As you will hear shortly on show #38, there were two main responses regarding my query about having a SIP address for a comment line that would record a voicemail message and send it to my email address.  One response led to the hosted SIP comment line that we recently announced.  The other response, from Julien Goodwin, was an explanation of how to do this in Asterisk.  While I personally don’t have the time to administer systems and run my own Asterisk server, I thought I would post it here for others to see and experiment with.

Julien provided the following configuration, noting that he had not tested this, but it was based off of his working configuration:

extensions.conf:

[sip-guest]
s,1,goto(bluebox,1)
i,1,goto(bluebox,1)

bluebox,1,answer
bluebox,n,Voicemail(u1)
bluebox,n,hangup

[some-private-context]
bluebox-admin,1,Voicemailmain(1) ; User side of VM, to set message

sip.conf:
[general]
context = sip-guest
disallow=all                    ; Disallow all codecs
allow=ulaw                      ; Allow codecs in order of preference
allow=alaw
allow=gsm
allow=ilbc
; G729 could also be allowed if your system has a license

voicemail.conf: 
[default]
1 => 12345,Bluebox Comments 
Box,blueboxpodcast@gmail.com,,attach=yes|delete=1|format=wav

(NOTE: These last two lines were split for formatting but should
be merged onto a single line.)

Thank you, Julien, for providing this and if people find it useful and/or make suggestions/comments, please do leave those as comments to this post.

Thanks to Dean over at voipuser.org, along with Martyn Davies who did some great testing, we now have a comment line to which you can connect via SIP.  All you need to do is use your SIP phone to call the address:

bluebox@voipuser.org

(Please note that this is NOT an email address, but rather a SIP address.)  Martyn and Dean have both left messages and it seems to work well. 

If you have a SIP phone with the ability to call across the Internet, please do give it a try and leave us a message.  Feedback is definitely welcome.  Again, many thanks to Dean for setting this up and to Martyn for helping with testing.

P.S. As a bonus, we also now have a PSTN comment line in the UK: +44 844 933 6305.  If you want to give that number a try, please do!

Well, we recorded Blue Box #38 last week, but Jonathan was in Asia and we had some connectivity issues which required more post-production than I could do before leaving for Fall VON.   It will be out, soon, though.

Also, if any of you are here at Fall VON 2006 in Boston, please do drop us an email. I (Dan) am at the show and will be on a panel of VoIP bloggers tomorrow at 1:30pm Eastern.  I’ll also be doing some interviews which I intend to put up as a special edition.

Stay tuned for more…

While K7.net provides a very nice voicemail service for free, one of the disadvantages of using the service is that if no one calls your number in 30 days, the number is made inactive and there is no way to start using it again.  In periods where we have had no audio comments for some time, I have tried to remember to just call it myself… unfortunately, I didn’t do so recently and so we lost the number we have been using since October 2005.

The new comment number is +1-206-350-2583 ("2583" = "blue" – cute, eh?) Please do give us a call and let us know your thoughts on the show.

(And yes, in the recording of show 36 we still mention the old number – I unfortunately discovered the problem after uploading the already post-produced show 36.)

Well, I gave it a valiant try, but the lesson of this week is that I have to either: 1) wipe and re-format my laptop; or 2) figure out another way to do post-production while travelling.  When trying this week to edit the recording Jonathan and I did right before I left for IETF, my laptop kept entering a state of doing an insane amount of disk swapping… and not letting me get the editing done.  So, I’m unfortunately going to have to delay it until I get back home and can use my normal system there.

The good news for you all is that you will wind up with two Blue Box podcasts next week.

BTW, the IETF meeting was excellent… if you haven’t gone before, I’d definitely consider it for future meetings!

FYI, we’ve now recorded interviews with people about IMS security and IPv6 security…  both of those shows will be posted soon.  Also, this week’s podcast will be coming soon – either late tonight or tomorrow.  I’m up at IETF in Montreal and a wee bit challeged for production time. 

The 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards have opened up nominations through July 15th and if any listeners would care to nominate our show in the Technology/Science, Business or other categories, we would be deeply honored.  I’m not necessarily a huge fan of these type of contests, but in this case I believe Todd Cochrane and his crew do a very solid job with the overall process and it’s one that I definitely support.  I’ve gone and nominated several of the shows I believe should be considered – and would encourage you to do the same.  (If you want to nominate several shows for the same category, you can vote again each calendar day – so nominate some today, then some more tomorrow, etc. )  Voting in the contest begins later in July, but the first step is to make it through the nomination process.    Thank you for your consideration.

Unfortunately, it appears that some issue with low disk space on my laptop (I’m currently travelling) caused my edited audio file to become corrupted.  Luckily (because it was a great show) I have a copy of the unedited show, but I now have to re-do the post-production, which with current travel is not something I will probably be able to do until Sunday evening or Monday morning.  So look for the show then.   (And in the meantime I’ve freed up a large amount of diskspace to prevent the recurrence.) 

I’ll briefly explain a bit more of what happened in show #32, which we are recording on Monday with the goal to have it out next Wednesday.  So you’ll probably wind up with two shows next week.

Thanks, again, to all of you who contacted me to let me know what happened.

Thanks to the several listeners who called/emailed to tell me that there was a problem with the MP3 file for show #31.  I have no idea what happened, but I’ve pulled down the file and weblog entry until I can figure it out.

UPDATE: It appears that my edited file was corrupted (potentially due to low disk space), so it looks like I  need to re-edit at least some portion of the file (good news is that I have the original recording)… so it will be a longer project that I’ll have to do tonight.

With show #30, I made a subtle change to the "Name" field of the ID3 tags associated with the show MP3 file.  Instead of "Blue Box Podcast #30: …", it is now "Blue Box #30: …".  I made the change after looking at a list of shows on my iPod and realizing that you couldn’t see the number in the limited number of characters on the screen. There is no easy way to know which show was listed.  I figured having "Podcast" in the ID3 name was rather redundant, so I dropped it.

The only impact this may have on you is that if you use iTunes or another MP3 player that lets you sort by track name (or defaults to doing this), "Blue Box #30:…" will now be listed before the previous episodes whose names began "Blue Box Podcast #xx:…".   Note that there was no change to the file name – this was purely in the ID3 tags associated with the file.