This has little to do with Asterisk other than it happens to be the most prevalent SIP-based platform on the Internet currently.  It has everything to do with protocol attacks by script kiddies, or more professional attackers.  Bad passwords = easy penetration.  The upside on this is that it yet again gets the attention of administrators who might not otherwise know that their password of ‘1234′ might be guessed by criminal users.

The bug that was mentioned in the SlashDot summary of the article?  Old news.  Really, really old news.  And really not even that much of a threat for most people the way they have their systems configured even if they haven’t upgraded.

Asterisk, Broadsoft, Cisco, Kamailio, OpenSER, FreeSwitch, Avaya – they’re all vulnerable to the brute force attacks if adequate network and username/password security is not implemented.  There are ways to minimize, if not eliminate these threats with very standard security policies that should be familiar to any network administrator (ACLs, random passphrases, random client usernames, adequate exception logging, and limits on account usage, to name a few.)  Here’s the blog I wrote on this a while back, which is somewhat Asterisk specific but contains useful pointers for pretty much any SIP system.  I suspect that >99% of the penetration threat is mitigated with just the simple policy of strong username/password pair combinations – the tools that are being used by most black-hat types are just brute force attacks.  Script kiddies take the easiest possible targets; common-sense methods remove you from that target range.

To update people on the current thinking about network-based mitigation: After quite a bit of debate in the development community, it was generally agreed that within Asterisk is not the appropriate place to do proactive “defense” mechanisms that block network ports or certain users.  There are extremely sophisticated systems (free and non-free) that will take log output from a network-based application such as Asterisk, and then provide IP-layer blocking and alerting.  They do it much better and faster than Asterisk could hope to.  What has been recently implemented in Asterisk is a framework to report security events upstream to such programs, and the SIP stack is the first on the list to be instrumented.  Digium has been working on this framework in conjunction with community members who have expressed interest in building more sophisticated third-party alerting and management tools around Asterisk and other SIP-based platforms.

Note that Asterisk already has basic Access Control List functionality for SIP and other IP protocols that Asterisk “talks” on, though it is statically configured in a very similar manner to the way that Apache or other network servers work.

Just as an aside, the Digium SwitchVox platform, which is our commercial re-packaging of Asterisk, has as an element of it’s GUI a tool that indicates the relative strength of passwords.  We’d encourage any other re-packagers or users of Asterisk to implement a similar UI hint that forces good password behavior by users and local admins.  It’s really not something that can be done in the core of Asterisk; it has to be done by whatever is the layered UI on top of Asterisk for configuration, or just by good policy.  Good security policy is really the cornerstone of the whole solution.  Asterisk is like any other infrastructure server program: it’s generally very secure as a core platform for an application service, PBX, or appliance, but that doesn’t absolve administrators from making sensible and secure policy decisions regarding how it is implemented.   I hope in the future that there is a better understanding between application security and implementation security, but I suspect I’ll be writing this explanation again in another year.

JT (Open Source Community Director)

But as that momentum of resources has built, some parts of the Asterisk community infrastructure haven’t kept up with the wave of new demand for information.  The “asterisk.org” website has served well over the last few years as a fairly static repository of information, but after some review it was determined that a new structure was needed to give better access to the community as well as present a new style that was a bit more suited to the vibrancy of the project.

Today, we’re introducing today the re-worked “asterisk.org” website. It’s live already – take a look! Our goal has been to become the first source people look to when they’re wanting more information about Asterisk or anything Asterisk-related.  Asterisk.org has always been the place to look for the code, and the mailing lists have been a tremendous resource for anyone with questions and discussions.  Now the website itself will have the ability to keep up with those two other foundational items in the Asterisk community, and we hope to make it the permanent repository for answers to any kind of question that involves Asterisk.

Here are some of the big changes:

- Better community involvement: Some of these documentation areas will be edited entirely by community members (appoint yourself!) and some areas, like the documentation on actual code parameters, will be able to have comments and additional data added to it.  The site has previously not been edited by a wide number of community members, and it’s time to harness the incredible energy and enthusiasm of the Asterisk developer, implementer, and user community.

