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Asterisk -- Linux PBX and Voice Response System

Posted by timothy on from the deep-infrastructure dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "This whitepaper at linuxdevices gives an introduction to Asterisk, an open source project which implements a Linux-based Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform. Asterisk turns a Linux system to the task of switching calls, and offers a large number of features to support communication in a business environment. According to the whitepaper, "Asterisk can do just about anything in software that a traditional PBX would do with specialized hardware. It unifies systems to provide tremendous possibilities for information services. Seamless use of Packet Voice allows Asterisk servers to intercommunicate throughout LANS, private WANS, and the Internet. Asterisk provides a sophisticated solution for IVR platforms, wide hardware interoperability, flexible wide area phone networks, and advanced telephony features -- all at reasonable cost." Apparently, Asterisk is supported on the Linux-based snom 100 VoIP phone, which has an embedded computer based on a Motorola PowerQUICC processor with 16MB of RAM and runs a Linux 2.4.18 kernel."

8 comments

  1. snom 100 VoIP Kernel Version... by muonzoo · · Score: 1

    Well, all the snom phones around our office (and they are very nice by the way) claim to be booting 2.4.3...

    1. Re:snom 100 VoIP Kernel Version... by sien · · Score: 1

      Hey, what kind of gateway do you use to get to the phone system ?

    2. Re:snom 100 VoIP Kernel Version... by muonzoo · · Score: 1

      CISCO 2600s some with FXS/FXO, some with T1 cards.

    3. Re:snom 100 VoIP Kernel Version... by humboldt · · Score: 1

      Well, all the snom phones around our office (and they are very nice by the way) claim to be booting 2.4.3...

      Get the newest firmware, it runs 2.4.18. Make sure to get at least 1.10i, since this version fixes a lot of nasty bugs.

      By the way: the bootloader still shows "Booting 2.4.3" but then switches to "Booting 2.4.18" after a few seconds?!?!

      IMHO the snom phones are really shitty. Low quality hardware, annoying speaker and really really buggy. And their H.323 stack is a bad joke. SIP works quite well, though.

  2. ASTERIX? by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

    If the system is called "Asterisk", I hope that they are prepared to be sued by overzealous, dyslexic Frenchmen!

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:ASTERIX? by Slashamatic · · Score: 2
      It's OT, but the suit is coming from a lawyer of dubious reputation in Munich who makes his money about defending other people's IP, often without them knowing about it, Regrettably, this is permissable under German law where the lawyer act's as an agent of the court.

      However, an asterisk '*' is a symbol whereas Asterix and Obelix refers to a comic strip. I guess even though they are in Germany, they should be safe from predatory law-suits.

  3. wow by jjshoe · · Score: 1
    i was looking for something like this some time ago, glad to see something like this being worked on. imagine a phone network of nerds, one phone in each town, means free calls to any town anywere (assuming ofcourse you had access to route through etc. etc.)


    i just have one question out there for you telephone company people, what do you think? if this takes over, then ofcourse you'll get your money in internet connection fee's and what not im sure?

    --
    -- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount} /dev/girl -t {wet;fsck;fsck;yes;yes;yes;umount} {/de
  4. I've used it -- it works great, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm a system admistrinator for a Global-1000 company. We recently switched from our expensive and proprietary PBX vnedor to use "Linux", since the per-seat licensing costs were significantly less, and access to the source code was deemed to be beneficial.

    There were a few migration issues, like not being able to use "WinModems", but overall, the process is smooth. Unfortunately, the Linux 497-day uptime limit may force us to switch back to Windows 2k dataserver with redundant clustering. We can't afford the downtime to reboot our telephone systems once every 497 days!