Lately I’ve been poking around Asterisk and related VoIP stuff, and generally trying to make it work. I’ve (not) read my fair share of documentation, and it still seems pretty patchy. I’ve signed up for a free 0141 number from Sipgate and it seems mostly good. However, SIP addressing is a big itch that I’ve recently scratched…
The thing that gets me is the sheer amount of SIP providers out there all clamouring to offer a telephone number, with various limitations and methods of connecting to other providers networks. More often than not, they do not have a peering agreement with each other. When they do, it’s often the larger networks only and you have a list of prefixes to dial when you want to reach these other networks. It’s one step short of asking the operator to patch you through to London…
To this end, I set up my own sip address. With the magic of DNS srv records, I could redirect all SIP requests to the Asterisk server in the flat. All it took was _sip._udp SRV 0 5060 my.ip.add.ress for SIP, and _iax._udp SRV 0 4569 my.ip.add.ress for IAX. Equally, hostnames could be used, but that’s adds a little more reliance on Virgin Media having working DNS in my case.
In sip.conf, my default context is guest-inbound-sip (and guest-inbound-iax for iax.conf). In extensions.conf, the incoming calls are routed through to the flat phones as any other caller would be.
And there you have it. Regardless of what SIP provider you are on, whether they have peering arrangements or not, you should be able to call Charlotte and I on sip:ch@rlotte.me.uk and sip:kyle@lodge.glasgownet.com respectively. It doesn’t actually matter what one you call, as it’ll be the same phones in the house that ring 🙂
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