Difference between revisions of "Broadvoice"

Revision as of 15:50, 29 January 2009

For the uninitiated to Asterisk, Broadvoice is a good place to start to test the system with a few caveats:

1. Sip username is not the same as account username. For Sip setup, you use your Broadvoice assigned phone number whenever LinuxMCE asks you what your username is.

2. Sip password is not the same as your account password. You must contact support to get this. When using the LinuxMCE wizard for Broadvoice setup be sure to enter this case-sensitive password exactly as it will prevent you from registering Asterisk with Broadvoice if you do not. The consequence will be a series of ambiguous messages in the asterisk log that will give you little hint that this is the problem. In fact, once the wrong credentials are presented several times the server will lock you out. The work around is to use the /etc/hosts file to enter the ip address of a different proxy server than you had been attempting to register with aliased as sip.broadvoice.com. This should let you register immediately.

3. Make sure you get all the information entered the first time correctly when you set up the Broadvoice account with the LinuxMCE Wizard. If you do not, you may run into a series of Asterisk related conundrums that will require real expertise to figure out. I eventually gave up on them, reinstalled LinuxMCE from the DVD as a fresh install and then it worked perfectly.

4.Broadvoice support does not have Asterisk experience and can not be counted on to give you all the information you may need--although their web site does give you an idea of what steps you might need to take. But beware that you really don't need to follow these steps on the web site if you get the username and password right in the LinuxMCE wizard. In my case, it took 4 separate calls to support to figure out why my Asterisk server would not register: first they told me to use my phone number instead of my account name. Then they told me to turn off the Broadvoice-supplied Grandstream HT-502 as two devices could not be registered at the same time. Then they told me I needed a separate Sip password and finally they told me that I was being locked out because I had put in the incorrect password and attempted to register too many times. Generally, support was friendly, just not up on what needed to be done.

Given this background, you should be able to get your asterisk server up and running quickly. Adding an ip phone--in my case Linksys SPA 942--has not been the plug and play that is advertised elsewhere in this wiki, but if you follow the information on adding a phone as a device and then go on the web for tutorials on how to set up the phone of your choice, it should be relatively painless to get it working. The big key here was to realize that your extension is also your password and the ip address the phone connects to is the LinuxMCE server internal address: 192.168.80.1 if you go for the default setup. Asterisk codes also conflict with the factory codes in the Linksys SPA 942 so they need to be removed on the device, but this was easily discovered on the web.