Daniel's Intuit Blog - pulse of Asterisk & Nagios

Dear Asterisk/FreePBX friends

Two weeks back i was asked by Packt Publishing if i'm interested to write a book about FreePBX. So we spent some time to identify the outline and chapter structure. And yes for sure i love to do that.

I will be very busy the next couple of weeks, writing the book. The book will be praxis oriented and start with a plain vanilla Debian and Asterisk installation from scratch.

The book will focus on a real live deployment of Asterisk and FreePBX without the need of Trixbox, Elastix etc....

Let me know if you have any cool input for the book. Will keep you updated on the progress.

Cheers
Daniel

This month we got our new office!!! We celebrated this occasion with champagne, food and a round of bowling.

We hope to move in our new office by next month. Here some pictures:

The lonely cooler with the champagne....

Our street. Lot's of restaurants, bars and SPA's...

Cheers!

Thats reflecting Marco's humor... smile

Azwin our newest Intuiter.. welcome!

Frank in action... so dynamic

The winner team. They destroyed us! Wonder if they really work or just hang out at the bowling.....?

Sunil, as calm as ever.

Cheers
Daniel

Couple of days ago, we (the Intuit owners) went up to Genting Highland to get some fresh air and discuss and brainstorm some new ideas.

Genting is about 45 minutes (fast) drive away from the heat of Kuala Lumpur, 1800 meters above sea level. We decided to take the "romantic" cable car ride up....

Here some pictures:

Cable-Car Base-Station

Frank - our VP Global Project Management

Sanjay - our VP Global Consulting, Marco - our VP Global Sales, and Frank

Rain-Forest on the way up to the top.

more rain-Forest on the way up to the top...

gorillas in the myst....

Daniel - el Presidente and chief entertainment officer

Cheers and have a great day!

Daniel

If you install Asterisk with my script the FOP (Flash Operator Panel) is not working properly. This is due to some path related issues on the Debian install.

Here the steps to make FOP work smoothly on a plain vanilla Asterisk / FreePBX installation:

1. Download latest FOP

cd /usr/src

wget http://www.asternic.org/files/op_panel-0.29.tar.gz

tar -xzvf op_panel-0.29.tar.gz

2. Copy the new files into the right location

cd /usr/src/op_panel-0.29/flash

cp operator_panel.swf /var/www/html/panel

cd..

cp *.cfg /var/www/html/panel

cp *.pl /var/www/html/panel

3. Change some values in the config files

cd /var/www/html/panel

sed '3s/use_amportal_conf=0;/use_amportal_conf=1;/g' op_server.cfg > op_server.$

mv op_server.cfg.tmp op_server.cfg

sed "6s/manager_host=192.168.0.1/manger_host=yourip/g" op_server.cfg > op_server.c$

mv op_server.cfg.tmp op_server.cfg

sed "9s/manager_user=user/manger_host=admin/g" op_server.cfg > op_server.cfg.tmp

mv op_server.cfg.tmp op_server.cfg

sed "10s/manager_secret=secret/manger_secret=amp111/g" op_server.cfg > op_server.cfg.tmp

mv op_server.cfg.tmp op_server.cfg

cd /etc

sed "40s/AMPWEBADDRESS=xx.xx.xx.xx/AMPWEBADDRESS=yourip/g" amportal.conf > amportal.conf.tmp

mv amportal.conf.tmp amportal.conf

Now you need to change a path in /var/www/html/admin/views/panel.php:

nano /var/www/html/admin/views/panel.php

change:

src="../../panel/index_amp.php.....

to:

src="../panel/index_amp.php.....

4. Restart Asterisk / FreePBX

amportal restart

Now you should see your FOP under "Panel" in FreePBX:

Cheers
Daniel

Today’s instant messaging services like MS Messenger and Yahoo Messenger are widely used in organizations. Employee’s spend many minutes or hours every day chatting. A lot of this chatting is not work related and is using your resources in terms of productivity and network infrastructure.

On top of the productivity loss you expose your companies sensitive information over a un-secure public network.

Can you imagine that two of your staff use instant messaging to discuss a contract related matter over a public available infrastructure like MS Messenger?

If you try to block MS Messenger respectively Yahoo Messenger you normally get a lot of resistance because employees argue that they need these services to effectively collaborate with their colleagues. I do agree with that.

So how you control that your employees only chat about business related matters and not waste your money?

With Openfire you can build your own instant messenger platform within your organization. This solution allows you to have a secure, controllable and feature rich instant messaging collaboration platform within your enterprise.

If some staff complains that they need to instant message certain individuals outside your enterprise then you can simply use the Openfire gateway feature to bridge a Openfire account with a defined MS Messenger or Yahoo Messenger account. All this gateways are centrally managed by you and therefore controllable and auditable.

Openfire integrates into your LDAP environment like Microsoft Active Directory, therefore you don’t need to create all Openfire accounts manually.

On top of all, Openfire will cost you zero in license fee! The server as well as the client software are open source.

Here some Screenshots:

Spark Clients:

Web-Client:

Openfire-Administration Interface

Openfire-Gateways

Openfire-Reports

Openfire Asterisk Integration:

If you combine Openfire with Asterisk you have the perfect collaboration, unified messaging and presence management solution. Openfire provides a Asterisk plugin which connects to one or many asterisk servers at the same time. With this combination you achieve 2 main goals:

Presence-Management:
You will see if your colleagues are connected to your network and are available.
If someone is on the phone, the status of this person will immediately change to
“On the phone”

Direct-Dialing:
You can call your colleagues by double clicking the User-Icon in your Spark client.
It does not matter if you call a softphone, deskphone or handphone Openfire will send the necessary information to your Asterisk server which initiate the dialing for you.

Print-Screens for Asterisk integration:

Create-Integration

Phone-Mapping

Enjoy the Dream-Team !!!!!

As always let me know if you have any questions regarding this post.

Cheers and enjoy your weekend!

Daniel