IP04

Recently, my day stood still as I waited for an important email. While I stared at my email client, silently encouraging it to report my long-awaited email, I cursed my immobility. Here I sat, stuck indoors, in front of a screen, when I could instead enjoy the good weather, sip a cold drink and read a book on my deck. How I wished for a portable tool that would notify me audibly when email arrived in my In Basket.

Well, that didn't last. I got to thinking about my incoming context, and how I wanted it to work. Right now, it answers the PSTN, rings all the house phones, and hangs up (with a goodbye message, on occassion). I don't like that script much, and it is time to change that around a bit.

Let's go over that again, and I'll point out what I don't like.

1. The PSTN line rings, and the IP04 Answer()s it. There's an audible hesitation when the IP04 picks up the line

In my last entry ("Thoughts on a home PBX", I mused on how my exploration of the IP04 had bogged down because I didn't have a good plan for how I wanted to use it. Well, that's cleared up now.

I haven't had a lot of time to play with the IP04 recently; I've had some website changes on my mind, and that took most of my energies. However, I did get to play a little, today.

I've read through the Asterisk book, and feel ready to try my hand at configuring the IP04. The first thing I want to do is configure the device to answer my telephone, and transfer incoming calls to which ever extension picks up first. Simple, yes? Not so fast...

Today, I explored the IP04's Asterisk setup a little closer. I had my IP04 loaded with one FXO port (for connecting to the PSTN), and three FXS ports (for connecting to extension phones). The default configuration for Asterisk recognizes this configuration for the purposes of initializing hardware, but otherwise does not have settings to handle the FXO port. In fact, the default dialplans look on the device as containing up to eight FXS ports, and no FXO ports at all. Obviously, I will have to change this.