Lew's blog

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.

A decade ago, I hosted a website for my partner, so that she could post photos and such for her family to see. She didn't use it much, and, in 2017, the hosting software reached end-of-life. So, I shut the site down, planning to upgrade the software and resurrect the site later.

Well, life got in the way, and I never did resurrect the site. Until now.

I make no secret about it that I run Slackware on both my server and my desktop workstation. Slackware allows me to manage my systems the way I want to, without a "nanny" holding my hand and saying "No.". And, with this level of freedom comes a corresponding level of risk; you can really fsck things up as Slackware doesn't supply a safety net. But, that's all right: I believe in learning skills, and Slackware certainly requires skills.

In the year and a half since I wrote IP04 Progress, I've expanded my simple telephone system into something a little more comprehensive. I had three goals in mind; to provide that "complete accounting" of incoming and outgoing calls that my provider wouldn't supply, to manage the incoming calls so that I would be less bothered by telemarketers and other annoying callers, and to position the IP04 as a part of a much larger home automation project.

I've slowly worked my way towards all that, in fits and starts, and am ready to share some of my progress.

For years, I've played with my 4-port embedded-linux Asterisk PBX (the IP04 from rowetel.com). Now, I've finally decided to move it out of the toychest and into real use.