Today’s going to be rather sparse on posts, partly because I just don’t have a whole lot to write about today (Oooh… is Obama still out of touch? Yawn.), and partly because I won’t have a whole lot of time tonight. So, without further ado, I’m going to subject everyone here (all five or six of you, not including the Google searchers, if Sitemeter is any indication) to a rant about work. This works out well since half of my readers are coworkers.

Lately, my schedule has been fairly lax, meaning that I’ve had a fair amount of spare time in the office. Consequently, I figured I’d pound out a few projects that I’ve been sitting on. One rather urgent project we’ve been focusing on at work is preparing to become a reseller of Asterisk-based phone systems. Asterisk is a rather neat idea - basically, some guy (Mark Spencer, to be exact) sat down one day, decided he needed a phone system, shopped around for one, discovered they were all heinously expensive, and wrote his own. He then released the product to the world at no cost (free!). Right about now, you may be asking yourself an important question: How does one resell a free product? The answer is simple - you don’t. You sell service on top of the free product and you make a killing off of that. Of course, since the only thing Mark released for free was the code for his phone system and not actual free hardware devices, you can also make a fair amount of money selling the hardware, too. It’s not a bad deal.

Back to my story, though - my employer has been harassing me to find a solution to a problem he’s been having. He wants his phone to be able to page another person, sort of like an intercom. This is fairly standard on most analog phone systems worth their salt, but can be rather tricky on digital systems - the protocol that digital telephony on Asterisk is built on (SIP) isn’t designed to handle that. See, SIP actually waits for someone to pick up the other line and answer the call - an intercom, by its very nature, has to do that automatically. Similarly, SIP is designed to go from point A to point B; many intercoms go from point A to many points B, all simultaneously.

After a bit of searching, I discovered that, yes, Asterisk does, in fact, support paging and intercoms. But, there’s a catch:

SIP phones for the most part don’t support any of these phone based paging functions.

Of course they don’t… but you can fake it. However, upon reading the instructions, I learned that I needed to update the firmware of the Polycom phones we have around the office… which brings me to the story itself.

I just spent the past five hours trying to set up a phone to accept the new firmware, watching it bomb out time after time, only to figure out, after all that time, that the reason it wasn’t updating to the new firmware was because of a stupid typo in a config file. I had it pointing to a file that existed in a different directory. That was it. Five hours, all because of one lousy digit.

It’s been one of those days, folks. One of those days.

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