Michael's musings

Wed, 17 Jun 2009

Gizmo5 SIP client

Preferring open standards (SIP) to closed systems (Skype), I have been trying the Gizmo Project "Gizmo5" SIP client. It didn't work for along time due to some bugs in the Pulse/libao that were fixed upstream, but debian never considered a bug to release a patch for etch. It started working again in lenny.

I haven't figured out how to properly set my audio device in kphone to be my USB headset. aplay -L says:

marajade-[~] mcr 1102 %aplay -L
front:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=I82801DBICH4,DEV=0
    Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
front:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
iec958:CARD=default,DEV=0
    C-Media USB Headphone Set  , USB Audio
    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output

but I'm unclear what to put into the kphone box, and it does not give me a list of available devices like Gizmo does.

Well, gizmo lets me register to my office's Asterisk PBX, and it does give me a nice list, but I just discovered two problems:

* I can not get DTMF ("Touch Tones") to work through the SIP interface. No setting (inband) or outband (RFC2823) seem to work when I tried to call Porter Airlines, or one of the free conference call systems.

* I started to investigate, and was surprised to see that the registration for my extension did not come from my desktop's IP address. Rather, it came from the GIZMO project! Specically I was registered from:

cirrus*CLI> sip show peer 403
..
  DTMFmode     : rfc2833
  Addr->IP     : 198.65.166.131 Port 5060
  Useragent    : LinGizmo/1.7.07 (Gizmo-s2n1)
  Reg. Contact : sip:17471318555@proxy01.sipphone.com:5060
..
marajade-[~] mcr 1103 %host 198.65.166.131
131.166.65.198.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer northamerica.sipphone.com.

This really surprised me, and may well also explain the DTMF problems. I tried to call Porter Airlines via the GIZMO project, but the call did not complete, so I couldn't tell who was at fault.

This also concerned me because it means that GizmoProject can potentially listen in on my company calls, as they are a registered proxy. They also may get to see (and record?) my SIP passwords which otherwise should not be passing in the clear. (Of course, they could do this anyway as they provided the program I am running, but this is a new tack that I didn't realize)

I shall be building kphone from source, to see if perhaps I can figure out how to properly set the audio I/O device properly.