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Asterisk Open Source PBX 1.0 Release
An anonymous reader writes "Today at Astricon (the first Asterisk conference), Mark Spencer announced the release of version 1.0.0 of Asterisk. For those of you that don't know: Asterisk is a complete PBX in 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 three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware. Asterisk users can be up and running, making phone calls in under an hour using the various guides found at the VoIP Wiki. Connectivity to the PSTN is provided by companies like VoicePulse, Nufone, Gafachi and VoipJet."
(Mark offered to give a free IAXy to the person who got this slashdot story posted) :-)
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
Berkeley Breathed would like a word with you about your username. Also, if you have to provide references for your jokes, you might want to reconsider how funny they are.
...right here.
It's a bit out of date - it suggests you check out the code from CVS - but lots of good info there nonetheless.
The Army reading list
-erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
google is your friend.... in short its a phone system.
AC, meet my friend Google.
(PBX = Private Branch Exchange)
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/PBX.html
Free GMail invite with Free iPods!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_branch_excha
Keep your eyes to the sky.
PBX: Private Branch eXchange (private telephone switchboard)
used in medium and large size businesses. It's like a LAN for phones. You can tell when a employee has an extentions number.
Here we go again!
Any recommendations for IP (ethernet) phones to use with Asterisk? We've got Lucent/Avaya fones with power over ethernet (convenient) but the PBX backend is a proprietary piece of shite.
Also, is LDAP supported in Asterisk?
Don't you think you are being a bit hypocritical complaining about advertising when you are trolling for referrals for your free iPod? Now that is an example of advertising for a profit. If the shoe fits....
-erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
...is quite nice and easy to get going with a cheap $40 FXO card. With that and a decently powered machine you can easily replace your home answering service or machine with something a bit more complex. As great as Asterisk is though it definitely is a 1.0 product, hopefully now that the functionality has stabilized somewhat, more work will be put into rearing the myriad of control files into something more managable and some work will be put into better troubleshooting tools. Odd or weird problems can be a real PITA to diagnose on your Asterisk setup.
My dialplan (which works all but the analog portion 100% of the time) is that a call comes in -> rings the analog line a few times -> asterisk then picks up and gives the user a menu, from there one can pick my sip client or my girlfriend's or a global that rings the analog line and the sip clients at the same time. In case of no answer voicemail then picks up and fires off an email to us containing the message. Eventually I hope to have it sharing functionality with some friends in different states so we can all have free local dial-ins for family and friends who are scattered.
--- I do not moderate.
Mirrors can be found at http://asterisk.paperwork.com
echo '0.0.0.0 ads.osdn.com' | cat >> /etc/hosts
/etc/hosts
Here's the problem with the new generation of Unix users - they think that, just because Unix is a collection of small utilities that can be used to achieve great results, they must utilize as many tools as possible in solving the simplest problems.
echo '0.0.0.0 ads.osdn.com' >>
The worst is that there is a very steep learning curve. Configuration of both hardware and software is complex. While the documentation is thorough, it is not oriented towards the first time set-up.
Taken as a whole, though the good outweighs the bad, and it is worth investing in learning about it. This is great package. Tanks to the people who have been working on it, esp Mark at Digium.
I know at least one technically skilled computer programmer type (ruling me out on two counts) who had a lot of pain setting up asterics. (Brian will remain completely anonymous.)
;)
Considering the ludicrous (low) prices for which one can buy a complete system far-more-than-capable of running asterics, the relatively cheap price of the phone interfaces, etc, it seems like a plentifully adequate Asterics box could be made for a lot less than $500, and perhaps sold for that amount (just one or two lines, more could cost more). This isn't *dirt* cheap like future, hypothetical home PBX appliances ought to be from Linksys and similar companies, but considering you can also use it as a home server and other things on the side, strikes me as at least a plausible, reasonable price to aim for.
Has anyone done this? Does anyone sell a shoe-box PBX for a few hundred dollars that can be accessed via web, so new voice messages and menus can be dropped in via clicky-clicky drop-down menus?
On this front, Isaac from MythTV and Marc from Asterics should get together and forge an unholy alliance, integrating two home-automation tasks in a nice, non-monolithic, package. I noticed that MythTV has *some* kind of new addition involving phones, but I have not read the linked bits yet
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
What have we become?!
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
It's like a PBJ, but XTREME!!!
OK, that was bad.
