This is the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that’s how complicated. This story is ridiculously long, technical and includes lots of geeky terminology, so if you’re not into that sort of thing, check this space in a week for something resembling regularly scheduled programming. I’ve broken the story up into seven parts because I can’t imagine someone trying to read the whole thing in one sitting.

Part I: A Simple Plan of Execution

I think it’s finally dead.

I’ve hated my answering machine for a long time now. In 2003 I hatched a plan to kill it.

The simple idea was to put one of my mostly idle computers to good use and use it as my answering machine. I would get rid of all the annoying buttons and blinky lights and have something nice and usable. I would be able to listen to messages over the web or just have them emailed to me. That’s all I wanted.

Plan A: Mac OS X

I have a PowerMac G4 that’s basically my home server and I would love it if Apple included voicemail software with OS X. Sadly the modems in their machines are not voice-capable. I used to have an voice-capable external 56K modem, but I have no idea where it went. Since my last rant on the topic, PhoneValet got an upgrade and seems like a good solution for Mac OS X, but it’s $200!

Plan B: Linux

My next best idea was to repurpose an old Pentium II I had lying around as a Linux server and run some software there. VOCP would supposedly do everything I wanted. Great.

First I had to get a Linux distribution on the PC. Hmm, I don’t have a CD burner on the PC. Thankfully Apple’s Disk Image utility handles ISO images just fine and I was able to download Red Hat, burn it to two CDs and pop it into the PC. I had it reformat the drive, wiping out XP and setting up its own partitions. The install went fairly smoothly although it asked me way more questions than I really cared to bothered with. In the end I had a working Linux system – or so it seemed.

Meanwhile, I ran over to Fry’s and bought a modem, carefully avoiding anything that said “WinModem”, knowing it probably wouldn’t work with Linux. I came back home on November 23, 2003 with a Best Data modem for $32.46 and threw that in the machine.

Now the fun was getting the modem drivers working. I played around with all the software and compiled stuff, but it wouldn’t work. Then I thought that it might be a good idea to see if this modem isn’t DOA first. Windows drivers came in the box of course. Too bad I wiped out Windows. Red Hat was acting weird anyway. It wouldn’t download any updates. The registration utility just kept crashing.

I thought I would just install Windows into some free space on the drive. I searched around on the web for answers on how to do this. The answer: you can’t. You have to install Windows first, then Linux. Doh! Having Windows seemed to be the best course of action, so I copied a few of the files I worked on over to my Mac, reformatted the PC disk and installed Windows XP again. Once that was done, I installed Red Hat into another partition. Great. Now I can dual boot.

Now the good news was that the modem was recognized and worked in Windows. The bad news was that I discovered something about the modem – it didn’t seem to have any voice capabilities. I looked up the modem info on the internet and sure enough, it was NOT a voice modem, even if the box said it was. This extended my streak of bad Fry’s experiences to about 9,000 or so in a row.

After performing the painful return ritual at Fry’s, I went onto eBay on Nov. 24 and bought another modem. My consolation was that this modem as about $25 cheaper than the one I got at Fry’s – $8. It was an Intel modem, based on the Ambient MD563X-HaM chipset which supposedly would work for voicemail.

A few days later that one arrived and I started playing with it. After messing with AT modem codes for a while in Linux(it’s been a LONG time since I did that), I gave up and decided to get it working in Windows. This modem was recognized and seemed to work, except it didn’t show caller ID. (I drove Anne crazy calling our phone over and over to test this.) While the chipset was supposed to support it, it didn’t work in these modems. Sure enough, the eBay listing didn’t show caller id as a feature and I didn’t read it carefully. Back to eBay.

Next: Part II, More modems and Windows