Asterisk Open Source PBX 1.0 Release

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Asterisk Open Source PBX 1.0 Release

Posted by michael on Thursday September 23, 2004 @06:30AM from the linux-phone-home dept.

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."

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Enjoy your IAXy... by kasparov · 2004-09-23 06:33 · Score: 4, Funny

Anonymous User...
(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.
1. Re:Enjoy your IAXy... by TheMysteriousFuture · 2004-09-23 10:45 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Here are some good asterisk resources.
  
  The Offical Asterisk IRC channel!
  irc.freenode.net
  #Asterisk
  
  Note: you must be registered and identified with NickServ to join the channel as we've had a lot of problems with spambots.
  To do so simply
  /msg nickserv register mypassword
  /msg nickserv identify mypassword
  then /join #asterisk
  
  Come on in and say hi!
  Some links
  
  The Wiki
  The Asterisk Documentation Project
  Andy's Getting Started With Asterisk Guide (it's written for a old version of asterisk, but still useful)
  ManxPower's site
  For some advanced examples see John Todd's site
  Also read all files in ./asterisk/doc after you download Asterisk.
  
  more links (look at the "Unnoficial Links")
  
  Mod me up! :)...
  
  --
  .sig
Linux Journal did an article on Asterisk... by tcopeland · 2004-09-23 06:33 · Score: 5, Informative

...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It's a bit out of date - it suggests you check out the code from CVS - but lots of good info there nonetheless.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
Great for new businesses by erick99 · 2004-09-23 06:34 · Score: 4, Interesting

The features section of the website is certainly impressive. If I were starting a new business or, for some reason, had to get out of a current PBX contract, I would give this a try. Having worked in large companies with large PBX systems, the money saved would not be insignicant. I didn't see in the article or the features list if there was any sort of limit to the amount of phones that this would support. For example will it work with 400 employees? 4000? 40,000?
-erick

--
http://www.busyweather.com/
1. Re:Great for new businesses by Scott+Laird · 2004-09-23 06:47 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  It depends on your needs. There have been suggestions that some CLECs are using Asterisk internally, and there are certainly a ton of VoIP startups using it. The general impression that I get is that you don't want to run more then 100 simultaneous connections through a single Asterisk server. If you want more, then add more servers and share the load. If you're doing a lot of compression on the server, the number may drop below 100.
  
  Fortunately, Asterisk does a decent job of sharing information between multiple servers, but setting up a large multi-system PBX still isn't going to be trivial.
  
  If you're using VoIP phones (Cisco, Polycom, etc), then there's no real limit to how many employees you can service with a single server. If you're using analog phones, then you should probably limit yourself to around 4 T1s worth of phones per server.
Re:Thanks! by grifter7 · 2004-09-23 06:35 · Score: 4, Informative

AC, meet my friend Google.

(PBX = Private Branch Exchange)

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/PBX.html

--
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Re:Thanks! by boarder8925 · 2004-09-23 06:36 · Score: 5, Informative

but wtf is a PBX?
For you, and everyone else too lazy to use Google or Wikipedia ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_branch_exchan ge

--
Keep your eyes to the sky.
IP phone recommendations? by otis+wildflower · 2004-09-23 06:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?
1. Re:IP phone recommendations? by Akai · 2004-09-23 06:42 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  By far my fav are Cisco 7960 (I haven't tried the 7970) the only problem is they need things like DNS entried and tftpservers to work optimally.
  
  For lower-cost alternatives, I really like the SNOM phones. I've used an snom 200 for quite a while and it's a very nice phone.
  
  I also have a Pulver WiSIP which is nice but not exactly featureful, and the audio quality goes down when WEP is used.
  
  For ATA's the SIPura, and the Linksys models there of ($50 or so) are a good bet, and the dirt-cheap Grandstreams work okay too.
  
  Use the voip wiki to find optimal phone and sip.conf configs for a bunch of different phones.
  
  --
  Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
2. Re:IP phone recommendations? by ldspartan · 2004-09-23 06:45 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  In my apartment, I've got a Cisco 7960 and Budgetone 100 both connected to * via SIP. They're at opposite ends of the cost spectrum, the 7960 being about $400 MSRP and the BT about $100. Both work fine.
  
  See http://www.voip-info.org/ for more.
  
