Follow these easy steps to point a free Washington area code phone number to your Gizmo account. This is a great solution for those overseas who wish to have a North American DID (for free / cheap calls.)
Just shot this quick screencast demonstrating how to configure ENUMPlus to route to you SIPPhone account (Gizmo).
It is Friday evening and after a long work week I decided to pick up something nice to sip on. This is one of my favourites and is extremely affordable, it is called “Cartier Irish Cream” and can be found in Canada at your local Wine Rack. Like 99.999% of the world’s population I absolutely love Baileys irish cream, unfortunately for us Canadians a 26ox can run upwards of $30 and does not last long at all. Cartier sells for half the price of Bailleys at $16.50 in Ontario for the same volume, and is believe it or not quite similar in taste. In my opinion the texture and flavour is superior to O’Darby and it also mixed wonderful in coffee.
According to the Wine Rack website it is classified as a “Cream wine liquor with flavours of almond and mocha.” Here is a snapshot of what I am enjoying this evening.
ENUM is a brilliant solution for querying a contact identifier and returning other contact information. Imagine looking up a phone number and being able to identify an email address, website, phone number, SIP URI, address, business name etc. The reason I bring this up is because I have started working on enumplus.org once again and thought I should shed some more light on why it is beneficial for you to sign up. Our primary objective for enumplus is being able to call standard DID’s as you would find in your every day phone book and route the call over IP without touching your carrier or ITSP (there is huge savings here).
The biggest prioblem with ENUM lookup sources is that there are so many and they are all very incomplete. The percentage of numbers I call that actually route over IP is pretty much zero (unless I am calling 1-8XX of course). The beauty of Enumplus is that we give you a module for free which is easy to install and add additional lookup sources on the fly. You do not need to be an Enumplus subscriber to have access to the module – just upload it to FreePBX and add whichever ENUM lookup sources you subscribe to.
Enough about that, here is how it works.
When you pick up your phone and dial a number, the first thing your Asterisk system does (when using ENUM) is check the database for lookup sources. It then queries the lookup source DNS server for a NAPTR record using a command that looks like the following :
dig +short 5.5.5.5.5.5.5.1.lookupsource.org NAPTR
Where the 5.5.5.5.5.5.5.1 is the phone number reversed (seperated by periods) and the domain lookup (DNS Server) source at the end.
If the record exists, the DNS server will respond with something that looks like the following :
100 10 “u” “E2U+SIP” !^\\+15555555555$!sip:did@provider.com!” .
The ENUM script then strips the SIP URI from the result and terminates the call over IP.
If the record doesn’t exist – it will query the next source in line – if it runs out of sources the call will be routed as usual over your ITSP or carrier. NAPTR records can be used to return other values as well. Take a look over at e164.org – there you will find a Firefox plugin that converts DID’s to domain names as well as email addresses.
So go sign up at http://enumplus.org and test it out. Feel free to leave comments below.
I ordered 512MB RAM for my 1GHz Titanium Powerbook a few weeks back and got a great deal from Global Laptop Solutions. I paid around $24 USD (including shipping) for 1 lightly used module and I couldn’t be happier. The local computer shop had some OEM modules for $199 a piece but I just wasn’t willing to spend $400 for a moderate performance increase.
Once I received the package I opened it up then turned off my Mac, flipped it over to find that I had no clue what I was doing. I did some googling and found this wonderful guide.
The machine now has 768MB and I am on the lookout for another 512 module. If anyone is interested in my old 256 modules leave a comment. Here are some pictures (I know the old girl needs a bath!) 
