Posted on
November 16, 2013 in
This is not a tech blog, but when I spend time finding an answer to a tech question that Google doesn’t have, I’m going to publish it here.
I use Vocalocity for my office phones. It’s a voice-over-IP service. I have one extension ringing ing the downtown office, and one extension ringing at the same time in the Heights office. I also have various forwarding schemes set up for various times during the day.
I had an analog phone connected to Vocalocity at the Heights office via a Cisco SPA2102. It worked fine for a while, but lately it has been disconnecting outgoing calls after thirty seconds, which is inconvenient. So I ordered an Obihai OBi100
(Amazon link), plugged it in, and set it up.
Nobody had documented what to plug in where on the OBi100 setup page. So here you go…
This is Vocalocity’s “Devices” tab for the phone extension I wanted to set up. The blurred number next to “sip-” is my Vocalocity account number. The MAC address is that of the OBi100; I inputted it. The SIP/Authorization ID is Vocalocity-assigned:
Here’s the OBi100 setup page. The Service Provider Proxy Server is the “proxy” URL from Vocalocity. The user name is the Vocalocity SIP/Authorization ID. The password is the same on the Vocalocity page and the OBi100 page (6+ characters, at least one number and at least one uppercase letter):
I hope that someone finds this helpful.
Lately I have experienced problems with DHCP using AT&T and HughesNet.
You have a static IP address for your VoIP. Static means it never changes. Think of IP addresses as phone numbers. You don’t want your phone number to change, especially in the middle of a call. You can’t hand out business cards with a phone number that might change tomorrow. So your phone number is “static”. On the computer end, that is DHCP where IP addresses are “dynamic” and prone to change since there is a limited number of IP addresses so dynamically home service IP addresses are shared, like a digital party line. When you “hang up” the IP address is re-assigned to someone else. The average user doesn’t care, as long as their browser works. But, your VoIP service runs as a “server” and must be static. So, when your ISP decides to upgrade your service or router and you get hit with dynamic instead of static service, then it all goes to hell in a hand basket. Our Promox cluster just went down and we’re awaiting for AT&T to fix their supplied router. My IP addresses are changing, instead of being static, and the problem is at the AT&T supplied router which now refuses to honor localnet static IP addresses that are NAT translated to our 6 static IP addresses. You might not have had a problem on your end at all. It might have been your ISP not playing nice in the first place. Ric