Once again, I've moved the in house phone system. I was running into problems with the virtual version I had running for the last couple of months. It worked pretty well most of the time but the clock was continually out of sync and that caused other problems on occasion. We had one instance of the server rebooting in the middle of a call. Not cool. Good thing it's just at home.
I'm sure there's a way to make it work with the proper VMWare tools and a good bit of tweaking but it's just not worth my "time"!
So, I downloaded the freshest copies of TrixBox CE and chan_sccp_b. Again, I followed the steps here and had no problem getting everything installed. Remember to change the IP address for the server in the xml files in the tftpboot directory and also in the sccp.conf file in /etc/asterisk/ and then reboot the whole thing. Reloading Asterisk didn't seem to be enough. Not sure why that is. Restart your phones and you're good to go. Oh yeah, in my case I had to change the SIP related IP's on my 1760 gateway also.
After all of the struggles in the past with the sccp channel it's amazing to me how far it's come. It really is pretty easy now. It sure would be nice if they could build a GUI module for the configuration though. In time perhaps.
Part of my motivation to do this is to fix the clock problem, but I also plan on getting a little more complex by adding some VoIP based connections to the world. So far I've only had the single Verizon analog line. I think I'm going to start by getting an inbound number from Gizmo5. They've built in integration with Gizmo5 now and it's pretty easy to set up. I've been testing the outbound calls since they give you $2.00 in free calls at 1.9 cents/minute for signing up. The quality's been excellent! The only problem has been that my parents don't answer because they don't recognize the number. :) Buying the inbound number should fix that.
What I really need is a small form factor TrixBox CE server. Something along the lines of what Digium is offering in their Asterisk Power Appliance. Something cheap that can handle <10 phones would be a real sweet spot.