Hack 37. Set Up Multiple Phone Lines
You can have multiple Skype phone lines by running multiple instances of Skype on the same machine. Works with: Windows version of Skype. To have several phone lines you must have several instances of Skype running. These instances can run on different machines, or on a single machine. For this to work, each instance of Skype must run independently from the others. This hack gives some suggestions on how to set up and configure multiple phone lines using Skype. First, a word of caution. If all the running instances of Skype (whether on the same machine or spread across machines) share the same Internet connection, setting up multiple phone lines is an idea that can be taken too far, because too many instances of Skype sharing the same connection might, at some point, overwhelm it to the degree that call quality is universally degraded. 3.14.1. Multiple MachinesThe simplest way to obtain multiple phone lines using Skype is to run Skype on multiple machines, each with its own sound device and/or phone hardware attached. This is very easy to set up and configure, as each is independent of the other. For a small office, or a home with multiple computers (Dad has a PC, Mom has a Mac, and Junior has a Linux box, for instance), this might be the best option. 3.14.2. Multiple Instances of Skype on the Same MachineYou can have multiple phone lines through a single machine, but it will require a little bit of forward planning, setup, and configuration. Here's the procedure:
3.14.3. Multiple Virtual MachinesThis is really only for serious techies! When I set up my Skype Test Lab for this book, I was confronted with the difficulty of testing Skype on a variety of platforms and, in the case of Linux, on a variety of distros (SuSE, Fedora Core 4, Gentoo, Debian, and others). To solve this problem I simultaneously ran different operating systems in different virtual machines (Windows) on my computer using VMware Workstation (http://www.VMWare.com/). In each virtual machine there was a different instance of Skype, and with some jiggery-pokery with sound devices, you can make each instance of Skype in each virtual machine have a different sound device, which amounts to having several independent phone lines, all provided by a single machine! You can do the same on Linux using open source machine-virtualization software, such as Xen (http://www.xensource.com/) and User-mode Linux Kernel Port (http://sourceforge.net/projects/user-mode-linux/). |