How to – Setup Email for ViciDial reports and voicemail

This article will go over how to setup your email configuration on your server in order to get reports from ViciDial or to receive voicemail to email notifications and recordings. Gmail recently changed the way their security is handled so some changes need to be made in order for your emails to go through. You can alter the config below for any email service you may use.

Step 1 – Edit your postfix config file

Ok so first you need to edit your postfix configuration by editing main.cf and adding a few lines to the bottom of it.

nano /etc/postfix/main.cf
### Now paste the following lines to the bottom: ###
relayhost = [smtp.gmail.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = lmdb:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_mechanism_filter = plain
smtp_use_tls = yes

Step 2 – Create a Gmail APP Password

1. Go to Gmail and log in to your account.
2. Now, in the upper-right corner, click the Home Account icon. In the open wizard, click “Manage my Accounts.”
   

1. You will be redirected to Gmail Settings. In the left tab, click Security, and then click ‘2-step verification’ in the ‘Signing into Google’ section.
2. The 2-step verification window will appear on the screen, click ‘Get started.’
3. In the next step, Google will ask you to use your phone as your second sign-in step. Click ‘Try it Now’ to move ahead. You will be asked to log in to Gmail again, and a notification will appear on your phone screen to confirm the sign-in, click Yes.
4. After giving access from your phone, Google will ask you to add a backup option, enter your phone number, and click Send.
5. A code will be sent to your phone to confirm the login, enter the code in the opened window and click ‘Next.’

2-step verification has been enabled. Now, you can easily create an App Password to login to third-party apps.

Creating App Passwords

1. To create the App Password after enabling 2-step verification, go to ‘Manage your Account’ from the home tab.
2. Now, in managing accounts, click the Security tab in the left pane, and then scroll down to ‘Signing to Google.’
3. Here, you’ll see the App Passwords option, click over it. You will be asked to sign in again to your Gmail account.
4. After signing in, select the type of app and device for which you want to generate an app password and click Generate.
5. The App Password will be created; you can copy it to the clipboard, and click ‘Done.’

That’s how you can create App Password for your Gmail account. Now, you can use this Password to login to Gmail with your ViciDial server.

Step 3 – Edit your sasl_password file

Now you need to edit your sasl_password file as shown below:

nano /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
### Alter the line below with your username and password ###
[smtp.gmail.com]:587 youremail@gmail.com:password

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That’s all there is to it, now set your email account on your voicemail boxes or automated reports in ViciDial and you should be good to go.

I hope this helps.

-Chris aka carpenox

How to – Use CID groups

This article is going to go over the method to best setup CID groups and the different ways to configure each option available for them including statefill, statelookup and creating auto rotators. This will assume you know how to add DID’s to the system which is fairly easy. So the first thing you need to do is create the CID group as defined below:

Step 1 – Create CID group

Within the ViciDial admin gui go to the Admin section then to CID groups

Once you are here, just click “Add a CID Group”:

The first one we will create is for state lookup method, define “AREACODE” as the group type like shown below:

hit submit and you’ll see it looking like the below picture

Step 2 – Add the DID’s to the CID Group

Next, we will be using the admin utilities to add your DIDs to the CID Group. Go to the “Reports” page and scroll down to the bottom to click on “Admin utilities” then click on “Admin bulk Tools”

Now scroll down to “CID Groups and AC-CID Bulk Add” and add your DID’s, selecting “state lookup” will assign each number with its area code to the proper state its from, selecting “statefill” will automatically add every area code for each state you have a DID for with separate entries for each area code which is a really nice option to ensure local presence in some fashion even if you don’t own DID’s from every area code.

When you choose statefill youll see the same number submitted many times, this is normal

After doing this you’ll notice it filled it every area code for this example I did it for Florida, and even though I only entered 5 area codes, it filled in these 5 numbers for every area code in Florida:

Step 3 – Assign CID group to your campaign

Now you just have to assign the newly created CID group to the detail view of your campaign as shown below, make sure you set “Custom CallerID:” to Y

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Now I will show you how to create an auto rotating CID group which will rotate all the DID’s added to this group based on intervals you can choose. Complete step one again but choose “None” for the “CID Group Type” as shown below”

Once your hit submit, choose how often you want the DID’s to change, a good starting point is every 5 minutes or 35 calls as shown below:

Go back and complete step 2 again using the “state lookup” method and assign the CID Group to the campaign, now your DID’s will auto rotate, I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and like always, if you have any questions, feel free to join our Live Support on Skype.

I hope this helps

-Chris aka carpenox

How to – Add conferences for add on servers to a cluster

This article will show you how to add additional servers to your cluster and make sure all the conferences are also added. Its just a few simple steps needed to have it done for you.

Step 1 – Adding the second server(or 3rd, 4th, 5th, whatever)

There is a SQL script already created that does all the hard work for you, just follow the commands below:

mysql -A asterisk
\. /usr/src/astguiclient/trunk/extras/second_server_install.sql

Step 2 – Updating the IP from 10.10.10.16 to your new server IP

For this part, there is a perl script that will update the conferences and vicidial conferences as well as the new server that was added to your GUI as “TESTast”. Just copy and paste the following line into your Linux CLI:

/usr/share/astguiclient/ADMIN_update_server_ip.pl --old-server_ip=10.10.10.16

Then make sure you add your IP to the third question it asks you as shown below:

Step 3 – Run the install.pl script

Now we need to run the install.pl script to connect the second server to DB server

cd /usr/src/astguiclient/trunk
perl install.pl

Make sure when you get to the DB server question you input your DB server IP(where the blue arrow is)

Step 4 – Change the name of the server in the ViciDial GUI

Make sure to change the name of your server and update the Asterisk version and trunks

Thats all there is to it, you should now have your second server added to your cluster. IF you have any questions feel free to comment here or stop by our Skype Live support