And with that, I've uploaded all my slides for the Utah Open Source Conference. My goal was to have them ready by last night, so I'm a bit late. Still better than last year where I only had one presentation and I was still updating my notes the night before. If you're looking for me make sure to check the schedule as there have been some changes, and there may well be more to come. Also look for my late addition where I'll be joining Gabe Gunderson of izeni to talk about VoIP (specifically FreeSWITCH and Asterisk).

The other day my boss and I managed to create a call routing loop between two of our phone systems. It was kinda fun, in one of those painful ways. Here's how it went down.

Phone system A has extensions in the range of 2XXX. Phone system B has extensions in the rage of 1XXX. The PBXes have an IAX2 trunk between them to allow direct dialing. The phones themselves have a dialplan which recognizes 1XXX and 2XXX as patterns, which allows for faster dialing. Users must dial a 9 to reach an outside line.

There was just a slight problem. Due to a misconfiguration on my part, B was set up to route any unknown 1XXX extensions back over to A. For a real extension, say 1000, the rule wouldn't match because B would know to send that call to the local user. But let's say that somebody's boss forgot to dial a 9 when dialing a long distance number. So the phone sees the first 4 digits, 1 + area code, and assumes it's an extension. A sends the call to B. Well, that extension didn't exist so B sent the call back to A. That would be the point when the fun began.

I would have thought that the PBXes would create a whirlwind of calls until the original call eventually timed out and broke the chain, thus bringing all the calls to a halt. But somehow that isn't what happened. The system stabilized at 400 or so active channels. Sat that way for a few hours I believe. What finally did stop it was my removing the rule to allow 1XXX over the IAX2 trunk from B to A. Within just a few seconds all the calls came to a grinding halt (in a good way).

I've decided then that having local extensions that start with a 1 is a less than desirable thing. It's not the end of the world, but avoiding it can relieve some potential headaches so I intend to eschew it where possible.