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Build Your Own PBX
Kerbo writes "Kerry Garrison has written up a complete guide to building your own PBX with Asterisk@Home to create your own working PBX system. In the article, he shows how you can build a complete, working system for under $20 (assuming you have some old hardware laying around the house)."
... Assuming you have the mose expensive part of the setup laying around, it's merley $20.
Building Your Own PBX with Asterisk
Kerry Garrison
What would it mean to you to have your own full-featured PBX system at your home or small office? What would it mean to you if you could build an entire PBX system (minus the phones) on hardware you probably have laying around, AND that it can probably also save you money on your phone bill? Sounds too hard to believe doesn't it, but using old hardware and some open source software, you really can build a commercial quality phone system that would normally cost thousands of dollars.
The Hardware
As I mentioned in the opening, we are going to build our PBX system from equipment that we have laying around the house. After cannibalizing three spare systems, what was left was a PII 450, 386mb RAM, 12gb HD, 48x CDROM drive, and an Intel Pro 10/100 network card. This is all you "need" to get going as long as you are going to get VOIP dial tone service from a company like BroadVoice (more on this later). If you want to use regular analog phone lines you will need modem card. Not every card will work properly, however, the most recommended card is the Digium Wildcard X100P FXO card which can be purchased brand new on eBay for $6.95 each. So far, total out of pocket expense for the card plus shipping: $12.90.
The Software
The software for our PBX system is the open source package called Asterisk. When I said that this was a full-featured PBX system, I wasn't kidding. The following is NOT a complete list of features:
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
While Asterisk can run on numerous systems from Linux to even flash ROM for some LinkSys routers, we will focus on installing Asterisk on our salvaged equipment as simply as possible. To aid in our install, 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.
With a VOIP PBX system you have three basic means of providing access to the users (the phones).
SIP Compliant Handsets ($70 - $500)
PC Based SoftPhones (Free)
ATA (Analog Telecommunications Adaptor) ($50 - $500)
Without having to spend any money on our technogeek special PBX system, we will set it up for the time being with X-Lite softphones.
Installation
With Asterisk@Home, you simply need to download the disk image, burn it to a CD, and boot off of it.
Burn Asterisk@Home iso to a blank CD
Boot your Asterisk PC with the CD and press enter
NOTE: This will erase all data on the hard drive of the PC!!!
After the Linux is loaded the CD will eject. Take out the CD and wait for the system to reboot
During the reboot Asterisk will be built from source for your hardware. This will take some time. Do not cancel the boot!
Log in to your new Asterisk box (user:root, password:password)
When you login, you will be given the URL to the web interface. You will also be told that you can use the help-aah command to get a list of quick commands. You can get into the Asterisk system for advanced settings by using asterisk -r command. We won't go into all of the advanced features of Asterisk in this article, that topic could consume an entire book.
If this machine is going to have any internet access, you should immediately change the root password with the passwd command. If you wa
"Kerbo writes "Kerry Garrison has written up a complete guide to building your own PBX with Asterisk@Home to create your own working PBX system. In the article, he shows how you can build a complete, working system for under $20 (assuming you have some old hardware laying around the house)."
And it will be just as reliable as a real PBX too.