Tobias McNulty
Tobias co-founded Caktus in 2007 and, as Chief Executive Officer, guides the strategic vision of the company. He has been an active member of the Django development community, is a core developer of the RapidSMS framework, and makes regular contributions to both the projects. He is the co-author of and chief advocate for the messages framework that was introduced in Django 1.2 and has helped Colin organize several successful Django development sprints in the North Carolina Research Triangle area.
Tobias is also a passionate believer in the power of technology to improve public health and obtained a Masters of Public Health at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill in 2016. When he’s not writing software, Tobias loves cooking, making pottery, and cycling.
2007
Is Asterisk More Silent Than You'd Like?
At Caktus, we use the Asterisk open source telephony platform. While setting up Asterisk, we tested a number of different system environments and configurations to help determine what would best fit our telephone needs. This involved running Asterisk on both real and virtual machines and testing several configuration front ends, including FreePBX and DeStar. This article discusses a fairly technical problem we confronted while installing a basic Asterisk setup on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system (on real hardware); namely, when the ztdummy Linux kernel module was loaded, Asterisk was unable to play back any recordings (even its own). When we unloaded the ztdummy module, however, recordings would play back fine. The catch, of course, was that we needed ztdummy loaded for conference room support.