Tag Archives: Tech

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cisco 7960 and trixbox

I’ve been able to borrow a brand spankin’ new Cisco 7960 SIP phone to play around with with my Trixbox server. This appears to be a really nice phone with a lot of features and a quality product. The phone seems to be pre-provisioned with my company’s settings and I am trying to figure out a way to “unlock” it to use with my Trixbox server.

I would consider this an advanced topic for myself since I don’t often get a chance to get my hands on cool hardware like this. The Trixbox server has some tftp files pre-installed but nothing really specific or the required provisioning files for my situation. The Cisco phone wants to phone home to the preconfigured tftp server. Sniffing the traffic and spoofing DNS is trivial but still a lot of work that I don’t need to do if I can figure out how to unlock this thing. I did find these links that appear to be useful, at least initially.

Obviously, I need to get into the details, but as I do, I’ll post my results.

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tech sundays

Today (and a little bit of yesterday) was good with my tech goodies. With the DST situation, my hacked Tivos were about to have some problems. Yesterday they flashed up a message that said something like:

DST is three weeks early and your Tivo will work just fine, but the time displayed will be an hour off and any manually added recordings will need to be adjusted.

At work, there has been a mad dash to update all the machines that are affected by the DST change. My FreeBSD and linux boxes are all okay. So, last night I found the following link for my Directv tivos:

Hot damn! This worked flawlessly. For those of you that don’t know, if you have a Directv Series II tivo and have hacked it, you can’t have it dial in for its updates… otherwise any downloaded updates will whack your hacks and you have to start all over again. So I, and many many people, can’t simply have the DTiVo dial in and get the updates. You’ll have to do it manually. This worked nicely.

While I was at it, I also upgraded “tivowebplus” to version 2.0 which is a release candidate. I actually had to “downgrade” to 1.3.0 from 1.3.1. I can tell already I need to reinstall hackman. That’s easy (if you have done it before).

I also have an update on my cheapo HTPC. The CDROM/IDE drive issue never worked out. But I did find this link to install Ubuntu via Knoppix. This worked good, but I must have foobarred the grub portion since I am getting kernel panics when booting. I’ll have to monkey with it later, but I did spend a good bit of time on it this weekend.

Here’s some other “advanced” ways to install Ubuntu:

I also got some “eval” networking gear from a person in my office. Therefore I think I might be able to help my brother-in-law with his networking issue and the ultimate location of this HTPC. More on that as I work on it and his situation.

I’ve been thinking what’s the best thing to do with the gear I got from the company. I really want to do an honest eval, but the challenge is trying to come up with real world situations. I’ll sleep on it and see what comes up in my head in the morning.

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ViaTalk, Trixbox, and your IVR

I set up a quick page on my ViaTalk setup. You can access the link via this page:

ViaTalk and Trixbox

Like I said before, this is a really slick setup. I have a different “time condition” for the weekend that will give the caller a chance to call our cell phones if we don’t answer the main line within 30 seconds. The trial and error paid off since I have a much better understanding of how it’s all glued together.

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a lot of things going on

This is the second time my draft got wiped out. If it doesn’t work this time, I am going to go to bed and try again tomorrow. Anyways, I got some cool things I am working on so here’s a quick update. Expect some updates over the next couple of weeks.

  • Trixbox and ViaTalk
  • Zero-Cost HTPC

My VoIP provider is ViaTalk. I’ve been with them since 6/06 and they have been great. I’ve been using an unlocked PAP2 ATA adapter. Recently, my Dad sent me a wonderful PC case he no longer needed and I installed Trixbox. I’ve played around with Asterisk on FreeBSD but the whole Trixbox suite is pretty neat. So now I have several softphones and my PAP2 all talking to the Trixbox box. The whole things works so well, I am used to tweaking something until it is perfect and this exceeded my expectation since it works so well. Once I understood everything, it is a snap to set up and adminstrate. A UNIX/LINUX background will give you a leg up on understanding the internals and help you debug all that much more effectively.

Now, my brother-in-law wanted to find a way to display German videos on his TV. In my case, I have an xbox with XMBC and it is a no brainer for me. But he has some intersting limitations, like he doesn’t want to spend any money on it, he might not be able to easily wire his connection, and it has to pass the spousal approval factor. Luckily, he’s got an old AMD PC laying around so we are going to install, (at least the plan is at this point), Ubuntu and MythTV on it and hook it up to his receiver. He doesn’t have an HDTV so RCA or S-Video will probably be okay. This is a learning experience for both of us, so I’ll be posting some updates on this effort over time.

More as time permits. I’ve kept some of the person updates out of this post. Those will come at a later point.