I've got a question for VoIP pros and developers out there...
The other day, I flashed an antenna for one of my colleagues, as a newby he asked me if all the phone numbers for his AREDN phone were now stored in there (of course not..). But - a few days later, I gave the new UI a try and saw that you can now enter a "phone" info in the services section. Wouldn't that be a great starting point for a "data collector," like a service that regularly surveys the network for nodes with phone numbers, which would save them along with the node name and IP address, in best case in one of the XML import phone book formats of the most common phone types (Cisco, Yealink, etc.). Like this you could get rid of a PBX (which is also called a single point of failure...), as only direct IP calls would be used.
What do you think of this idea?
Hi, Kurt:
I don't care for it, but a buddy of mine in the next county likes IP dialing
more than dialing PBX extensions and more than SIP:<hostname> dialing.
:-|
I think everyone willing to share their VoIP telephone should advertise their phone as
<callsign>-phone
What do you think of this idea?
73, Chuck
Hi, Kurt:
I don't have a phone book in my phone either.
I can dial by hostname from Linphone.
I just enter SIP:nc8q-phone and Linphone looks up the IP address from the AREDN DNS server and dials.
On my PBX, I program 'dial-by-callsign' so that I, again, do not need a phone book.
" Even if you would have one, you couldn't be sure which of the phone numbers were actually on the air at the time. "
Yes, even with a phone book or an advertised hostname, you are never sure if the phone is active.
"collecting both the PBX telephone number and their IP address"
You can collect a current IP address via DNS and this allows the VoIP phone to 'move around'.
If one collects a phone's IP address, sometime later it could change and your phone book would be in error.
A while back my neighbor that likes to dial-by-ip moved his phone.
He then needed to send emails to to his friends announcing his phone's new IP address.
I replied, I do not dial-by-static-ip-address,
I dial by your phone's published host name and I already have your new number. ;-)
73, Chuck