Panoramisk / The VoIP druid 

Asterisk Dialer is a Yahoo! widget which allows a user to automatically dial his SIP phone directly from his computer. It allows drag and drop from any application and runs either on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, more often it is free!

Installation

First of all you will need to install, if you are not already a Yahoo! widget user the engine¹. We have developed this widget on version 3 of the engine and tested it on the version 4, now available.

Once the engine is installed, grab the widget, available on the Yahoo! portal or directly here². After download, the execution of the widget will install it automatically in the widget folder on your computer.

Configuration

On the computer

Some parameters should first be entered in the widget configuration in order to know which SIP phone is associated with the computer and where is the Asterisk PBX, right click in the window and select the parameters menu.

Parameters are:

• User: user configured on the manager interface in the Asterisk PBX.
• Password: password for this user in the manager interface.
• Ping Interval: in order to check if the IP link with the Asterisk PBX is still alive, a periodic check is performed, you can change the delay here.
• Login retry interval: if disconnected from the Asterisk, this retry delay will be wait in order not to stress the Asterisk with new connection.
• Phone: SIP extension associated with the computer running the widget. At the Asterisk level, this phone should exist in the sip.conf or users.conf with a sip tag.
• Asterisk server: IP address or FQDN name of the manager interface of the Asterisk PBX

These parameters are saved in the user’s profile, they will not be required at each launch.

Asterisk

At the asterisk level, the manager configuration should allow the user’s widget to connect using the HTTP interface. The only required level to allow is a write access to call events. Configuration could look like:

[dialer]
secret = dialer
deny=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
permit=192.168.16.0/255.255.255.0
read =
write = call

Here the user ‘dialer’ will needs to give ‘dialer’ password in order to connect to the Asterisk manager, it can only send call messages.

Every calls started from the widget are using a specific context call [internal], this one should exist in Asterisk configuration and allow calls accordingly with security policies.

Usage

Once configured, the widget dialer connects to the Asterisk and the star in the Asterisk logo turns green. This star indicates the status of the connection between the dialer and the PBX, it can turn red if an error occurs, in this last case the reconnection is automatic.

In the text zone, the user can type in the number to dial or use drag and drop from its favourite application³. The number entered is pushed to the Asterisk which rings the phone associated with the widget. If the user pick up the phone, the other extension is called and only in this case.

Actual release: 1.1, still in unstable state…

Change log

• 1.1
  • the callerid now is set to show the dialed number on the associated phone.

Known issues

• there is a problem with the sleep mode on Mac OS X (10.3), the workaround is a stop/start of the widget and some time the widget engine.

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1. previously called Konfabulator [↩]
2. the latest release is first available on Panoramisk [↩]
3. only phone numbers are supported at that time, no SIP URI [↩]