- Reference Documentation: The documentation that is embedded in Asterisk is now extracted and published on the site.  You can add your own notes, FAQs, or examples to the documentation for everyone else to use. This is only a fraction of the documentation we hope to have published eventually (much more “free-form” documentation is planned and expected from Digium as well as the community) so it’s a good start.

- New Format: The new format is hoped to be easier to navigate, and the graphics have been updated.

To start with, the site is going to have some holes and empty spots where data should go.  See something you like?  Something you want to edit?  Something you’d like to see added?  If you know what really needs to be there… put it in!  Or if it’s not obvious that you can edit the page, ask me (jtodd@digium.com) and we’ll see if we can add you as an editor for that section.  (AstriCon is also this week, so please be patient with the inquiries.)  We’re going to try to open things up as quickly as we can while still ensuring good data.

We hope you like the new format.  The coming weeks will see significant changes and additions as well; stay tuned for interesting announcements here, and at AstriCon this coming week!

JT

We all love Asterisk, and we love hooking to up to all that IP telephony stuff, but… there’s still a lot of plain ol’ telephones out there…  Welcome to the hi-tech honky tonk (no fist-fighting, just some sparring between Asterisk dudes…  Last year, we wrangled SIP phones for the prize, but this year, we’re going old-school, and sticking with analog ports.

Step right up, step right up – the contest is simple.  We’ll give you a PC with a good ol’ analog speakerphone attached to the Digium analog card inside, and the Asterisk and DAHDI source files already on the machine.

All you have to do is install DAHDI and Asterisk from the tarballs and set up a configuration to the point of achieving a very simple set of call results. The clock starts when from your first command and stops when the right thing is heard out of the speakerphone.  We won’t tell you exactly what the test is, but I’d suggest you brush up on rapid dialplan creation, DAHDI configs, and fast typing!

The contest will run in the exhibition hall and will run during show hours, and the master of testing ceremony is long-time Asterisk author, consultant, and carnival barker David Duffett, who will guide you through the process whilst peppering you with witty observations and possibly even teaching the crowd a thing or two during the process.  (Having him shout “Yeehaa!” with a British accent during the planning of this contest is reward enough for me, actually.)

You’ll be up against some of the fastest geeks in the south (Yeehaa!), all with an eye on one of the stunning prizes on offer – which will be presented by Allison Smith, our far superior fill-in for Vanna White.  Prizes to be awarded in the same room as and just before the last “Asterisk Roadmap” conference session.

Quickest Dude to the dialtone prizes:

Fastest: An unlocked HTC Hero Google Android Phone
2nd Quickest: Digium backpack w/schwag, Digium analog card with FXO/FXS, retro bluetooth handset, geek toolkit
3rd Quickest: Digium backpack w/schwag, Digium analog card with FXO/FXS

As we draw nearer to this year’s Astricon, which celebrates the 10th year of Asterisk, and as I was rummaging around my closet this morning for something to wear, it occurred that I might bring all of you on a walk down a Digium memory lane.  Thus, I present a 10-year history of Digium in shirts.

Before the beginning, no one at Digium wore any work shirts.  We might have worn shirts, but we wouldn’t say.  Customer meetings were conducted in paraphernalia that would have been appropriate for college dormitory rooms and we’d never been to a tradeshow. So, we wore shirts that looked a lot like this.

In the beginning, Digium was known as Linux Support Services and resided at www.linux-support.net (no link, as it no longer goes anywhere).  At the time, our logo was comprised of three human-shaped characters (people) , in three different colors (all kinds of people), two of which (Linux experts) were supporting the third (Linux users, we’re so clever).  The shirts were tan (yuck), short-sleeved work-shirts and were purchased from WalMart by Mark Spencer.  This shirt is vintage 2001.

Following our Linux support days, when we needed to refocus the business, after we’d started doing business as Digium, and while we still had a large supply of the tan shirts (Mark had bought in bulk; it’s Walmart, after all) we re-badged them as Digium shirts.  Note the original instantiation of the Digium logo.  This shirt is vintage 2002.

Fearing that we’d ruin a good thing by using something other than tan (it goes great with khaki pants), we then attempted to buy more of the shirts (excellent decision). Unfortunately, WalMart had run out of stock; and, much to my chagrin as I missed the tan shirts dearly, we finally found our way to button-up knit shirts.  Here we are with Digium in orange on a black shirt.  This shirt saw one of its first tours of duty at the original Astricon.  This shirt is vintage 2004.

