As has been mentioned before in previous posts, we don’t have a regular telephone service beyond our mobile phones and the plan is to use “asterisk” as a telephone exchange. For a large part of last weekend I spent time trying to get it working happily with the rest of our kit. All the time I was working on it, and failing to get it to work, I was relying on any incoming calls being diverted to a voicemail system belonging to our VoIP provider and so happily hacked away at all of the various byzantine configuration options. I managed to configure extension 500 to make the sound of monkeys screeching (one of the free sounds asterisk provides in its arsenal) whenever we dialed it. Being a phreaky geek I was excited about this because it showed I was getting somewhere. But after many hours of hacking I was still unable to make and receive calls from the outside world.
It wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that I realised the truth: everything was working perfectly, except:

• Outgoing calls were being dialed with no numbers, resulting in no sound and
• Incoming calls were being accepted and sent to the sound of screeching monkeys!

Sorry to any folks who tried to call during that time.

Tonight I was trying to find some suitably offensive music to download in the hope of subjecting telemarketers to it, when I suddenly remembered that I own some really dreadfully shit music already! After a little searching I became aware of how utterly unpleasant some of my CDs would be as unsolicited hold music. Akie’s classic “Magic Troms” proved to be our favourite. Listen out telemarketers.