… or anyone else really, with a little trick to implement a black list and filter unwanted callers.

GoogleVoice (GV for short) is a great service (I won’t go into the details, but you can read up about it here), but it is unfortunately accessible only if you are in the USA.
Granted there is already plenty of documentation about how to circumvent this, but I’m not aware of any of those using Asterisk.

So this post will document how to sign up for a GV account as well as how to use it with Asterisk afterwards, in the prospect of using it if you are not in the USA.

In order to be able to sign up for GV, you need to meet 2 prerequisites :

1. You need to have a US IP address
2. You need to have a US phone number, which will be used to validate your GV account

Step 1 is left as an exercise to the reader (“Good luck ! I’m behind 7 proxies !” :D).

Step 2 is the one we’re going to describe here, as an example of what you can pull with simple Asterisk configurations.

This post is meant to clarify a few key concepts about Unix filesystems such as directory permissions, hardlinks and symlinks.

As stated in Wikipedia :

D-Bus (Desktop Bus) is a simple inter-process communication (IPC) system for software applications to communicate with one another.

This post provides a simple code snippet in Perl to help you getting started with D-Bus programming.

In this post I’ll cover the basics one needs to know to install, upgrade and remove packages on a Gentoo linux system.

If you downloaded an ISO file and you want to mount it into your filesystem, you can proceed as follows :
spaghetti% sudo losetup /dev/loop0 cdrom.iso<br /> spaghetti% sudo mount /dev/loop0 /mnt<br /> spaghetti% ls /mnt<br /> Autorun.inf setup.exe setup.ico<br /> spaghetti%<br /> [...]<br /> spaghetti% sudo umount /mnt<br /> spaghetti% sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

This will use the feature known as “loop devices”, which lets you use a file as a device, and subsequently mount it as it would be one.

When you use Linux in text mode (as opposed to with an X server), you readily have access to multiple Virtual Terminals (aka VT for short) by hitting one of your keys (if you are running a X server, you’ll need to hit simultaneously).

This lets you access one of the VTs which are initialized at boot time, but won’t let you create new ones even if your kernel configuration would allow more VTs. Furthermore, what if you want to deal with VTs from a script ?

This post covers the 3 commands which will let you control your VTs from the command line or from a script.