Sticking with our black theme, we made only minor changes in the next shirt.  By minor, I mean that we changed the color of the Digium logo from orange to white – a small change, but one that greatly improved the readability of the logo – and we converted the Digium logo to a registered mark.  Ho hum.  But, at the very least, the photogenics were improved.  This shirt is vintage 2005.

After conquering the short-sleeved knit shirt, we then decided to go for something with long sleeves and a proper collar. And, while we appreciate how professional this makes us look, we often wonder “Should we have commissioned a Digium necktie?” If so, what would the design be? Anyone? This shirt is vintage 2006.

Having put on the Ritz with our fancy shirts, and considering just how hot (temperature, not our physical attractiveness) we were on show floors in long-sleeves and fabric that wasn’t breathable, we moved back to the knit shirts. Here though, we combined the Digium and Asterisk logos in order to enforce the association between Digium (the toilers) and Asterisk (the object of the toiling). Visitors to our offices in Huntsville will see the same logo on the sign out front. For me personally, between tradeshows and customer visits, my shirt circled the earth three times, making it the most well-traveled of all my Digium shirts. This shirt is vintage 2007.

We took five for most of 2008, and introduced a new corporate logo in December. That new logo resulted in this shirt, which remains our current shirt; an excellent, breathable knit fabric, short-sleeved show shirt. Aside from the original Linux Support shirt, this is personal favorite.

Any ideas for future Digium shirts or accessories? Perhaps that necktie? I’ll be in khaki and our 2008 model shirt. What will you be wearing to Astricon?

Sept 23rd is the cutoff date for the room discount, and we’ve requested another block of rooms for attendees.

The Renaissance is the exclusive hotel of AstriCon 2009. It is where most of the attendees and exhibitors stay, and is a great place for networking! Please make sure you book your hotel rooms right now to ensure you get the AstriCon fantastic discounted room rate. Availability is on a first-come first-served basis and the cut off date for the special rate is September 23 2009.

Renaissance Glendale Resort & Spa
http://cwp.marriott.com/phxgr/astricon09/
Special rate – $144/night

There are other hotels in the area, so if the hotel fills (as it did last year) there are other options. But getting a room at the Renaissance is probably your best bet, since you won’t have to trudge across the arid parking lots or drive to another venue. There are lots of restaurants close-by in the new entertainment center – I didn’t go to the same place twice last year!

To answer the question that seems to be on everyone’s lips: yes, AstriCon looks to be as big than last year, if not significantly bigger.  I know the economic situation is weighing on everyone’s mind, but Open Source Asterisk installations are up and what is hurting the “big guys” is putting some wind under our wings.  AstriCon is where you’ll see lots of people who are winning deals, creating revenue, and building the market of the PBX that is now the most-installed platform in North America (we’re hoping to say world-wide VERY soon.)

Now, to encourage having everyone book a TINY bit in advance instead of all at the last minute (who, you? book at the last minute? I know I’m not talking about you.) I’ll again announce that we have a discount code that you can use on your sign-up, which will give you a 15% break on the conference price. The discount code is “AC09″ and you’d enter it on the registration page to get your discount.

Top 5 Reasons to attend AstriCon:

* The talks! This is yet another stellar line-up of talks this year, with a wide array of fascinating examples of how Asterisk is being used to solve novel problems. How can you make your business or project more profitable and effective? These talks focus on those questions, and more. The sub-tracks on cloud computing and government/large enterprise implementations are creating quite a bit of interest this year, and the speakers have extensive practical advice to dispense on all topic areas.

* Trade information - Open Source isn’t just the software. To a large degree, our user and development community members cooperate with each other to solve all kinds of problems. Ask others about their experiences, and offer your own in the informal setting around the conference. The market around Open Source software doesn’t just have code as its only currency! The conference is for information exchange, and this just might be the most valuable thing you take home.

* Vendor area - check out the new technologies from hardware vendors, software vendors, and service providers! The market changes; make sure you know what the most current methods and products are.

* Put names to faces - that person you’ve been talking with for a year on IRC or IM but have never met? That consultant whose emails you’ve been reading on the mailing list? That customer you’ve been trying to get pay attention to you? Chances are good they’ll be at AstriCon, and having that face-to-face conversation is sometimes the trigger you need to get a project going.

