As I promised, I’ve created a VMware image with a demo of the Voice Mail Feed. Now you can download it. Torrent file is at the end of this post. Here is how to use it. If you do not already have VMware Player, VMware Workstation of VMware Server, download and install VMware player

1. Download demo image
2. Start image in VMware player
3. Wait until image compleates booting
4. Login into console (user root, password password). Once you are in, you will see image IP address displayed on the screen. If there is not IP address present, check if your DHCP server is working correctly.

5. Open image IP address in a browser (it works best in Firefox)

6. Click on the link indicated in the previous figure

7. Follow instructions in the HELP frame

8. Using a sip phone, call Bob at extension 21. If you do not have a SIP phone handy, download and install it. For simplicity sake, make the phone register on the Asterisk as Alice at extension 20 and password 20.

9. Make a call to Bob and live him a voice mail message

10. Go to iTunes and update the feed

At this point you should see the message that you left for Bob in the iTunes. Here you go…

For long time I was thinking that I shold start giving back to the Open Source community.
Here it is.. I am releasing my first Open Source project.

This is really more like a concept prototype of a voice mail system that I would actually use… I have to admit, I hate using voice mail. It is so tedious to dial all those numbers remember all those passwords… RSS Voice Mail Feed Generator releives people from that. I hope for thouse of us using Asterisk PBX it would be useful enough so that other PBX vendors would follow with the same type systems.

RSS Voice Mail Feed Generator

It allows to subscribe to an RSS feed to voice mail. When new voice mail arrives my tool will make it an item in the RSS feed for your mailbox. RSS aggregators (iTunes including) would pick up that email and make it available to whatever device I use. It can download voice mail to iPod as a podcast episode for example.

It is also possible that Feedster, myWeb 2.0 and other aggregators would be able read the feed too, but I have not tested yet. I have tested it with iTunes, Opera and SharpReader so far.

Archive with the source code is here vmfeed-0.5.tgz and at the end of the post.

• Apache web server (Tested on 2.0. I think it should work in 1.3 too)
• PHP 4.3
• Asterisk PBX with voicemail
• lame mp3 encoder

Installation

Tip: Easiest setup is using Trixbox 1.1. I am going to release a pre-configured VMware image for a quick try.

All examples are for RedHat-like distros (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS …) If you use other distro, please adjust accordingly. Please be kind to share your setup instructions.

1. Place following text at the end of your Apache config file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

#———-Voice Mail Feed Generator Config Start ——
Alias /vmfeed /var/www/vmfeed
< Directory >
Options FollowSymLinks
DirectoryIndex index.php
AllowOverride Limit

< /Directory>

# ———Voice Mail Feed Generator Config End ——–
2. Restart web browser
#/etc/init.d/httpd restart

3. un-tar archive to /var/www/vmfeed

# mv vmfeed-xxx.tgz /var/www
# cd /var/www
# tar xzvf vmfeed-xxx.tgz

4. Point your browser to http://yourhost/vmfeed

5. Enter required data

6. Remove install.php
# rm /var/www/vmfeed/install.php

You should be all set now. This is what should see in the browser at ths point

Tip: With this setup you should be OK on your local network. If you need access to RSS feed on open Internet, you need to expose http port to the outside world. Talk to your network guys… and good luck…

Known problems
1. Some weirdness with Explorer 6 CSS rendering. I gave up trying to fix it. If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know