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Talking to Hackers

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Telephony
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

Yesterday Ana finished setting up FreePBX for our house, and revived the Cisco SIP phones to make them useful again. Eventphone provides SIP, DECT, GSM and other telephony technologies at hacker events like CCC and also runs a long-running SIP service, known as EPVPN to connect hackerspaces and hackers between events.

We set up our extension as a trunk in FreePBX and could easily test outbound calls, but it was a little more difficult to test inbound calls. There was no system to queue up a test call (at least that I could find) so we needed to find someone to call back manually.

SpaceAPI provides a JSON document that lets you know if a hackerspace is open or not. It was 11pm in the UK so I wanted to make sure whoever I was calling wouldn’t mind the call. Once I found a hackerspace (Hackspace Marburg) that was open I placed a call and someone answered, but the hackerspace was in Germany and the call was answered in German. Luckily, they also spoke English.

After looking up the documentation of how to call Eventphone extensions using their hackerspace PBX, I got a call back and confirmed that I could receive incoming calls.

Some next steps:

  • Add extensions for the DECT phones which live downstairs
  • Set up a SIP phone for 57North Hacklab for which I have registered extension 1057

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