* Meet entirely new people - the best experiences at AstriCon come from the most unexpected places. That person you sit beside in a talk, the lunch table you share with others, the person in the elevator with you – the interactions you have will expose you to new people whose projects will amaze and interest you, and possibly even lead to your changing your methods or finding new business.

I really hope I see you there!

JT

Until now, the official Asterisk distribution has come in only three language “flavors” – English, French, and Spanish.  We are long overdue for getting more languages into the “main” Asterisk distribution, and over the past few weeks there has been quite a bit of work done getting licensing and practical concepts understood to the point where we are comfortable with expanding the number of available languages at the discretion of the community.

There has been a document submitted for inclusion with Asterisk which outlines the protocol process, practical requirements, and license criteria for having a new language submitted to Asterisk as part of the official distribution.  It should come as no surprise that we’re asking for all contributions to be in the Creative Commons v3.0 Share-Alike/Attribution licensing regime, as this is clearly the best (or only) method for distributing works such as audio recordings with an open-source package such as Asterisk.  We’re also insisting that the talent that creates any language files be available for others to hire, so that there does not become a bottleneck with new prompts for others who wish to expand the range of recordings.  Lastly among the important notes is that in the rare instances where we have new prompts as part of the “core” package requirements, anyone who has submitted a language package is under a non-binding community commitment to get the new prompts created in their language for addition.  (This is a rare event, so hopefully is not overly burdensome to contributors.)  This is truly a community participation request – there are far too many languages in the world for this to work without being almost entirely contributed by active Asterisk users and developers.

The complexities of adding new languages is significant – there are intricacies in the “say.c” sections of code which determine how numbers and dates are pronounced.  There are differences in the way voicemail prompts are created for playback.  New languages may not be functionally complete if they require code to handle certain nuances of sentence structure, and the inclusion of new language audio files does not mean that they will be sensible in that particular language even if accepted.  However, the first step is to get the language recordings in there, and then others can come in and correct the code once they have half the puzzle in their hands – that’s the spirit of open-source!

There are at least 35 language or dialect versions already existing in third-party repositories (see this list) and of those there are probably a quarter that have more than one voicing in male or female talent formats.  I’d love to see the majority of those find their way into Asterisk as selectable language options.  If you know the person that has created one of these language sets, please forward them the new language guideline link below!  I’ll be trying to contact all of the language contributors, but often there are linguistic barriers or dead-ends for contact data.

To read the requirements and to get started on your language contribution to Asterisk, see this document which will soon be part of the Asterisk standard distribution: Asterisk Language Submisson Criteria, part of issue #15771.

JT

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Skype for Asterisk (SfA), it is an add-on channel driver that integrates Skype calling with Asterisk-based telephony systems and allows businesses to build a presence in the Skype community. Once a business is connected to the Skype community via SfA, free calls to the 400 million + Skype users and low rates for calling landlines and mobile phones are available to lower their telecommunications costs.

The SfA product will be the only solution that integrates Asterisk directly with Skype with no external gateway hardware. This is not a “proxy” solution and the call quality will be superior to anything else on the market. Customers will have the ability to make, receive and transfer Skype calls from within Asterisk phone systems, using existing hardware and existing Asterisk configurations: Skype calls become just another Asterisk call.

Some of the features that are supported in this release are:

• Make Skype-to-Skype calls.
• Receive calls with online numbers (SkypeIn).
• Make world-wide PSTN calls to landline and mobile phones (SkypeOut).
• Make and receive multiple concurrent Skype calls from the same Skype account.
• DTMF support for incoming and outgoing calls.
• Read Skype profile fields from incoming calls.
• Set and retrieve online status.
• Set privacy settings.
• Handle incoming Skype calls using Asterisk applications such as voicemail, ACD, MeetMe conferencing, etc.
• Simultaneous access from both Asterisk and the Skype desktop client.
• Trunk calls between Asterisk servers over Skype.
• Supports G.711 and G.729 (included) codecs.

