Into the Wild

Recently, I participated in a discussion about using Asterisk on the Raspberry Pi, to provide a call filtering facility for a home installation. My correspondant had tried to set up a Raspberry Pi and VoIP handset to handle phone calls such that incoming calls would pass through a whitelist/blacklist, promoting good callers and damning bad callers, while directing outgoing calls to their intended destinations.

As this is exactly what my long running Receptionist project does, I offered to send him a basic version of my dialplan for his own use. It took a bit to strip out the bells-and-whistles that I've incorporated into the dialplan over the years, and to test it out on a Raspberry Pi, but I got the whole thing together and sent it off.

And, now, I've got a basic Receptionist, all packaged up with no where to go. So, with this blog entry, I set it free on the interwebs. I've licenced the dialplan under the GPL v2, and included enough background material that someone with Asterisk experience should easily be able to get it running. I do not include any of the back-end material (shell scripts, PHP pages, databases, etc) that I use to manage the Receptionist's features; these I leave as "exercises for the reader".

What's included:

README

the usual sort of README file, introducing the software and listing the included files

LICENCE.TXT

the GPL v2 licence for the Receptionist.inc dialplan

Receptionist Notes.pdf

a PDF that describes the Asterisk database and soundbytes used by the Receptionist dialplan

Receptionist.inc

containing the Receptionist dialplan logic

extensions.conf

an example extensions.conf, to illustrate how to use the Receptionist dialplan

load_astdb.sh

a set of rasterisk "database put" statements that load an example set of AstDB setting for the Receptionist dialplan.

Receptionist.soundbytes.txt

an example recording script for each sound file used by the Receptionist dialplan, provided for documentation purposes only

If this is your thing, please try it out. I don't guarantee that this is bug-free code; while the original runs fine on my IP04, this is a stripped-down version, changed for Asterisk 11 syntax and modified a bit for my correspondant's use. If you use it, I wouldn't mind getting feedback and suggestions.

Thanks