It started with the bell. I noticed that there was an unused Western Electric remote telephone bell in my boss's office, just to the right of the door and about two inches from the ceiling. I decided that I wanted to make it possible for anyone in the company to make that bell ring by clicking a button on a web page.
I got the idea from a prank that one of my fraternity brothers had pulled on the CEO of a company that he used to work for. The CEO had a habit of walking around his office when he was thinking. He went on vacation and my friend put a croaking frog in the ceiling with a motion sensor that would cause it to croak when he walked. They also had it set up such that they could trigger it from the office next door too.
The company I worked for had a Christmas party and everyone was given a raffle ticket and I happened to win several eBay gift cards. I won the eBay bid on a Grandstream HT-386 dual FXS analog telephone adapter and used the gift cards to pay for it. This device has an RJ45 Ethernet jack, two RJ11 jacks for analog phones and a power connector. It is designed to obtain an IP address on the network and then register as an extension with a SIP server and allow calls to and from a dumb analog telephone plugged into one of the FXS ports. It can supply enough power to make the remote telephone bell ring.
Asterisk is software that can be installed on Linux and supports most SIP devices, including the Grandstream HT-386. I had already installed Linux on my laptop, so I installed a few additional packages: asterisk, apache and PHP. Then it was a simple matter to modify the asterisk configuration files to allow the HT-386 to register as extension 101 for one jack and 102 for the other with a maximum ring time of 5 seconds, which is the length of time of one telephone ring.
Now the problem was how to cause asterisk to dial the extension from a web page. One of the tools that a company engineer had written would cause a remote customer system to dial an external number and connect the call to an extension on their system when run from the admin server on the company network. So I knew that there had to be a way to dial an extension too. After viewing the source of the command that the engineer had written, I found out that what it did was create a specially formatted file and copy it to /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing on the remote system. I then created a file that would cause extension 102 to call extension 101 with the 5 second timeout. Then it was just a matter of writing an html/PHP file that would display a web page and when the button image on the page was pressed, copy that file to the /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing directory on my laptop.
The next thing to be done was to run a wire from the bell in the office at work to somewhere that I could plug the HT-386 into power and the network. The company had added four cubes during an expansion and had hired electricians to run network cables from these cubes to the network closet. They had cut holes in the wall to run the cables down near the floor and another at the top of the wall into the drop ceiling and the upper hole just happened to be less than a foot from the bell. Only three of these cubes were in use, so there were unused network and power jacks in the fourth cube. I brought in a spool of telephone wire and one day stayed late until everyone else had gone home and ran the wire up through the same hole that the network cables came out of near the floor and through one of the mounting holes for the bell, connected it and attached an RJ11 jack to the other end. Several days later, I brought the HT-386 into the office, hid it behind a box in Andy's cube and connected it to power, the network and the bell. I also connected a black RJ11 patch cable to the connector on the side of the bell, lifted up one of the ceiling tiles and threw the other end as far as I could. Then I powered on my laptop and made sure that pushing the button on the web page would make the bell ring.
The only thing left to do was to let everyone in the office except my boss, Mike J, and his office mate, Dave, know about the web page. I just figured that I would ask the engineering team if they had a mailing list tomorrow and send out an email to the list during lunchtime.
So the next day, I completed my first appointment for the day and went to talk to the engineering team. I first talked to Carlo, but he told me to talk to Greg, the manager of the engineering team, who insisted on me telling him what I wanted the list for and as soon as I told him the web server IP address, he pushed the button ten times. Then he asked what had happened. I told him that it had made the bell ring. Since I had set it up to ring for 5 seconds, 10 pushes of the button meant that the bell had rung constantly for 50 seconds. Ben and Carlo, who worked for Greg went to Dave and Mike's office while Greg pushed the button a few more times to verify that the bell was ringing. Then everyone on the engineering team went to the web page and began pushing the button.
After an hour or so of the bell ringing pretty much constantly, Mike said that he was going to make sure that whoever had done this was going to be fired and that he thought it was Carlo, because "he knows how to solder." The Human Resources Manager then came around and was asking who did it, but nobody confessed and Carlo just laughed and said "No, it wasn't me" when he asked him.
After a while Ben came back to the engineering office and said that it was over because Dave had unplugged the wire from the bell. I asked him which wire, and he said the black one. I said that the black one was just a fake, a dummy one that I had put in to throw them off. Ben's mouth dropped and everyone laughed and continued pushing the button on the web page and ringing the bell.
At one point the CEO, Chris came by to ask Mike something and Mike complained about the bell to him and Chris just walked away in disgust.
Dave then tried removing the metal bells, but while this made it much quieter in the office, it didn't stop the bell from going "bzzzt" every time someone pushed the button.
After a while, Dave decided that even that was too much and got on his chair holding a butter knife to cut the wires. We warned him that there was up to 90 volts on the wires and after looking at the butter knife, he decided to do it anyway. He managed to break at least one of the wires and finally the bell became silent.
I went and asked Andy if I could get something next to the box under his desk and removed the HT-386. I then shut down my laptop and put it and the HT-386 away in the laptop bag.
In retrospect, I should have limited the bell to ringing only once every five minutes instead of allowing it to ring constantly. This would have required modifying the PHP script to create a time file and only allowing the bell-ringing file to be copied if the time stamp on the time file was over five minutes old and then touching the time file to update the time stamp. I also should have created my own email list of everyone in the office to send the email to. This may have resulted in me being fired that day, but if the CEO, who has pulled his own pranks, had pushed the web page button a few times, he may have prevented that.