[Anveo] AnveoDirect: TIL* - setting up AnveoDirect (my experiences)

With the demise of Circlenet, I've moved my primary outgoing (termination) provider over to AnveoDirect (AD). The more experienced of you probably know all what follows, but I was pinged a couple times so I thought I'd share my learnings. I've had a home-office DID with AD for a couple of years (used mainly for teleconference calls hosted on my PBX). It's been reliable, and cheap (19c per month; 0.4 cpm incoming). For the sake of simplicity (and laziness), I mostly had it forwarded to another provider's SIP URI. But since I now need a more complete solution with AD - incoming, outgoing and SMS -, I've had to make some adjustments. Most of what I describe below is on the AD portal or in other threads, or based on some PM advice I received from other DSLreports contributors (thanks folks!). 1) Incoming SMS - perhaps the most important learning - when setting up a dedicated SMS server, I found that that the IP that the SMS messages comes from is not listed anywhere on the AD portal (http://anveodirect.com/about/faq), or elsewhere. If you want to lock down your firewall, you also need to accept connections from 169.48.232.147(/32). I discovered this during experimentation with a dedicated Amazon EC2 server set up to only do AD SMS - I firewalled off all other incoming connections, except those listed on the AD portal. But did not receive any SMS messages until I looked at the firewall log and found this additional IP. I don't get a lot of SMS' on these numbers, but one of the numbers on AD does sometimes get SMS from service providers, so I wanted to be able to receive these. After some experimenting, I got this working on an Amazon EC2 server (the freebie version). In order to have SMS forwarded to you, you set up a php to use the sendmail (postfix) function (from this thread: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28661865-Anveo-Problems-receiving-SMS-via-Anveo). I was going to respond in that thread, but it veered sorta off topic. After figuring out how to get SMS to work on the EC2 architecture, I turned a spare RaspberryPi3 into a webserver, with sendmail/postfix. Because I had to open port 80 in my firewall, I locked down the allowed incoming IP addresses solely to those listed on the AD portal *plus* the SMS IP listed above. I wanted to watch the Pi for a couple of weeks before switching over from the EC2 version. So far there is no intrusion into the Pi (iptables and the usual security applied), so I will probably switch soon. Here's the smscallback.php code that goes either in the HTML or the CGI-BIN folder (depending on your version/setup) - from the thread above: X<?php $deliverto = "YOUR-EMAIL@YOUR-DOMAIN.COM"; $from = $_REQUEST['from']; $to = $_REQUEST['to']; $message = $_REQUEST['message']; $subject="SMS Message from $from to $to"; $comment="Incoming AnveoDirect SMS Message\n\n FROM: $from\n\nTO: $to\n\nMSG: $message\n\n"; mail("$deliverto", "$subject", "$comment", "$from"); ?> It took me awhile to sort out the missing PHP tags and exactly which folder this needed to be located in. Note: properly written PHP files are not readable on the internet so your email shouldn't be harvestable. 2) Outgoing calls - AD does not support SIP registration for outgoing calls, but rather uses IP authentication. I'm on a cable modem with dynamic IP assignment, though my IP has been stable for at least 6 months. However, termination from AD is via IP, and there is a chance it could change at some point (power loss, etc). My setup includes a PBX, so I have failover to other providers supporting SIP registration, but I'm on AD for the pricing ;). After a bit of searching and experimenting, I modified a script I found on the internet (I will update an attribution if I can find the specific source), and added it as a cron job to check the IP hourly, and to send an email if it changes: X#!/bin/bashNOWIPADDR="/home/pi/scripts/nowipaddr"GETIPADDR="dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com"LOG="/home/pi/scripts/ip.log"timestamp=$( date +%T )curDate=$( date +"%m-%d-%y" ) if [ -f $NOWIPADDR ]; then if [[ `$GETIPADDR` = $(< $NOWIPADDR) ]]; then echo $curDate $timestamp " IP address check: " $(< $NOWIPADDR) >> $LOG else $GETIPADDR > $NOWIPADDR echo "The global IP has changed. The new IP is below; you should check Anveo settings." | mail -s "Public IP Change - check VOIP settings" youremail@yourdomain.ext < $NOWIPADDRfielse curl $GETIPADDR > $NOWIPADDR echo "The global IP has changed. The new IP is below; you must check Anveo settings for outgoing calls" | mail -s "Public IP Change - check VOIP settings" fromemail@fromdomain.ext < $NOWIPADDRfi I am told that some flavors of FPBX have this built-in, so YMMV in terms of needing this. 2a) I've opened one of my free tickets to see if the AD "Authorized IP Addresses" list could be made to take FQDN, because I use Namecheap's domain services along with the DDNS settings on my router to maintain a subdomain which points to my IP (generally for VPN use). 3) Outgoing SMS - can be done in a web browser with the format: X https://www.anveo.com/api/v1.asp?apikey=YOUR-API-KEY&action=sms&from=YOUR-AD-DID&destination=OUTGOING-PHONE-NUMBER-INCLUDING-COUNTRY-CODE&message=Thanks%20for%20your%20message.%20See%20you%20soon. I made a crude HTML form that concatenates the fields, but I'm trying to create an Android app that will do the same. Assistance welcomed ;) 4) LIDB - after experimenting, I found it most effective to do this from the CLI on the RaspberryPi3, because you can get a file with the disposition of the request. It's actually very simple, and amazingly quick (updated lookups for major providers - Verizon and AT&T started showing up about 9 hours after I submitted my request). The code I used is: Xcurl -g "https://www.anveo.com/api/v2.asp?userkey=YOUR-API-KEY&action=DID.CNAM.UPDATE&param[E164]=YOUR-DID-INCLUDING-COUNTRY-CODE&param[ACCOUNT_NUMBER]=YOUR-ACCOUNT-NUMBER&param[CNAM]=DESIRED-NAME" -o filename-for-output.txt There was some disagreement in several threads whether the the "percent-symbol20" or a space would work in the name field, but the "percent-symbol20" for sure inserts a space in the LIDB name. 5) Incoming calls - as I noted above, I took the lazy way for the first year-plus, forwarding to another providers' SIP URI. This works well in general, getting me CID, filtering and the like. But in the spirit of getting all things working, I found that by allowing IPs from the IPs listed on the AD portal (http://anveodirect.com/about/faq), I can get calls to come directly to my PBX. Interestingly, FQDNs can be used for this setting: my primary SIP URI is $[E164]$@my-namecheap-subdomain.mymaindomain.com. Of course, this means I need to set up my PBX to do all the filtering, ring groups, etc., that I have setup on the other provider... so I got lazy again, after proving I could make it work - went back to forwarding to another providers' SIP URI. Hope this helps someone sorting through the same issues. If I make any additional changes or tweaks, I'll update. Cheers, *TIL = Today I Learned, with apologies to Reddit for appropriation.