Polycom Un-dumps itself

Last year I lamented the fact that Polycom had stopped freely distributing firmware upgrades for it’s phones on it’s website. I just don’t like dealing with companies that make things difficult for customers for no good reason. After I posted the comments a Polycom rep contacted me to see if there was something they could do, including pointing me towards some resellers who could provide updates. Credit to them for trying to work it out but it completely missed the point.

Anyhow, I thought it only fair that I should post a follow up since it appears that Polycom has now reversed itself and firmware is once again available. And now that they’ve fixed that I’m once again I’m looking seriously at Polycom phones. Good for you Polycom.

Logging Asterisk RTCP Statistics

I’ve created a small how-to on how to capture RTCP statistics in Asterisk.

Two useful Asterisk Scripts

I have re-written my Asterisk CDR import script so that it now tests every record for uniqueness before inserting into the database. As long as the database has an index on the call date field the performance hit is very reasonable given the extra flexibility and ease of use this provides.

Previously if you started your SQL logging before you ran the import it wouldn’t work which was a major pain because generally you want to get the sever up and running with logging before worrying about old log records.

Now you can run the import anytime and it will import everything and won’t create duplicate records.

The new Asterisk cdr import V2 is located here.

I also finally got around to putting online my maxcallcount perl script. I run this script in a cron every night so I can keep track of how busy my asterisk server is getting. More importantly it tells me how many Zap channels we’re using so I know if we need to consider adding more PRIs.

It also catches things like people call-forward looping their phones which can eat up all the Zap channels in a big spike.

The maxcallcount script is located here.

They both can be found (with more Asterisk stuff) at this page : http://www.johnlange.ca/tech-tips/asterisk/