On Apr 19, 2005, at 12:25 am, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:
I've been using vgetty - the version in Portage is pretty good, and once I actually sat down to configure it I had it mostly up & running over the course of an evening - I think it sounds much more complicated than it is....
I'm migrating to Asterisk Real Soon Now (tm), but it certainly won't support any of your current hardware - it's more appropriate if you want to do VoIP, probably involving routing all your telephone calls through it. If you have to ask, you probably don't want to use Asterisk yet.
Several people have been adament that I should use Asterisk - but I remained rather unconvinced... as all the documents I see surrounding Asterisk are interested in VOIP devices - whereas I want a solution for a more ancient technology.
I think you're right to be unconvinced - I'm pretty new to Asterisk, but I'd _love_ to see a justification for using it for your purposes.
As I see it, the normal use of Asterisk as an answerphone on a POTS line would involve answering the call on first ring, forwarding it to the VoIP phone for X rings & then recording a message only if that line isn't answered. I'm sure you CAN do what you require using Asterisk, but that doesn't mean you _should_.
Some scripts to munge vgetty interactions into emailed mp3 files sounds extremely useful (any chance of an emailed tgz - or putting them on an ftp site somewhere?)
Thanks for reminding me! I've just posted an updated version to the [m|v]getty mailing list.
It's at <http://tinyurl.com/caygp>
I was hesitating on vgetty not particularly because I was worried that I could manage to set up that sort of a system - but rather that I didn't want to divise a solution which wouldn't benefit from ongoing developments and that I'd want to change i a few months.
Well, I've sure I've heard statements that the [m|v]getty code is obscure, dated & hard to work on, but I have no idea whether that's true or not, as I haven't looked at it myself (and probably wouldn't be qualified to do so). It IS, however, well-maintained & supported by the mgetty author - if you post to the mailing list he will likely reply himself.
As far as forwarding the voice messages to email are concerned, the standard function of vgetty is to save the voice message into its spool/incoming directory; if the admin has specified a script to run, that will be called with the full path of the voice file & caller ID as parameters, so the script can do whatever you want with the recorded messages. I pass the recorded .pvf (portable voice file) down the longest pipe possible in order to convert it to
Stroller.
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