PodMail: Receiving voicemail as a Podcast

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Podcast file

RSS Syndicate

• lame
• Apache + PHP4 (optionally with LDAP)
• mod_rewrite
• Asterisk (1.0 or 1.2)



Getting Started:


This section will attempt to shed some light one just how you could add this configuration to your own Asterisk server. To get started make sure you have all required software (above) installed and working. With that in place ensure that the user running the webserver process (often "httpd", "apache", or "wwwrun") has read access to voicemail.conf (if using file based authentication) and the Asterisk voicemail spool. This is usually hosted in "/var/spool/asterisk/voicemail". Finally install the included podmail.php somewhere in your webserver's document root.

If you have installed podmail.php to somehwere other than '/' (from the Browser's perspective) then modify the RewriteBase directive below.


        # Required for mod_rewrite
        Options SymLinkIfOwnerMatch

        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteBase /
        RewriteRule ([A-Fa-z0-9]+)\.mp3 podmail.php?guid=$1 [L,QSA]


The three Rewrite lines can also be put in a .htaccess file if "AllowOverride FileInfo Options" are permitted in that directory.

Open podmail.php and change any variables specific to your environment.

podmail.php vars:
First choose the backend. To enable password protection, choose 'file' or 'ldap'. To make your Podcast available to the world choose 'static'


$conf['backend'] = 'file';


If using 'file' for the backend, then the location of voicemail.conf must be specified:


$conf['file']['location'] = '/etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf';

Remember to make voicemail.conf readable by the webserver process
If using 'ldap' for the backend, specify the connection parameters:


$conf['ldap']['host'] = 'ldap.example.com';
$conf['ldap']['userkey'] = 'uid';
$conf['ldap']['basedn'] = 'ou=People,dc=example,dc=com';

Note that 'userkey' will be prepended to whatever the user enters and 'basedn' will be appended. basedn may or may not be the root of your LDAP tree.
Further to authenticate the user an authenticated bind is attempted followed by a read of the voiceMailbox attribute. The user must be able to bind and minimally read their own object for the voiceMailbox attibute.
voiceMailbox is provided as part of the Asterisk::LDAP distribution found at http://projects.alkaloid.net


If using the static authentication option (no external authentication) set up the mailbox here:


$conf['static']['user'] = '101';

Don't forget to set the force_context option below!

Setting this option will force the mailbox to be in the given context:


$conf['force_context'] = 'default';

Specify the base directory for voicemail storage. Note that this and all children/files must be readable by the webserver process.


$conf['vmail_basedir'] = '/var/spool/asterisk/voicemail';

Set to the location of LAME


$conf['lame'] = "/usr/bin/lame";

Specify the base URL for podmail. To this string will be appended "/{GUID STRING}.mp3" which will be processed by mod_rewrite (above).


$conf['baseurl'] = "http://podmail.alkaloid.net";

Configure a cache directory to hold converted MP3s.
* Note that for now the cache is never expired. You will need to configure a separate process to clean this directory up manually.


$conf['tmpdir'] = '/tmp';

Below this line all configuration options are directly mapped to the iTunes XML DTD for Podcasts. For information on how each of these elements are used, refer to iTunes documentation.


#
# Podcast Metadata
#
# Don't worry about special characters, they will be converted before sending.
$conf['title'] = 'Alkaloid Networks Voicemail Podcast';
$conf['subtitle'] = 'Your Voicemail as a Podcast!  '.
    'Brought to you by the Alkaloid Networks';
$conf['ttl'] = '60';
$conf['link'] = 'http://projects.alkaloid.net/';
$conf['copyright'] = '2006 Alkaloid Networks';
$conf['description'] = 'Podcasting + Telephony is cool';
$conf['author'] = 'Alkaloid Networks';
$conf['summary'] = 'Integrating the best of open source to deliver new ideas,'.
    ' Alkaloid Networks brings you PodMail: Hear your Voicemail as a Podcast!';
$conf['owner']['name'] = 'Alkaloid Developers';
$conf['owner']['email'] = 'projects@alkaloid.net';
$conf['image']['url'] = 'http://podmail.alkaloid.net/podmail.png'






PodMail version 1.0

Developers can find PodMail in the Alkaloid Networks Subversion repository at
https://svn.alkaloid.net/gpl/podmail/trunk or browse the Subversion tree at http://svn.alkaloid.net/browse/chora.



Ben Klang <bklang@alkaloid.net>

Bryan Rite <brite@alkaloid.net>

Jeff Smith <jsmith@alkaloid.net>