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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)."
Become a Millionaire with only $20, and another $999,980 laying around.
some old hardware laying WHAT around the house?
Hmmmm. How about making a Linux distro that gives out a PBX/bastion host/firewall???
For those with extra hardware to run Astrerix@Home, consider running Folding@Home! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
While I ddid focus on using softphones, you can use either SIP phones or normal phones using an ATA adapter. SIP phones range in price from $69 - $500.
So now when people call me they can go through auto attendent hell just like the big companies.
Ours (done in a modern machine, so it would have PCI 2.2 for the cards to drive Plain Old Phones) has a (not hard to do once the basics are working) callpath that's a caller-ID whitelist.
Calls from numbers "on the list" ring the phones, then go to voicemail, like "normal" calls would. Calls from one of our cellphones tell the caller how many new voicemails are waiting, then distinctive-ring the phones, then go to voicemail. Calls from unknown, private, or not-on-the-list numbers go straight to voicemail without ringing the phones.
You'll pry it out of my wife's cold dead hands...
For those that don't know...Private Branch Exchange[wikipedia.org]
If you don't know what a PBX is, then this probably isn't of interest to you in the first place. I have no idea what "Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) and Elliptic Curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV) for key agreement, and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for signature generation/verification" means, but that didnt stop me from reading about it.
Thank you. I was going to post, too, but given my already "Bad" Karma, I thought better of it. Glad to see someone agrees.
In any case, here is an explanation of PBX -- it certainly helped me.
It you just opened your own cottage industry style consulting business out of your home, something like this could make you look like a bigger business. I could see the advantage to that. The features of the system would be handy too for a new and very small business.
http://www.busyweather.com/
With all this talk of voip here and there, I've never understood how the actual conversion from ip to pots actually takes place.
Basically I want to know how these companies do it. How do the perform this termination service? How small a scale could one do this himself?
PBX = Private Branch Exchange
(Your work phone system)
Just in case it's not clear yet
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/PBX.html
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
HINT: When the article provides absolutely NO background information, it can safely be said that everyone but you knows what we're talking about.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The most recommended card is the Digium Wildcard X100P FXO card which can be purchased brand new on eBay for $6.95 each.
Not for long...
So, this is a PBX. So, I can hook this hardware up to the telco and take incoming calls from clients anywhere in the world over IP and make a call for them to a telco phone number, and let them talk over my PBX, correct?
OK, but what I do not know is what kind of connection to the telco do I need to do this? Can I do it using my standard phone connection? I would think you need multiple lines outgoing to the telco POTS (plain old telephone system), correct? So, if I have N lines to the telco, I can handle a max of N calls from clients on my IP to Telco PBX, correct?
So, would this be cost effective as a business model? Is a certain number of lines required, etc?
TIA
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Hi,
I'm considering setting up Asterisk at home, however, the WAF (wife acceptance factor) is going to be very important here, so I'd like to make sure I know what I'm doing before I start. How hard is it to deploy an Asterisk@home with the following configuration:
Two outgoing lines (one for local calls via local telecom, one for US calls via VoIP (packet8 -- using their DTA-310), and three local extensions (only one will be a "real" telephone.
As I understand it, this means I need two FXOs, and one FXS. Can I use three separate cards for this, instead of buying a 2 or 4 port FXO, which seem to be more than 2* the cost of a single?
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
This is great. When I get another free day off I'm going to try this out. If it makes me a lot in consulting and hence improves my CV, then all the better for me.
Thanks Asterisk!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
The parent submission is a serious troll. I mean, I started working the lowest level helpdesk in 97, and when I got my first tour of the server room, I was shown the PBX. Now, I had no idea what PBX stood for, or how it worked (and to be honest, I still don't), but I was told that its primary purpose was to handle all the phone switching.
I mean, come on. It's almost all but impossible to work in the IT field and not at least see a PBX.
Slashdot isn't supposed to spell out every single technology that it features. It's assuming that you either have an idea what the article is about, or you know how to at least use google. Go google for "what is a PBX". There, done.
It's too bad that there isn't some sort of online database of acronyms.