Ignoring the free iPod issue, this is free software (GPL, even) that we're talking about. It's not v1.0 of some random commercial program. It's v1.0 of the premier Linux VoIP package. That makes it news.
printf "%s %s %s\n" $( echo '0.0.0.0 ads.osdn.com' | cat | rev | nl | head -5 | sed 's/Eris/Bob/g' | awk '{ print $2 " " $3 }' | rev | nl ) |cut -c3- >> /etc/hosts
--
Evan "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I've just barely started playing with it, but it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. It even comes with prerecorded messages such as "all members of our household are currently dealing with telemarketers", "somethings *terribly* wrong", and one that's just angry monkeys screaming for 20 seconds.
Here are some great resources for getting started:
http://www.digium.com/handbook-draft.pdf
and a good soft phone (x-lite) at http://www.xten.com/
We have been running it for quite some time to handle our order status system. We programmed a python interface to our oracle database, greatest thing since sliced bread. Very flexible system with alot of possibilities.
Got Code?
Not that most will care, but I first heard about Asterisk via the HTTP_REFERER data in the Web server logs for the OMR, which was apparently referenced as a place to get no-cost, pre-licensed (open licensed) on-hold music.
Now that the OMR has been shut down, the links to those songs are available in an XML dump of the music database that can be found on freality.org or my own site.
No Laughing Allowed!
I have been using Asterisk for well over a year, it has replaced the cisco call manager for my applications.
It has provided robust functionality, and many features that would be cost prohibitive to implement from other vendors.
If your looking to get into voice over IP on a scale larger than a single Vonage accout, or even want to have full pbx facilities for home..this is the way to go.
Just my 2 cents
-AC-
Someone (not me! not me! the monkeys!) should connect asterics with festival, an audio compression program, and a mail agent.
Would be good to call one's landline (connected to an asterics box) and be given options like "press 7 to hear email."
Would be annoying to hear everything, perhaps (and too slow, too), but an option like "play the first 10 words, then prompt for more, or to skip to the next message" would make it bearable.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Or you could fork out 40 buck and get a card to interface to the pstn, close off your sytem with a firewall.
You could also install a 4port T1 card, order up a T1 from your local Telco provider, install a few channel banks and have a traditional PBX saving thousands and thousands of dollars without ever exposing yourself to script kiddies.
Here's the link (from the MythTV site) for MythPhone. It's for making SIP calls, not intended for integration with a POTS service as far as I can see, but conceptually it could be a good front end for calls made over asterics (or any landline, if tied into one). That would lose the fancy picture stuff, but would turn a MythTV computer into a big, fancy phone. Beldar Conhead plastic face mold not included.
:) Got it working, eventually, Yes, but QuickRip (sadly discontinued) does a good-enough job with a shallower learning curve. Tradeoffs are everywhere, and there's one.
"Unfortunately big complex systems require some idea of what you are doing. Services are available to those who don't understand telephony. But usually they want to get paid for their time. You sound like you expected something like this to be just configure, make, make install and it's up and running."
Actually, I'd like it to be even simpler than "configure,make, make install," but I don't *expect* it -- at least, not magically. The reason I suggest a turnkey appliance is because such a thing can encapsulate many hours of the time you mention in a form that's easily reproducable at low marginal cost, and the cost of that time can be amortized over many units' worth of hardware -- the same way interface-design and programming time that go into things like wireless appliance of various kinds can.
Re: complexity / money for time, the same could be said (and has been) about all kinds of complex systems which have in the end been simplified with sufficient skill to make them useful *without* a big learning curve. I want my cake and to eat it too, Yes, but so does everyone who drives a car that doesn't need to be manually cranked, rides a ski-lift, or uses central heating instead of stoking a coal furnace (etc). There will always be a market (in money and attention span) for the hardcore, bare-metal approach to just about anything, but that doesn't mean simplifications and commoditization in general are bad.
Somewhat related example: video compression. Using dvd::rip, I have squashed a few DVDs into hard-drive friendly smaller sizes, so I can carry some favorite films on my laptop. dvd::rip is itself a front-end meant to be simpler and friendlier than using the underlying programs it connects, but it's still not all that user friendly, at least to klutzes like me
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Here's a pic of the system in action.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
We use Asterisk where I work -- about 30 Zultys ZIP 4X4 phones connected to a dual Xeon server with a Digium ISDN adaptor card (4 x E1 spans). One span is used to connect to the outside world (the full 30 lines; was just 12) and another connects to our "old" Siemens HiPath exchange.
