Hack99.Forward Your Home Phone Calls to Skype

Hack 99. Forward Your Home Phone Calls to Skype

For those times when you really, really need to stay in touch.

This is just plain cool. If you've come this far with Asterisk and the Internet Phone Wizard, you've unlocked a world of wicked-cool hack potential. To get you primed for your journey to Aster-Skype hackatopia, let me show a very simple dial-plan modification that will simultaneously ring your incoming phone calls on your locally connected phones as well as on your Skype phone. In /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf, consider the following:

 exten => s,1,Dial(SIP/100&SIP/200) 

This extension will dial the two phones connected on SIP peers 100 and 200, and connect the call to whichever peer answers first. But let's say an Internet Phone Wizard is connected to channel Zap/2 [Hack #98]. Now, you can actually dial those two phones and a Skype speed-dial alias from your buddy list:

 exten => s,1,Dial(SIP/100&SIP/200&Zap/2/99) 

Now, whoever is associated with speed-dial number 99 in your Skype buddy list will also receive a call (through the Skype network), courtesy of the Internet Phone Wizard that you've hooked up to a Zaptel FXO port (Zap/2) on the Asterisk machine. So, if this was your default context for incoming calls from your home phone line (connected to Asterisk via another channel), your incoming home phone calls would also ring on the Skype client that was logged in as the buddy in your list.

Ideally, this buddy is a second Skype account you've set up, because Skype doesn't let you "call yourself." So, I would set up Ted1 and Ted2 as Skype buddy names and then have the Internet Phone Wizard's Skype client log in as Ted2, while I go about my normal business logging in as Ted1. In essence, my home phone calls will be forwarded from Skype user Ted2 to Skype user Ted1.