During the extended beta testing period, there were an abundance of users and test case scenarios applied. Users from all parts of the world participated. One of our favorite uses of SfA involved a solution that implemented both fixed to mobile convergence and dynamic contact routing through Asterisk. The Asterisk-based PBX was integrated into a customer’s traditional telephony service, SIP extensions, Skype users and mobile network.  A custom script was developed that attempted to find the user where they are available whether on their SIP client (via their desk-phone or mobile), their Skype account (on their PC or mobile), direct to their mobile or to their voicemail (which is sent to their e-mail account). The order of this routing is based on individual preference and cost efficiency to the business.

So what’s next? Digium and Skype are continuing to collaborate by listening to our customer’s suggestions to enhance SfA for the next release so it can continue to solve problems for businesses. We are all excited to bring this functionality to Asterisk servers everywhere and will continue to enhance the features.

Social Media and Social Networking have been around for a few years with various social networking tools and platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter leading the charge. There are many others including Digg, Plaxo, Zoominfo and Friendfeed. Job applicants are learning the first thing HR departments or hiring managers do is check your profile. This can be devastating to those who allow certain types of info to be posted on their profiles or sites especially in this recession. From a business standpoint Digium is one forward thinking company embracing these tools seriously in all aspects of business. Let’s explore Digium’s use of social media and social networking.

In the past year, tremendous momentum has occurred using these tools for business. How are they being used? Let’s look:

• Tweets: Twitter messages are up to 140 characters in length and each post of called a “tweet”
• Facebook messages: Facebook is used mostly for friends, family, pictures, events, and classmates but business use is emerging
• LinkedIn: historically the most serious business networking site
• Community: As an open source leader, Digium is no stranger to Community where developers, users, friends and customers post everything from questions to technology recommendations.  You will see Digium’s John Todd, Asterisk Community Director, posting, answering questions and blogging making sure we address issues in real time. These are posted in online Forums as well as on mailing lists and in email.
• PR: public relations have adopted social media as new methods to do press releases, reach out to press and analysts and marketing pitches
• Recommendations: LinkedIn has become the defacto standard for business connections and posting backgrounds and resumes; job hunting – recruiters can easily find talent they had no access to previously; and colleagues and former colleagues can post recommendations about co-workers and former co-workers.

Consider the fact that personal email has been surpassed by social networks and blogs (Nielson Online, March 2009). Online collaboration has become a fundamental tenet of business’ online personality. We are becoming a web-based society. Just look at the bulleted list above: all are online except email, which is fast becoming web-based as desktop email systems are disappearing. Collaboration is replacing formal business communications, 800-number calls, and public relations! Some examples?

• Customer Service: post a complaint about a company, product, or service and you may get a response within minutes. If you called the 800 number you may be on hold longer than it takes to get a Tweet response.
• Pre-sales: Looking for a new IP PBX? Gateway? Make a post to your followers, and if you have built critical mass you are liable to get half dozen responses from vendors, resellers, consultants or even press members.
• Technical Support: Open source “communities” have been providing these types of platforms for years, but add Twitter, Facebook fan clubs, LinkedIn “groups” and you might get several types of assistance in real time.
• PR: social media releases are taking on a whole new persona; our very own well known Tristan Degenhardt says, “Social Networking releases give plenty of ‘bang for the buck’ and facilitate getting coverage for smaller stories that wouldn’t normally warrant an entire press release, or coverage for ancillary stories related to more major news.” Tristan also feels “social media releases are more participatory- rather than just releasing the news out into the wild, you’ve got more opportunity to have a conversation with readers and followers.”

This is more powerful than a trade rag picking up a release that you’ve paid to distribute and it shows up a month or two later in a magazine. Immediate reaction, a web site click becoming a lead, collaboration between resellers and users, any number of interactive scenarios are enabled using social media.

At Astricon and Digium Asterisk World, we create constant streams of Tweets and several of our team and of our Asterisk community post interesting information which is appreciated by those not able to attend or attendees that may miss something if they don’t know its happening.

