the Internet was borked today

What a day — Rogers’ network was b0rked starting around noon, which meant that our office T1 connection flapped up and down all afternoon. It finally seemed to give out entirely around 4 p.m., at which point I think everyone at the office just headed home. Since I have my name on a ticket with Rogers, I’ll definitely be asking for a refund per our SLA.

Matt, a former colleague of mine, told me that Bell had been advertising null routes in the morning too — not good. In general, not a good day for Canadian ISPs.

In other news, I’m working on the Asterisk VoIP server again. As I build and configure this thing, I think it’s best if I keep a list of questions that I will try to answer as I progress. Here’s my current list of questions. If you are an Asterisk guru and happen to know the answers to these, feel free to comment on this post!

1. Actions in the dialplan are usually applications. Where does one find a list of these applications (and what they do), short of doing a show applications at the Asterisk CLI?
2. What is the syntactical format of each exten => line in the dialplan? (I know I’ll probably come across this somewhere in the docs, eventually)
3. How do I register phones — either softphones or physical IP phones — in Asterisk, and how do I get those phones to authenticate to the Asterisk server to self-register themselves? Is there any way to autoregister phones with a restricted dialplan?
4. How do I know what all the sounds bundled with Asterisk say, short of playing them one-by-one?
5. How do I configure the voicemail system to do things like e-mail voice messages to the mailbox owner, encode the voice mail in different formats like Ogg Vorbis or MP3, and so on?

I plan to post the answers in this journal when I find the answers.