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VOIP with Asterisk@Home

Posted March 18th, 2006 by isaac
in

Being a lover of technology, lots of gadets impress me. Asterisk is about one of the most impressive gadets I have ever seen.
Asterisk is a complete PBX that runs on software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware. Asterisk@Home is a pre-package ISO image that automates the installation of Asterisk and adds a usable web interface to monitor and configure your system.

Features of Asterisk

  • ADSI On-Screen Menu System
  • Authentication
  • Automated Attendant
  • Blacklists
  • Blind Transfer
  • Call Forward on Busy
  • Call Forward on No Answer
  • Call Monitoring
  • Call Parking
  • Call Recording
  • Call Retrieval
  • Call Routing (DID & ANI)
  • Call Transfer
  • Call Waiting
  • Caller ID
  • Conference Bridging
  • Distinctive Ring
  • Do Not Disturb
  • E911
  • Interactive Directory Listing
  • Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
  • Music On Hold
  • Music On Transfer
  • Predictive Dialer
  • Overhead Paging
  • Remote Call Pickup
  • Remote Office Support
  • Roaming Extensions
  • Route by Caller ID
  • Spell / Say
  • Supervised Transfer
  • Talk Detection
  • Text-to-Speech (via Festival)
  • Three-way Calling
  • VoIP Gateways
  • Voicemail

What this means for you is that you can install a fully functioning PBX on a $100 PC and have an 'answering machine' to make any geek jealous.

Let me just mention a few of my favorite features:

If someone leaves me a message, the system emails me the audio file and sends a text message to my cell phone with the caller id and length of the message. Not to forget that their is also a web based method of listening to all of my messages.

I can add or edit an extension in less than 30 seconds and the web interface can run reports on all phone activity.

·  Linux CentOS - Asterisk@home installs CentOS a free version of RedHat Enterprise Linux.
·  Asterisk
·  Asterisk Management Portal - full featured Asterisk GUI interface for configuration.
·  SugarCRM - CRM with Click to dial included homepage
·  Asterisk Flash Operator Panel - Web-based real time view & control of your Asterisk PBX.
·  WebMeetMe - Web based control over your telephone conferences
·  Asterisk Span DSP - Optional Software based FAX. Automatically detects and receives incoming fax (on zaptel hardware). It sends the fax as e-mail with a MIME .PDF attachment. Run install-pdf to add FAX support.
·  xPL - xPL connector that sends out information on Voicemail and CallerID.
·  Cisco SIP phone support - We have a web interface and TFTP server that can configure Cisco SIP phones like the 7960
·  MySQL Database - SQL database for Call Detail Reports and optionally configuration information. phpMyAdmin is included as well.
·  Apache Web Server - already configured with PHP support, default users: maint, wwwadmin,

Here is how I setup my Asterisk@Home v1.5 box:

With Asterisk@Home, you simply need to download the disk image, burn it to a CD, and boot off of it.

1. Download Asterisk@Home – ver 2.6 is the newest version available
2. http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/
3. Burn the Asterisk@Home iso onto a CD-R
4. Boot the PC to the CD and press enter
5. After the Linux is loaded the CD will eject. Make sure you are there to take out the CD as the system will soon restart and don't want to go back to the CD!
6. During the reboot Asterisk will be built from source for your hardware. Depending on your Hardware this may take time. On a 800mhz CPU with 512mb I believe the entire process only took 1 hour.

OS and Asterisk Are Now Installed
7. Asterisk will soon to login prompt (the defaults are user:root, password:password)
8. Next I would change the default password. Type "passwd" to change it.
9. To assign a static IP to the box, run the netconfig command. If two NICs are installed, netconfig will only configure the first NIC, eth0 and not eth1.
OK these changes, then reboot the machine to make them take effect.
After reboot, long in once more.

UPDATES (only if installing AAH 1.5 – version 2.0 already includes all of these)
Centos OS Updates
1. [root@asterisk1 /]# rpm --import http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
2. rpm -Uvh http://mirrors.versaweb.net/centos/4.1/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/centos-release-4-1.2.i386.rpm
3. ### Answer Y for Yes for the updates

    [root@asterisk1 /]# shutdown -r now

4.type "yum install mysql"

5. If you are using Voicepulse - Run the following commands to download the VoicePulse Connect! public key (needed for receiving calls):

cd /var/lib/asterisk/keys

    wget http://connect.voicepulse.com/keys/voicepulse01.pub

6. Set your Time Zone - Default is EST:

    [root@asterisk1 /]# timeconfig

7. You need to set new passwords for the Asterisk@Home maint, meetme user.

    [root@asterisk1 /] passwd-maint
    [root@asterisk1 /] passwd-amp
    [root@asterisk1 /] passwd-meetme

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