Two weeks ago I contracted the cloud-based telephony bug and found myself experimenting with sipXecs, SIPfoundry’s 100% SIP communications system.
I only advanced so far: just enough to visit and push the buttons on the sipXecs web-based configurator before I ran into a brick wall called DNS.
Translation: without an Internet phone book to look up addresses, I couldn’t register a SIP phone and actually use this thing
Figuring that it would be good for my soul, I decided to spend a few lunch hours last week learning just enough DNS to set up a cloud-based sipXecs system that actually was usable.
I assumed that this effort would reward itself in spiritual IT and SIP wisdom.
To condense a week’s worth of work: I succeeded in configuring a DNS server in the Amazon EC2 cloud, resulting in a happy sipXecs server. (Hat tip to Mike Picher for pointing me in the right direction.) And with a little bit of trickery, I borrowed an external free DNS service, called zoneedit, which provided just enough magic dust to fool my X-Lite softphone into registering with my remote phone system.
I had my euraka moment as my SIP soft phones connected with each other.
Eureka: my X-Lite registered with sipXecs
There was a sense of accomplishment or maybe it was the release of finally not banging my head against the metaphorical IT wall?
Obviously, I’m not an IT pro— a real one would have made much shorter work of this.
Overall, it was a good experience. While I’m still seeing transient problems in getting my softphones to talk to each other—this is very much a work in progress for me—it’s impressive that all this communication capabilities are off-site, in some remote location known only to Amazon.
And there are lot of neat things in sipXecs, such as personal attendants and unified messaging, that’s on my list to explore in future afternoon visits.
One small note worth making at this early stage is not all SIP softies seem to work with sipXecs. I’ve had most success with the X-Lite softphone, version 4. Even though SIP is open-standards, there’s still enough implementation variability to cause even basic functions to fail—I’m talking about you SIP Communicator, Jitsi, and Zoiper.
In thinking about what I’ve done, I recall working at a small company, not that long ago, in which to realize basic phone service with extension dialing the owners had to buy the actual phone hardware and call in $technicians$ to cut and crimp wires and plug in cryptic codes into an ACII console.
Cloud-based or hosted phone systems are just one of the many little modern conveniences that make starting a business much less of a hassle.
Related articles
- A Peek at Cloud Telephony: SIPFoundry’s sipXecs (technoverseblog.com)
- SIPfoundry Blogs (sipfoundry.org)
- zoneedit
