This was the buggiest weekend that I’ve had in years. I tried to do one simple thing: upgrade Asterisk to the latest CVS version to fix a Cisco-Asterisk interaction bug. Here’s what went wrong:

1. Asterisk wouldn’t install without some new sound files that didn’t exist in the CVS tree.
2. Once it was installed, it wouldn’t start. Staring at things long enough lead to an obsolete plugin that worked with the previous version (3 months old), but not the new one. Deleting it let Asterisk start again.
3. Incoming calls via POTS work fine, but incoming calls via NuFone refuse to go to voicemail. They’ll ring, but if no one answers, instead of my voicemail prompt, callers hear Allison saying that the caller is unavailable. According to my logs, I’m not playing the message, so it must be NuFone.
4. My new asterisk->cellphone email script wasn’t working, so I upgraded my MTA to the latest minor revision from Debian and discovered two bugs. Basically, the upgrade ate my entire alias file, and it failed to fix the original bug.
5. And that bug’s just great: Debian’s build of courier’s makealiases script does weird things to command aliases. Basically, it double-appends the domain name to the name of the alias in aliases.dat, but only appends it once when generating the .courier file that actually runs the command. So, email aliases that get piped to commands just don’t work.

Oh, and on top of that, Asterisk’s hold music generator ran wild yesterday and slogged down my Asterisk server, leaving me with no phone service at home for a few hours. Ugh. There’s a reason that I waited 3 months to upgrade. I swear, once 1.0 is finally released, I’m not upgrading for years.