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Posted By: surdel Are you a asterisk user? - 11/24/08 02:32 PM
I dont know who is or who knows its issues problems and solutions but I have used it for a number of years and sometimes, I just run into a wall on a solution to a issue.

Example, Currently running 1.6 and want to get Festival working properly with asterisk but it seems there is a patch issue that needs to be resolved. This is in /usr/src/asterisk/contrib/festival The patch needs to be taken care of before Festival can work properly with the extention i have setup in extentions.conf.

If anyone has sucsefully setup festival perhaps I could ask you about some of the steps you took to resolve it?
Posted By: Kumba Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 11/24/08 05:39 PM
I would not run 1.6 for anything that has to work for more then a few test calls.

Version number does not equal stability.

I would recommend you use 1.4.21.2 or 1.2.30.2 for production use.

I have looked at 1.6 but wont be investing any real time into it for at least 6 months. Any new version of anything Open Source is always riddled with bugs and potential re-writes.
Posted By: surdel Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 11/25/08 05:15 PM
That is so true kumba. I got rid of 1.6 and went for 1.4. So far so good. BTW there must be more people on here that use and deploy asterisk. Anyone else that you know of? Also, do you configure medium to advanced dail plans?
Posted By: Kumba Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 11/25/08 06:53 PM
I know of a dozen or so people on here that use asterisk back at the shop/bench to simulate a fake CO for testing stuff. Some of them also use it for trouble-shooting or diagnosing issues that would otherwise require thousands of dollars of hardware.

I think Arthur Bloom uses it too hook up his antique/collectible phones and PBX's so they are usable and part of an enthusiast's network. Evidently there are quite a few people who do that (although not many of them frequent here).

I've seens some switchvox and trixbox guys on here. That's essentially a highly modified and re-skinned Asterisk. Depends on how purist you want to get with your Asterisk deployments.

My company does consulting on ViciDial (a call center set-up) as well as vanilla Asterisk. Medium to Advanced are relative terms unfortunately. If you can define those a little more I could answer. I would consider myself an Advanced user, at least in my own opinion. I've done all kinds of strange things with Asterisk including integrating it with a CCTV package called ZoneMinder, standard-style PBX's, load-balanced SIP/IAX gateways, and now call centers.
Posted By: surdel Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 11/26/08 03:44 PM
Yes, I have looked at Zonemindser site. What did you do to have asterisk integrate with zoneminder may I ask?
Posted By: Kumba Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 11/26/08 07:45 PM
Wrote a perl script that would monitor ZoneMinder for motion detection during alarm states. If ZoneMinder detected motion it would fire off a trigger. The job of the perl script was to watch for the trigger, capture the information about the trigger (camera, time, percent of motion in picture), then place a call out to a pre-defined list of numbers. The people on the call list would get a call saying "This is the CCTV system at Building X (or company, whatever)! An alarm has been detected on: <say camera number/name>, at <say time>, with <percent of motion> percent of motion!".

The reason for the percent of motion was so that you could distinguish between a cat or something like camera moved (storms, it's Florida you know). Percent of motion was defined as the average amount of change from frame to frame relative to the total amount of pixels in the image (usually 720x480 or 345K-pixels).

Something small like a cat was always about 5% of motion (depending on camera angle/mounting). 20-80% of motion was usually legit. If you had 80%+ it was something like a tree hit the camera, bird flew into it, bad storm, etc.

It was also hooked into the PA and the overhead light power relay so when it alarmed it would play sirens over the PA and turn the lights on. If you knew the phone number you could call in to deactivate it/etc.

The owner had me modify it so that he could turn the lights on with his phone. The shop entrance door was on the other side of the building from the light switch and he hated crawling through a dark machine shop to turn them on. And yes, he did spend more to have me do that then he would have to have had the electrician extend a switch. Just like he then paid me to make the sirens and warning call use the voice of the computer from star trek and the red-alert sirens. Was a fun project while it lasted.
Posted By: surdel Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 11/27/08 03:31 PM
Kumba,

Have all the hardware here cctv card ect to make a working system. You dont mind if I get a copy of that perl script and see how this work?

Sounds pretty good since this eliminated the use of security watching the cameras 24 hours a day.
Posted By: Kumba Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 11/27/08 09:02 PM
I'll have to swing by and see if I can copy it off his system. I did that almost two years ago. That script has long since perished from my desktop. Also keep in mind that almost nothing in these scripts will be copy-paste into your set-up and work. Almost everything was site/camera specific.

You can start by getting ZoneMinder up and running. That was always pretty fun depending on the capture cards you were dealing with.

After that there are two ways to make it do things on motion detection. First is by telling zone minder to run a command when it detects motion. Problem with this was that if your capture timeframe were 5-minutes (5-minute chunks from segment to segment) that it could take up to that long for it to run.

Second way was using a perl module with ZoneMinder that you could include in a perl script to somewhat do realtime monitoring (take seconds now). The perl script that I started with was zmtrigger.pl which is part of the regular ZoneMinder distribution. This has to be customized to your particular monitor (camera) set-up to work.

The first method was the easiest but had the longest delay obviously. The second method was a real pain to get working from what I remember.

The Asterisk part (turning alarms on/off, lights, etc) was all handled through shell scripts on the OS.

Also, it wasn't perfect, as with any motion detection set-up. And i'm not sure I would go as far as to say it can replace a guard. But it was a lot better then nothing smile
Posted By: jctsphone Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 02/17/09 05:35 AM
wow, it is awesome to find people that are doing things that I am. I just did my first install of zoneminder last week, with two IP cameras, I havent gotten into it as much as you. I am looking into setting up a .call file in asterisk to do the same thing, call me when something is in the camera view. I have been running asterisk at my house for years. Our company sold only one system as the salesmen would rather sell avaya (I think its cause the asterisk system has never generated a call back for service). I would appreciate it if I could email you guys and discuss a project, a salesman said one of his clients asked him about Asterisk, and he said he had a tech that knew alot about it....Mind you I have only setup my house and 1 small company 10 phones. 4 Trunk lines. This new site would have 80 phones and a PRI, I am not sure about hardware specs and all that, so any thoughts?

btw I have a script that I put together using python and twill to allow me to call home and setup manual recordings in mythtv.
Posted By: Kumba Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 02/17/09 11:11 AM
Yeah, sure. You are welcome to e-mail me.

The number of phones doesn't really matter to Asterisk as much as the concurrent call volume and extra features like call recording. Still, with a vanilla Asterisk system, a small server can easily handle a single PRI. My standard server platform can handle rapid-dialing of 150-concurrent channels without any real issues.

It all just depends on how complicated a dialplan you are executing.
Posted By: Baylink Re: Are you a asterisk user? - 04/14/09 08:18 AM
Yep, Asterisk is a fun toy. I'm one of Kumba's customers; we run a 4-room, 2-site call center just shy of 500 seats on Asterisk 1.2.30 boxes, channel banks, and PRIs; 25 telephony servers mostly with Sangoma a104's, but the occasional leftover Digium card.
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