("ESAC") possibly do with a microforum?

Realtime news
First, insert feeds from the existing traditional forum into the ESAC Microforum using TwitterFeed. This excellent service will take an RSS feed and post it automatically on your Laconica instance. The forum titles with links to the posts are now available without visiting the forum. Suppose you're the admin of that forum. You can look at what's going on there simply by monitoring the Laconica instance.

Other client apps
I need to pause here to mention something I find crucial to the choice of Laconica as a platform: the fact that Twhirl works perfectly with it. If our club members want to be on Twitter and monitor their club site, they can do this in two different windows with Twhirl. The Twhirl client also refreshes automatically and takes up less space in a window.
Continue reading "Basic Microforum Features and Uses"