SIP Witch, Skype and cell phones...

[Bill Davidsen]

Linuxguy123 wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 10:54 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:50:15 -0430,
>>   Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 09:15 -0600, Linuxguy123 wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>> So SIP Witch is a SIP server, meaning that I could get a SIP capable
>>>> phone, set up SIP Witch with a POTS connection and connect my phone
>>>> through SIP Witch to the phone system ?
>>> I've no idea what SIP Witch is. RTFM. But consider this: if it's a
>>> server it has to be connected to the net. Connecting to a simple POTS
>>> line with no network on top of it isn't going to get you anything.
>> I wouldn't go that far. You can do fun stuff within your house independent
>> of whether or not you are connected to POTS and/or the internet.
>>
>> You can get hardware that will either talk to phones or the telco for
>> prices that are not cheap, but not out of line for a hobbiest. Unfortunately
>> the people that produce the most popular driver for such hardware refuse
>> to upstream their GPL code so that they can dual license it. So the code
>> isn't available in Fedora and using it from ATRPMS is dicey if you like to
>> track recent kernels or rawhide.
> 
> Tell me more about this, please.
> 
>> I have a play setup at home, but currently am just using it as an intercom
>> system between upstairs and downstairs. I don't have a POTS connection
>> currently and was having some issues with some things I was doing to connect
>> the phones to a SIP/IAX server (asterisk) and haven't made time to play with
>> it recently.
> 
> I never thought of that... get a bunch of VOIP phones, preferably
> wireless and one could implement a pretty neat home phone system.  That
> is one of our problems... all our phone messages end up in one voice
> mail box and its always full.  
> 
Why don't you just get a Google voice account, which doesn't get full, emails 
you voice mail to you, can call your home and cell number, etc? If you want to 
learn about SIP and POTS, get asterisk and a case of beer, and set aside a 
weekend. If you just want it to *work*, use the easy solution.

Kind of neat if you want to get rid of the land line and use your cell(s), have 
gvoice ring ALL the cell numbers, and call that your "home phone" which you can 
give people. And you get selective block, send a number to a particular cell, 
etc, etc.

Or find a decent dial-up modem with voice. vgetty allows all manner of things, 
like blocking numbers with no caller id (or after bedtime), sending certain 
people to voice mail, giving different canned massages to different people. 
That's great fun, you can spend days building a tree which does everything.

> Does SIPWitch handle voicemail ? Will SIPWitch send an email to a user
> when it receives a voicemail ?
> 
> As you can tell, telecommunications is a bit of a problem around our
> house.  I'd love to solve that problem with Linux.
> 
> 


-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot