A while ago I posted a small HOWTO on how to use Pilmo and the Pilmo Voicefinder with Asterisk. In response to that I got some requests on how to unlock the Voicefinder. Although there is no need to unlock it when using my instructions, here’s how:

Download an original Addpac firmware from http://www.addpac.com/addpac_eng/customer.html

Just type AP200 in the download box and you’ll get a list of available firmwares.

• Connect the voicefinder using a DTE serial cable.
• When the system boots press Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X alternately until you see BOOT_login:
• Login as guest using password guest.
• Set a new password for the root user using the password command: password newpw newpw
• Do a show interfaces.
• Configure your PC to be in the same IP range (or reconfigure the voicefinder IP).
• FTP to the voicefinder IP address and upload the downloaded firmware. (Login using root and the newly set password.)
• When the upload is complete the Voicefinder will report the version of the firmware you uploaded an start writing it to flash.
• Once writing and verifying is completed type reboot.

The voicefinder will reboot using the newly uploaded original firmware. It will ask your DHCP server for an IP address. Go there with your favorite web browser and behold.. a full Addpac webinterface :)

Two weeks ago XS4ALL introduced ‘Personal Livestream‘, allowing their customers to share their own audio/video stream with an unlimited number of viewers within XS4ALL and a handful on the rest of the Internet. Sounds good?

Unfortunatly their website tells you the service will only work with Windows as the service requires Windows Media Encoder. Sound bad!

Fortunatly it’s easy to prove them wrong using vlc:

vlc input_stream --sout '#transcode{vcodec=DIV3,vb=256,scale=1,acodec=mp3,ab=32,channels=2}:std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,url=:7007}'

Replace input_stream with your favorite audio/video files or devices, register your stream with XS4ALL and enjoy!

The last few years I’ve been using Pilmo as my voip provider and am quite pleased with it. The good thing about them is that they supply me with a regular Dutch phone number including a normal area code and not some weird number in one of the dedicated voip number ranges. The bad thing about them is that prices at other providers have been dropping and they are slow to follow.

What I wanted was to keep Pilmo for my incoming calls and use other providers for my outgoing calls. Unfortunately the ATA they supply is more or less locked. I decided to install Asterisk and tweak its config to proxy between their ATA and the Pilmo servers. I can now receive calls on my Pilmo phone number and call everyone I know, even abroad, for free using an IAX channel to voipbuster.com.

I posted my config to: voip-info.org