[Asterisk-Users] Jumping on the asterisk bandwagon

[Nilesh Londhe]

After two weeks of reading about asterisk and joining this mailing
list, I finally decided jumping on the asterisk bandwagon... Asterisk
rocks!!!

I have a www.Stanaphone.com SIP (free) for incoming line and a
www.VOIPJET.com IAX line for outbound. I also have a www.Vonage.com
line (gives me 500 outbound minutes) and a Cingular cell phone (gives
me 800 minutes) and I also use Skype fairly regularly. Not sure if
there is a skype to asterisk gateway in software (probably won't
happen because of intellectual property reasons) so I needed three FXO
ports and one FXS port. Below is how I plan to connect all these.

FXO #1 for Vonage ATA RT31P2 www.vonage.com
FXO #2 for Cellphone connected via Doc-N-Talk from www.phonelabs.com
FXO #3 for Skype to RJ11 adapter (www.echostore.com) and skype
http://www.skype.com/products/skype/linux/ and skypemate for linux
http://www.yealink.com/en/download/install-SkypeMate.zip

and the only FXS for the existing RJ11 house wiring that has been
safely disconnected from PSTN several years ago since Vonage started
business. All other extensions that I plan will be IP Phones
(hardphone/softphone) that will hook into my home gigabit ethernet.

So I ordered two x100p from ebay (gets me one FXO each), bought a
SIPURA SPA-3000 (gets me one FXO and one FXS), reformatted my 7 year
old pc and installed asterisk at home for use in my home. I tried my
first setup of asterisk at home ISO v2.2 and I am in love with this
already.

I am looking for ideas and examples, specifically those that support
the following scenarios:

1. Optimize outbound minutes usage: First use up all 500 Vonage
minutes and then switchover to cellphone to use up 800 outbound any
time minutes and then switch over to VOIPJET if needed. I have a small
script that uses CURL and grabs remaining vonage minutes. I want to be
able to extract that information from vonage page and use that
intelligently to switch over to using my cellphone (via doc-n-talk)
for outbound calls. Similarly, I want to be able to extract remaining
minutes information from www.cingular.com/ocs and switch over to
VOIPJET...and all of this needs to happen without my intervention.

For example: I have succeed in getting to the vonage billing page via
the following script but I still need a way to parse the resulting
page via a script to extract the remaining vonage minutes.

debugfile="/root/vonage_$username"

curl -d "username=$username" -d "password=$password" \
-c "/tmp/von_cookie_$username" \
https://secure.vonage.com/vonage-web/public/login.htm 2>&1 > $debugfile

curl -b "/tmp/von_cookie_$username" \
"https://secure.vonage.com/vonage-web/billing/index.htm" 2>&1 >> $debugfile

2. Presense Detection: I have used instructions from
http://www.mundy.org/blog/ and enabled a trivial script that detecs my
(cell phone's) presense via bluetooth. I want to be able to use this
presense information to route my calls intelligently based on where I
am.

3. Least Cost Routing: VOIPJET offers good international rates. I also
make international calls using www.relianceindiacall.com I need a
least cost routing mechanism to manage the lowest cost option by
default.

I am pretty sure there must be some one of this list that must have
already tried these scenarios and may already have a working
configuration that they may be willing to share their example
configuration files for their setup with asterisk newbies like me.

Thanks for your help.
-
Nilesh