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A few minor updates

There's not been much activity here recently, but, here's a small summary of some recent changes...

There have been some minor updates to the Philippines Numbering/Dialing Plan page, including the addition of some info on the PLDT #MyNumber product which breaks away from the norm of what constitutes a phone number with it's crazy '#' prefixes

Asterisk packages continue to be regularly updated as new versions of Asterisk are released, more info available on it's separate sub-site, here.

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Asterisk packages for CentOS/RHEL 6 & 7 released

Back in October the official Asterisk wiki page on packages was modified to state that there is currently no official repository for Asterisk packages. Indeed, since then, there have been no new packages released at http://packages.asterisk.org, the last versions available there being, all updated on 23rd October 2015, but released on 9th April 2015 are:

  • Asterisk 13.3.2
  • Asterisk 12.8.2
  • Asterisk 11.17.1

      • Those 3 releases were security releases to address AST-2015-003, the latest security advisory for Asterisk, but, making it to RPM 6 months after release. Leaving people using the official RPMs potentially exposed for 6 months. That's obviously an issue, and I expect the topic of a number of Digium internal conversations that, combined with the fact that it needed quite a bit of love and Digium were potentially suffering from limited in-house time and skills, likely resulted in the decision to drop support.

      Fedora EPEL would appear to be the ideal place to see Asterisk supported, in fact, it was, but following the typical slow and steady approach of EPEL, with Asterisk 1.8.32.3 being the latest release there, released on 9th April 2015 to address AST-2015-003, and only for EL6. Unfortunately, the maintainer of the package on EPEL/Fedora, jcollie, has stepped away from maintaining Asterisk packages also, it's not visably clear where that leaves Asterisk there.

      If you use Asterisk on CentOS or RHEL, you want to be using RPM packages, not messing around with building source tarballs on each of the machines you maintain. I use Asterisk on CentOS, both on CentOS 6 and more recently on CentOS 7 working with quite a few systems that it's important to keep consistent. I need RPMs that receive fixes in a timely manner, so, I've built my own with an automated build system. As I'm sure I'm not the only one who needs this, I'm sharing them here.

      Asterisk RPM repository @ tucny.com

      I'm still testing the builds, and for anyone else who finds there way here, I encourage you to thoroughly test too before deploying into a production environment. Standard boiler plate: These packages are without warranty, you use them at your own risk.

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Site migrated away from Google Sites

Google Sites as part of Google Apps for Domains served it's purpose of providing a place for the content of the site to live after the servers it used to live on in Telehouse (London) were decomissioned, however, it's limitations have reached the point that something had to change.

The site now lives at Linode (Link without referral code here)

This change has allowed for a number of improvements, including the following:

  • Default Encrypted - while there's nothing here right now that needs encryption, encryption by default would seem to be a good thing. The certificate comes from Let's Encrypt, a new Certificate Authority (CA) that plans to change the internet to be encrypted by default. The certificates are free and the CA will be fully open to the public in December 2015.
  • HTTP2 - the site now defaults to HTTP2 for browsers that support it, this did need encryption.
  • New responsive design - Based mostly on a design from HTML5 UP a site full of free to use designs licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution license, i.e. free for any use as long as you say it came from HTML5 UP. AJ/n33, the person behind HTML5 UP, has made a lot of different styles that all look pretty neat and make the jump between mobile, tablet, PC or any other viewing platform I've seen with elegance.
  • General content refresh - In updating the content to strip out Google Sites junk and clean up the HTML, a number of pages have been updated too, mostly minor updates, but, ensuring they are still current.

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