Before I left for CodeCamp on Friday, I'd done two things:

  1. I'd enabled the Telstra Home Messages 101 service on our phone line (seeing as our answering machine had died a couple of months ago)
  2. I upgraded the firmware on my Billion 7402GL modem to the latest release - 5.52e.

While I was away, Narelle mentioned that the phone had been playing up a bit. The Home Messages service takes a few days to activate, so I wondered if that was interfering with the Sipura SPA-3000's line detection somehow. I had a look this morning, and after power-cycling the modem and ATA, everything appeared to be ok. However tonight I noticed the phone dial tone was back on the expensive "Telstra" tone.

After fiddling with the modem settings for ages, I finally decided that maybe there was a problem with the new firmware, so used the emergency software to drop back to 5.04 then upgraded to 5.07, which had been very reliable and what I had been running for ages.

I managed to do this (though it would have been a bit quicker if I'd paid attention to the instructions where it said to ensure your PC has a static IP address before you start - kind of makes sense when you think about it). After power-cycling again, still no joy. I use the free SysLog daemon from Kiwi Enterprises to monitor what the SPA is up to, and it still looked like it was not able to register with our main VoIP provider - FreeCall.

Had my Sipura gone faulty?

As a last desperate measure, I checked the VoIP Forum on Whirlpool, and lo and behold - someone had posted about problems registering with FreeCall! A quick visit to their website confirmed in the hard-to-read scrolling notice that they're suffering some kind of DDoS.

Please be advised that our main Internet router is currently being attacked by virus. VoIP services are temporarily unavailable. Apologies for inconveniences caused…

So I updated the Sipura's configuration to point to our other provider PennyTel (usually we just use them for mobile calls), and bingo! we're back online again.

A pity I didn't check that first :-(