Annals of Telephony

For those of you who have been following along with my telephony exploits, an update.

When we last left the issue a year ago, I’d migrated all of my telephone numbers to Vitelity, including local Charlottetown numbers for home and office, something enabled by Vitelity’s then-new ability to port 902 numbers to become DIDs. That’s worked very well for the last year.

This year, as part of a gradual plan to wean myself from the aging server that’s sitting in the server room at silverorange, I’ve taken another couple of steps:

1. I migrated from Asterisk running on ye olde server to Asterisk running on a Raspberry Pi sitting beside me here on my desk in the Reinventorium behind a Bell Aliant Fibre Op connection with a dynamic IP. Unbelievably, this works extremely well, given that it’s running on a $35 piece of hardware: the RasPBX, which wraps up Asterisk and FreePBX into an easy-to-install distrubution for the Pi. And it just works.
2. This change then left me with a conundrum: my home phone, a regular old cordless phone connected to a Sipura 2000 box, was no longer to see my Asterisk box, obscured as it now is behind a dynamic IP. Rather than trying to configure a dynamic DNS or some such solution, I simply created a Vitelity sub-account, moved my home phone number to that, and then connected the Sipura box directly to Vitelity, using their own (free) Voicemail system as a replacement for my own Asterisk voicemail.

All of this took more fiddling that this description suggests, but it’s working well now.