We did have a problem with call quality which seemed to be related to recording calls; it turned out that it was due to having far too many files in the recording directory, and once we had that sorted, it was clear as a bell again.
My boss has even set up an Asterisk server at home. I haven't, but I've a spare machine I might use for the job if I can scrounge a spare IP phone. I'm not using a softphone -- we tested every one we could get the source for and one we couldn't, and they were all lousy for one reason or another.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Mark Spencer (the guy who does asterisk), is also the original author of Gaim, and Cheops (nifty network tool).
Anyways, that's it.. I knew him when we were both freshmen in college at Auburn.. He had ethernet in his room and I didn't, so my computer lived in his room most of that year..
Haven't talked to him in years.. so if you're reading this Mark -- HEY!!
--Zac
I'm about to move into a new office, fed by both DSL and cablemodem (for 99.9999% uptime = 30s:y downtime). Has your use of Asterisk and its PSTN connection been reliable enough that your company can depend on it? What should keep me waiting for the next generation?
--
make install -not war
Only odd thing we had to correct was switching off the Linux screensaver, as it was causing voice quality to occasionally stutter under high network traffic volume.
Support Hint: an office PBX is a mission-critical system for a commercial business. You can't run it on an old piece of leftover trash! You need to put it on a high quality 1U server racked in your air conditioned computer room behind a secure door where the night cleaner can't plug his vacuun cleaner into your power bar!
You also have to ensure it's properly backed up to off site tape/CD-ROM storage, and that the disk is RAID so that it can be QUICKLY restored when the disk fails.
Anything less than this level of proper support means your ass is grass when something bad happens and the office comes to a screeching halt!
You have been warned.
Ocelot Wreak
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
Ok so I install this thing on a Linux server. Then what? How do I make calls to say, someone in New York from LA? And who would I have to pay still? No one?
You set up Asterisk servers in NY and LA and make them communicate (hint: IAX2 rocks). Now you pay for net connectivity for both servers and that's about it. If you want a normal phone number attached to your Asterisk server, you need to sign up with a VOIP provider (there are plenty of them in the US, I wish there was at least one here...) - check the Asterisk Wiki (link in the summary), there's a list somewhere.
Also, how would I interface my phone with this thing? Would I need to get a VOIP phone?
You can use:
- a VOIP phone (just about any SIP/H.323/MGCP phone you fancy although some don't work with Asterisk) for about $70-$500 (from Grandstream to Cisco)
- an ATA (analog telephone adapter, IIRC) which costs a little below $100 per port (check out IAXy and the Sipura gear) - it's a device to plug in your analog phone(s) which then lets it communicate via VOIP
- a TDM400P card by Digium with an FXS module (1-4 on a single card) - you plug in an analog phone and it works with Asterisk
- a softphone (X-Lite for example) but it feels somewhat weird
If you want PSTN (public phone network) connectivity, you need either a VOIP provider account or a FXO interface card (check out X100P and TDM400P with FXO modules on Digium site).For a home installation I think I'd recommend a Sipura SPA-3000
Pavlov. Does this name ring a bell?
My hosting business, Binhost Technologies, uses Asterisk behind its IAX/SIP Origination and Termination and wholesale VOIP operations. It works well -- the price is right and the features are many. Most phones work if they speak SIP, IAX, or H.323 and the system comes configured from the start in a pretty usable state.
A few things we've found out: The scripting system is a bit of a learning curve. Also, the configurations are one of those Jenga configs -- breathe too hard and it falls down. You have to be really, really careful when messing with the configs because one place can easily mess up another thing. But once you get a good, working config, it just works.
Processor usage is reasonable, too. A P-266 would do well for a couple of lines and maybe up to 10. After that you'll want a bit more horse.
</plug>
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I have one of those TDM400 cards populated with 3 FXS modules. Each module is wired into my house's pre-existing phone wiring and drives anywhere from 2 to 4 phones. There is no issue with DSPs running out of steam; you can still only have one conversation on the party line that makes up that set of phones. It turns out the limitation is more the amount of loop current you can push through the line drivers before they fry.
Been running this config for months with great success.
Now if only I could teach my wife and daughters the concept of extensions and the trick of transferring a call, I'd be one happy camper indeed
PaulW, IT Consultant