Digium has several social networking sites and accounts:

Twitter:

• digium
• asteriskpbx
• astricon
• asterisknow
• switchvox
• beelinebill (me)

LinkedIn: What is unique? Many of these groups are created by our customers, partners, and enthusiastic Asterisk fans:

• Asterisk Open Source Communications Platform
• Asterisk – A Digium Sponsored Project
• Asterisk Trainers of the World
• Digium Switchvox USA Resellers
• Switchvox Administrators
• The Asterisk Group
• Digium

Facebook: (sampling, there are many of these fan clubs and  groups you can join to collaborate)

• Digium, Inc.Products
• Asterisk Products
• Asterisk Technology Product / Service
• Asterisk Technology and Telecommunications Service

We have received customer feedback, suggestions, highly qualified sales leads, and we thoroughly enjoy talking to customers, analysts, press, colleagues and leveraging the ever-changing and evolving social media web world.

We have been at this at Digium for some time now, but if you are just getting started you will need to build a strategy and execution plan as in any business and then continuously refine as we do. You can get all too consumed if not careful but with a steady effort you can build and execute your social media and social networking efforts. Join us at the above locations, we look forward to your participation!

Asterisk is undergoing a subtle but important change in the way it sounds.

Open Source Asterisk has had for quite some time the ability to play Music On Hold (MOH) to callers as an optionally configured call feature.  Of course, as soon as the code had the ability to play music, there was a general request and obvious concept that Asterisk should include a few default music-on-hold files.  At that point, several people within Digium looked around at the possible files we could use, but all of them had some type of license issues, which is understandable.  We found a company which sold rights to music, and we discussed in specific, painstaking detail what we wanted to do with the files and how they were going to be used.  They agreed that we could do what we wanted and distribute the files with Asterisk and that they were able to provide to us the appropriate license, so we paid our fee and proceeded to pick some likely music.  We then included them in Asterisk in the hopes that the community would find them useful as part of the system without having to search out selections which complied with various copyright issues.  This was a good-faith gesture on our part, and we had a quite reasonable expectation that the vendor from whom we purchased the license was authorized to provide to us a global right-to-use and redistribution capability to the Asterisk community for these sound files.

Apparently, that assumption is now being questioned.  In some nations (Australia and France, to pick two that have been brought to our attention) there are some who are claiming that we do not have the rights outlined above, and that our users therefore are in a similar situation where they may be in violation of license terms.

In the interests of space here I will not outline the exact organizations, laws, and claims in question.  Suffice it to say they are complex and unclear with a broad range of possible interpretations. Currently, at least two organizations disagree that we are complying with a set of license terms.  This is very far outside of Digium’s ability or interest to manage, nor do we wish to become involved in the protracted series of legal proceedings required to sort out this licensing issue.  So we have chosen another path that is more clear to us: we will eliminate the files of questionable license from Asterisk, and replace them with music that has  clearly defined and more acceptable licensing terms which are compatible with both the Asterisk license, and with any reasonable redistribution methods that might be used by others who re-package Asterisk.

So how can we be assured this won’t happen again?  The new music we’ve included is under the Creative Commons 2.5 license – which quite frankly didn’t have much of a following for media back when we first were looking for a set of MOH files.  Certainly, the selection of good-quality music files that would suffice did not exist in an easy-to-obtain fashion, or we would have gone this route in the first place.  Hopefully you’ll like the new music on hold, and will be customers of the artists who have so graciously given their work out under such a reasonable license.   We found the new music on Opsound for those of you who are looking for an even wider selection of freely available music.

We apologize for putting people through this aggravation – we sincerely wish that the recording industry would standardize license terms and avoid treating customers like enemies.  Perhaps there is a silver lining here –  this may be a good opportunity for you to freshen up your hold music – maybe “Calm River” was getting under people’s skin after the thousandth time you put them on hold.

The Gory Tech Details:

The new files can be found here: http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/sounds/

The new files have names that contain “opsound” replacing the term “freeplay” in the file names.  It’s really that simple.  We’ve removed the old “freeplay” files and symlinked the old names to the new “opsound” versions, just in case.  The contents of the .tar archives are different, but Asterisk should “just work” when the file contents are put in place unless you’ve extensively modified your music on hold configurations.

If you have an existing Asterisk system it is our suggestion that you delete any and all copies of the existing “freeplay” music on hold set on your system(s) and replace them with the new “opsound” module sets.  The good news is that this is very simple – very little configuration is required on your system – just a simple file copy and then restart Asterisk to see the new files.

