The Magic Jack Hack

I recently purchased a magicJack on the advice of a friend. It's a VoIP USB device that for $20 for a year gives you unlimited North American calling with a free incoming number from your choice of major cities across the US. It sounds too good to be true, but I had to find out for myself. After signing up online and paying the initial $40 fee (includes the first year of service) and patiently waited by the mailbox for my jack, 5-10 business days later it arrived (I kind of lost track of how many days it really was after a couple days of sitting there on the stoop). The install was simple and I won't bore you with the details, but it basically worked. My first call was a success... after I disabled bit torrent anyway. Other bandwidth intensive apps will basically kill the quality. You'll need to do some traffic prioritization if you have a router that supports it (ie Linksys WRT54G) or otherwise just make sure you have enough bandwidth when you want to make a call. The incoming number worked fine as well. In fact it worked so well, I decided to hook it up to my regular phones in the house. I happen to have an RCA 2-link Dect 6.0 phone and the 2nd line is available, so after some education on RJ14C jacks I hook the magic jack through the existing wiring in my house. Now my 2-line phone upstairs sees the other pair of wires (the black and yellow ones) as an active line and selecting line 2 on the phone gives you the magic jack dial tone. So far so good, I start using the 2nd line for all my outgoing calls. After a few calls I notice something strange. Sometimes the person I am calling can't hear me. I can hear them but they can't hear me... it's just "Hello.... hello? &!$%*! ". It gets progressively worse and my friends are starting to get really annoyed with me. I was not sure what the issue was at first but I was losing friends fast and my brain finally kicked in. It's my Asterisk server in the basement. What's Asterisk? Basically a whole other system you can run if you are a hard core VoIP geek like me. The problem is I have all the VoIP ports forwarded to my Asterisk server and it seems to be interfering with my magicJack. Soon enough it occurs to me that if the Asterisk server is interfering the the magicJack, perhaps it uses the same protocols (ie SIP) and maybe, just maybe I can make it work WITH Asterisk instead of against it. A quick search reveals that in fact my idea is not new or clever at all, many people have been attempting to and succeeding in this very thing! My elation soon turns to despair however as I fail repeatedly at making this work. It seems that the magicJack folks were bound and determined to not let people connect their Asterisk servers or other SIP softphones to their service. I read post after post of a battle that has waged since last year when magicJack first came out. It seems every time someone managed to get it working they would post the method on a public forum and then the magicJack techs would change something and stop them. Eventually I managed to figure it out on my own, but sadly I can't really reveal the method as I don't want it to stop working! But trust me, it can be done. I now have my 2nd line connecting to my Asterisk server which is registered with magicJack. My actual USB dongle is sitting on my desk collecting dust while I happily make all the calls I want for $20 a year.