So I picked the cell phone and plan I was going to get and decided to get a Blackberry with a $15 email plan. Everything set, I sit down at the computer only to find that the $15 plan has mysteriously disappeared. I call the retailer whose website I was going through and find out that Bell “arbitrarily” pulled the plan this morning and nobody knows what’s going on. Leave it to Bell to pull something like this with no warning.

EDIT: The plan came back and I ordered my Blackberry this evening. Thanks to Bell for having a shred of common sense.

Note: Not for the faint of heart. If you have no idea what I’m talking about after the third line, you may want to stop reading. This has almost nothing to do with law school. I get side-tracked too sometimes. I’m writing this partly to remeber what I did to set the system up in case it crashes and I have to start over. Also, it might help some people.
————————————-

Who knew that setting up a phone would take almost two months and a heck of a lot of effort? But wait…this is no ordinary phone. This phone (with Toronto local area code 416) could be used anywhere in the world, it will tell you the weather, wake you up, wake you up by telling you the weather, make a suggestion on what to wear, cook breakfast…you get the idea (it can’t actually cook breakfast, but with some screativity, it can tell you what to wear).

The coolest thing is that the whole system costs $50 per YEAR (the cost of the phone number) and the price of an old computer (or a netbook in my case). You get unlimited incoming and outgoing calls local (416/647/905) calls and dirt cheap long distance if you so desire. Because this works over the internet, you can be in India, and 416 will still be local to you. In my case, I will be in London, and 416 will be local to me.

Hardware Requirements

• Old computer, laptop or netbook (500MHz+, 512MB RAM, 2GB HDD is the minimum). I got a netbook to minimize power use
• SD card in the case of a small HDD (if you have a large hard drive, you don’t need it…unless…keep reading)
• VoIP ATA (connects your phone to the internet. I use a Linksys PAP2, $60 brand new). Alternatively, you can use a ZAP card, but that’s not what I’m doing.
• A phone (yes, any old phone)
• Router (obviously!)
• An internet connection (or else you phone will not work!)

Software Requirements

These will be installed one by one:

• GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition is what I’m using)
• Asterisk 1.4x
• FreePBX 2.5.x
• Apache, PHP, MySQL

Installing Linux

The first time I did this, I installed Linux to the 2GB solid state hard drive in my old eeepc 2G Surf netbook. However, by the time I installed all the above software, I used up 90% of the disk. I figure this is no good. I went out and bought a 4GB SD card, and when it came time to partition the disk, I chose the manual option and mounted “/” to “/dev/sdb0″ instead “/dev/sda0″. This ensured that Linux is installed on the network card, not the hard disk. I’m using the hard disk as swap space.

Advantages of using an SD card:
In my case, the advantage was clear: more memory. For those with bigger hard drivers, please consider the fact that an SD card:

• Makes no noise
• Makes no heat
• Has no moving parts
• Much more energy efficient

In any case, decide on what you need. If you do decide to install on an SD card, you may have to switch a setting in the BIOS and make your SD card slot the first boot priority. Do this if you get a GRUB error after installation.

Linux should be installed while the computer is plugged into the router with an ethernet cable. Wireless will not work and internet access is nice to have during the installation.

If installing the server edition of ubuntu, make sure to install the OpenSSH server, but do not install anything else.

After Ubuntu is successfully installed, it is a good idea to switch over the wireless (if you will be using it):

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

In that file, before “exit 0″, put in the following:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid “Your-Wireless-Network-Name”
sudo iwconfig wlan0 key s:YourWEPkey
sudo dhclient

If you are secured with WPA, search the internet on how to set it up under Ubuntu. If you are not secured, you suck and people will steal your internet connection. Take out the second line (the one that has the word “key” in it). But you should really secure your network. In case you are using a hex key, change the second line to “sudo iwconfig wlan0 key YourKey” (no need for “s:”).

Unplug the ethernet cable, reboot the computer and watch it connect.

Installing everything else

At this point, you can stop trying to type on a tiny netbook keyboard (or unplug the monitor from your old PC). Find out your server’s IP address (check the router config page) and use PUttY (google it, download it) to connect to your server. You now have a nice terminal window to work with on a full-size keyboard in a comfortable chair, instead of on the floor under a desk or wherever your server is.

The hard part of installing the software is actually done for us by some very nice people in the Ubuntu community. A script has been put together that will install Apache, PHP, MySQL, Asterisk, FreePBX, Zaptel drivers, and libpri. It can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AsteriskScriptOnHardy. Make sure to follow the instructions.

Setting up your phone to be a phone, not just a heap of metal

Now, you must set up your phone system to function as a phone. I will not walk your through this because every setup is different. I am using a company called vbuzzer and it offers a lot of walkthroughs for setting up the phone systems. The walkthough for “trixbox one user” works great . The idea however is as follows:

call comes in -> asterisk decides which phone to send it to -> phone recieves it and rings
a number is dialed on a phone -> asterisk decides which phone company to use -> call is made

In my case everything is simple: I have one phone company and one phone (extension). All incoming calls go to my extension and all outgoing calls use vbuzzer. Poke around the freepbx pages, paying particular attention to extensions, trunks, outbound routers and inbound routes. Have fun!

Next Steps

Do the following (trust me):

cd ~
sudo apt-get install flite0-dev alien
wget https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=215136
tar -xzvf asterisk-flite-0.5.tar.gz
unlink asterisk-flite-0.5.tar.gz
cd asterisk-flite*
make
sudo make install
wget ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/updates/8/i386.newkey/asterisk-curl-1.4.22-2.fc8.i386.rpm
sudo alien -i asterisk-curl-*.rpm
unlink asterisk-curl-*.rpm
sudo apt-get clean
sudo amportal restart

This giver asterisk two basic tools that you can use in telephony: curl (download info from the web on the fly) and flite (a text-to-speech engine for interacting with the callers).

The next thing to start doing is reading this site. It offers all kinds of cool things that you can do with your spiffy new phone system. Look at “caller ID superfecta” (provides name caller ID, something that VoIP comanies don’t), “worldwide weather” (weather), “hotel style wakeup calls”, and anything else that looks interesting. If you have specific questions about your setup, don’t ask me, head over to the forums (freepbx forums, pbxinaflash forums, etc.).

A Note

If your computer is not “hot off the press” and contains no “weird” hardware, you can avoid all the hard work of installing Linux and all the software by downloading a copy of PBXinAflash. This is a full operating system with all the software pre-installed. However, you can’t do cool geeky stuff like installing to an SD card, you lose all the knowledge you can going by doing it all yourself, and if you have weird hardware (or a netbook), it simply won’t work.

Thanks for reading and have fun!

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last month, but there realy hasn’t been any moviement on the law school front. My apartment in London is now basically set up and I’m continually moving (non-critical, non-expensive) stuff in there. My goal is to be living in London full-time by mid-August.

I have also been asked to write a short column for Amicus Curiae, the UWO Law student newspaper, regarding issues such as why I chose law generally and Western specifically. This comes after the editor of that paper noticed my posts on this blog as well as on LawIsCool.

Hopefully the next update will take less than a month as things start moving at a slightly faster pace.