What happens if you don’t update your music on hold?  The state of the FreePlay license currently is in question, and even if it is determined that the Freeplay files were not provided under the necessary license terms,  it’s unlikely that enforcement actions will be brought against end-users for using unlicensed hold music.  However, we would encourage all administrators to update their instances of Asterisk to the new sound files.  This is really a distasteful process for all of us, and in order to protect ourselves from any future liability we’re going to suggest that everyone remove the older files entirely.

The update is easy, which is the good news.  For “baseline” Asterisk systems, you simply need to remove the existing MOH files in your MOH directory (typically/var/lib/asterisk/moh on Linux systems.)  In fact, you’d probably be well-served just to delete everything out of that directory unless you’ve added your own MOH files.  Then, download one or more of the MOH .tar files into that directory (wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/sounds/asterisk-moh-opsound-gsm.tar.gz) and then unpack them (tar -xvzf asterisk-moh-opsound-gsm.tar.gz) then restart Asterisk (or issue an “moh reload” from the CLI) – you’re all done!  Fetch only the .tar.gz files of the formats you expect to actually use – typically, downloading the ULAW or GSM version is sufficient for most installations.  If you don’t have a certain file format for a certain codec, Asterisk will automatically convert whatever you have into whatever is needed at the cost of a small bit of processing power. For AsteriskNOW users, a simple ‘yum update’ operation will replace the MOH files installed on the system.

If you have a pre-packaged Asterisk system – just wait a bit.  I’m sure the distributors for the various front-end platforms will have an update shortly which will allow for this to be done via the UI, but that may take some time to percolate through the various development groups who build such packages.  If you’re a re-distributor of Asterisk in some form or another for versions created prior to today’s date, we’d suggest deleting any of the “freeplay” versions of your sounds and replacing with the drop-in versions of the “opsound” files.  There are no filename dependencies in the Makefiles, so replacement is very simple.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope the new music at least offers a welcome change to temper the unfortunate requirement for update.

This year promises again to be a record-breaker – we’ve already got
more pre-show signups, more participants on the show floor, and a
fantastic line-up of speakers and sessions.  There will even be a job
fair for those of you looking for a change in venue, or for those of
you looking for Asterisk-clued admins and developers.  (watch this
space for more details)

In fact, it looks like AstriCon is situated to be among the biggest shows for the quarter in the whole VoIP industry – how’s THAT for an open-source project?  I think it’s great, and I’m looking forward to the biggest and best conference ever.

We’ve got a focus this year on Enterprise and Government deployments of Asterisk as well as the very active “Cloud” uses, and there is a track on each of those.  As always, we have an in-depth Technical track for developers and administrators, a Call Center track, and a Commerce track for resellers and consultants.  Each of the tracks is focused on their respective areas, but almost all of the talkss would be interesting to almost any attendee – there is a lot of crossover between what each group finds interesting, which is why I love talking to attendees.  Everyone has an interesting story or application!

Speaking of which…

Last year, we had a great crop of participants in the Asterisk  Innovation awards program, where Digium tries to recognize some of the most novel and profitable uses of Asterisk in the now-huge community of users and companies that create products around the toolkit.  We have had a great response this year – more than ever! – but I know I have seen other really cool Asterisk-based products out there that are new, but somehow didn’t make it onto our list.  If there are any last minute, gold nugget application candidates out there (even silly ones), I’m happy to sneak them into the running.  See this link: http://www.digium.com/en/company/awards/innovation.php and mail Julie with your proposal, and I’ll hopefully be awarding
your company the prize at the AstriCon opening sessions.

The economy may make things tough for many of you, but I’d encourage you to see what you can do to make it to AstriCon.  This is such a valuable conference, from both a social networking perspective as well as what you’ll learn in the great line-up of talks. Beg/negotiate with/threaten your boss with inappropriate photos, squeeze your budget, and maybe trade in some frequent flyer miles – this conference will be worth it.  Even if it means eating chicken nuggets for a few lunches instead to help offset the cost of the room (which we got a good rate on again this year.)  :-)  What you learn at AstriCon makes you more valuable to your company, and more
able to do your job.  We’re trying to pack as much knowledge into three days as possible, and you won’t be able to help coming away from the conference with dozens of things to try, or ideas to research, or new friends to communicate with.  I hope to see you there!

- Mark Spencer