In the service of totally overdoing some #Dreamcast #RetroGaming, I've successfully patched the #DreamPi gateway to be less useful. Buckle up, because this is a kinda long post with little in the way of delivery.  

Normally the DreamPi throws its modem into voice mode, plays a dial tone to fake out the dreamcast, listens to the digits dialed, and then switches to data mode and kicks off a handshake. Stays off-hook the entire time.

This makes sense if you're using an electrically-simple Line Voltage Inducer and a straight connection between the Dreamcast and the modem for minimum part count get-up-and-go. It's actually a really clever workaround.

My tweak adjusts the modem behavior such that it stays on-hook until it detects an incoming ring, then answers and jumps straight into data mode.

This change was made because presently we're using a Valcom DLE-200B phone line simulator which does provide 'local' tone, ringing voltage, and ringdown.

This necessarily means that we lose out on capturing the dialed digits, but it turns out we don't need those at all for pretty much any of the PPP-based games with central servers, and I'm not interested in playing anything outside of that scope.

So now we have a dreampi that can only work in PPP mode and it requires a line simulator to work correctly. Why?

All, ultimately, so that we can hook the DreamPi and two dreamcasts up to a TDM-based #PBX instead of the line simulator, wherein either of the latter can dial the former, thinking they're dialing Dreamcast Online Services. It goes through the whole ring-in process, which terminates at DreamPi, handshakes, and tunnels to Dreamcast Live -- getting us the goods.

And there's lots of Friday left to go :3

#RetroGaming #OtherNetworks #PhoneLab #RetroLab #POTS #Modem

Hnngh, talk about an anticlimax. Been hunting down this IP Office chassis to install in the telecoms lab and it *seems* to have a dead internal PSU.

It's gonna get repaired, of course, but it just totally killed all immediate forward progress.

#VoiceLab #OtherNetworks #HomeLab #RetroLab #Avaya #PhoneSystems #PBX #IPOffice

Laying this -48VDC distribution panel out. AHhhhhhhhh red ground feels wrong, and it feels *even more wrong* to bond it.

#PhoneLab #RetroLab #RetroNetworking #HomeLab

I know I asked this a while back, but I'm stubbornly going to keep at it.

There are more than a few entities on fedi that are into standing up old phone networks, ranging from military field comms, business PBXes, even homelab ESS implementations.

But I can't find a dedicated hashtag for the life of me, so I'm going to pick one and run with it.

#OtherNetworks is a great catch-all for the more esoteric, #RetroLab is broad but you get the idea, and #HomeLab is *really* broad.

#Boost maybe? ❤️

Woke up this morning feeling awful; took a sick day.

Now trawling through equipment listings for the #RetroLab. Really want to get the ISDN & T1 plant properly operational, and looking through #Adtran part numbers is very frustrating.

They're internally consistent but also completely opaque!

Spent some time fighting the Tandberg C60 to play nicely with #asterisk tonight, but happy to report that we got there.

It really _really_ wants to use H323, y'all, and saving certain SIP parameters via the web interface is bugged to hell (like auth?) -- you've got to jump into the CLI and set the parameters manually.

Made tweaks to codec lists on device and pbx, and we have g.722+h263p SIP calls working.

Wrapped it up with a nice custom wallpaper bow.

#RetroNetworking #RetroLab #Telephony

Heya internet, I'm in search of tags and accounts of people playing around with:

* older enterprise networking gear
* telephony gear and labs, particularly CO equipment

Seems like the kind of thing one should be able to find on Fedi :-)

#telephony #homelab #retrolab #retro #boost