  --
  Phil
3. Re:IP phone recommendations? by Scott+Laird · 2004-09-23 06:54 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The Polycom IP300/IP500/IP600 line seems to be the best combination of price and performance right now, at least for a business environment. You can get cheap phones (the Grandstream Budgetone is around $70), but they're cheap and missing some features.
  
  Asterisk doesn't have native LDAP support, but it's not very hard to write a script that produces a set of Asterisk config files out of LDAP data. With a bit more work, you could script Asterisk to do LDAP lookups, but it'll take too much work to be worth it for small (100 users) sites.
4. Re:IP phone recommendations? by Scott+Laird · 2004-09-23 07:15 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Well, Asterisk already lets you send voicemail via email, with the message attached as a WAV file. It can suck its VM config out of MySQL or Postgres, or it can use text files. It'll also send mail to a pager email address; I get a SMS message on my cell phone whenever I get new voicemail at home. The message includes the caller ID information as well, which makes it a snap to return calls.
  
  There's a patch out there somewhere to tie Asterisk into Request Tracker. Done properly, you could build a really interesting support phone system--it'd record calls, stick them into the ticket queue as needed, and give you a great way to keep track of who's bugging you the most.
Re:Slashdot News by erick99 · 2004-09-23 06:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

As far as I can tell from the article and their website, this software is free so I don't see how this is advertising. At least not in the traditional sense of advertising to make money from selling a product or service.
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/
Asterisk... by juuri · 2004-09-23 06:40 · Score: 5, Informative

...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.
best and worst of open source by MrShoop · 2004-09-23 06:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

Asterisk exemplifies the best and worst elements of an open source project. The best being this is an awesomely powerful, infinitely configurable robust piece of software that is free and can replace otherwise extremely expensive proprietary systems. It is power to the masses in that a small company can have a comparable phone system to a big corporation that spends tens of thousands of dollars.
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.
1. Re:best and worst of open source by Scott+Laird · 2004-09-23 07:09 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  In many ways, Asterisk reminds me of Sendmail, circa 1996 or so. It's complex, it's sort of hard to configure (although Asterisk doesn't use line noise for config files, unlike Sendmail), but it's insanely flexible. In the early and mid 90s, you needed the flexibility, because email standards were in flux. SMTP was common, but so was UUCP and BITNET and a handful of other protocols. Gateways into non-RFC822 systems were all over the place. You needed a mail program that could handle all sorts of weird issues or you'd never be able to hack together a config that could handle your weird mail needs.
  
  Asterisk is similar. It's complex because it's designed to be able to tie together clumps of incompatible phone systems and act in all sorts of ways that the programmers didn't really intend. You can use it as a pure VoIP system, a gateway between different VoIP systems, a plain PBX with analog phones, a VoIP extension for an existing PBX, a voice-mail system for a PBX, a dialer for a call center, or a centrex-style virtual PBX for multiple companies. It's flexible enough to let you configure it to be any of these and a thousand other things. And today, we need the flexibility because we have so many weird little phone systems that we need to tie together.
  
  For email, things eventually changed. SMTP is king, and RFC 822 is the gold standard for email formats. Modern mailers are a lot less complex because they *CAN* be. Will the future hold something similar for telephone service? Who knows. Check back in a decade, but for now, use Asterisk.
cheap, turnkey asterisk systems? by timothy · 2004-09-23 06:44 · Score: 5, Insightful

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
Re:Thanks! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-23 06:47 · Score: 5, Funny

It's like a PBJ, but XTREME!!!
New Marketing Slogan... by GypC · 2004-09-23 06:47 · Score: 4, Funny

Asterisk 1, because when it comes to your job, you only have one "ass-to-risk"
OK, that was bad.
Re:ads by JabberWokky · 2004-09-23 06:51 · Score: 4, Funny

Actually, they should use:
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
Asterisk is great! by SendBot · 2004-09-23 06:51 · Score: 4, Informative

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 are running it by codepunk · 2004-09-23 07:03 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?
Re:Questions from a VOIP newbie by ModMeFlamebait · 2004-09-23 09:20 · Score: 4, Informative
VOIP intrigues me, but being a newbie at this, I still get a little dizzy by all of this. So perhaps if someone can enlighten me. :)

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
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