Perhaps we could call it Acronym Search.
Or perhaps some sort of search engine.
Help I'm a rock.
I could probably swing running the software and equipment, but I am lost with the administrative and telephony portion of having my own PBX.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Here's a REAL PBX that is my personal property.
It's a Rolm CBX II 9000 that is configured to handle 10,000 lines. (Yes, it's operational) It was purchased for $3,000,000 when it was brand new. It's had additional upgrades installed, it's net value was over $5,000,000 at one point in the very recent past.
It fills an entire building. So, compare that with this new tech and you'll all the more appreciate what you have in front of you...
order vonage service
receive vonage ata (analog telephone adapter)
disconnect ILEC telephone lines from inside house telephone lines at your dmarc on the side of your home
plug vonage ata into phone jack inside
enjoy
.sig
-
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
Just a "minor technical detail", that last note. The way people don't RT*A around here, I'll bet in a day or two we'll see some late posts whining about their loss of data. (is that Darwin I hear?)* Boot your Asterisk PC with the CD and press enter
NOTE: This will erase all data on the hard drive of the PC!!!
Aw, com'on, don't tell me you've never just hit enter without REALLY reading the dialog box, right?
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Make sure your connection is up for it:
http://testyourvoip.com/
Wikipedia VoIP Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voip
Fucking THANK YOU!!
Once my SO figured out she could have this too if, and only if, daddy gets to buy a new machine. i said it'd probably needs a good amount of horsepower and needed a lot of ram - she was still stunned by the idea of having such a phone system, she didn't even question it.
Hot damn, new server AND a new phone system to play with - i looked at the gui screenshots of the astGUI client - holy shit, this is going to be fun.
That's because the articles haven't been very good. I know that I go through phases of interest and when the articles are as bad as they have been slashdot gets replaced with other activities.
But the fact is that I'd rather slashdot erred on the terse side, instead of excessive verbosity. If I started seeing a lot of "In case you don't know, a CPU is a Central Processing Unit...", "In case you don't know an LED is a light emitting diode", "In case you don't know a ...." garbage in the submissions, I'd stop reading. If there's something that's too obscure I can always look it up.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Heh.. yeah. I knew what PBX was way back in the 80s before I was even in Middle School... Thank you Anarchist Cookbook!
Hey Folks,
We've got to be more careful - he's starting to ask questions. It's pretty important that he doesn't find out what else we've been keeping from him.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The answer to your question is in the Step by Step Home Wiring Setup" in the Vonage Faq.
What I would like to know is if this Astrix PBX they talked about in the article can be used to replace the ATA Vonage hands out. I'm pretty sure Vonage won't let me return the ATA for any value, but Astrix looks to have more features.
What the parent said should make you happy. It works well.
.5-1 ring delay).
Please do not try and combine Vonage with Asterisk unless you're prepared to use an FXO device/card. It can't be done. (Before I get flamed, technically you can do it through software but Vonage won't give you the information to do it.) You'd have to use an FXO card to connect the "analog" line coming out of your Vonage ATA to the Asterisk Box -- it would treat it just like a standard POTS line.
A very crude setup, if I do say so. Your calls would be going through multiple conversions and using much more bandwith (Vonage -> ATA, Asterisk Box -> SIP-phone/ATA vs. Broadvoice -> Asterisk then bridged to Broadvoice -> SIP-phone after call setup).
Plus it's frankly just going to be annoying -- when you start doing things like this you're just asking for a long delay between when the person calls you and your phone rings (even with immediate=yes, the Wildcard X100P often introduces
Not to mention all the dupes recently.
To the editors: I do hope that you get off your asses and do something. Editors are supposed to editorialise right?
So, pen your thoughts on topics of interest to the geek world. All we get so far is this immense wall of silence from you. It's like you're just going through the motions nowadays.
At least address the complaints we see daily. You owe the paying subscribers this much.
I recall the heyday of
Articles on tired Sci-Fi franchises and barely concealed adverts are boring me to tears.
As an aside, can anyone can recommend another good forum for geeks to hang out on?
This looks like a great idea for student houses. I'm going to seriously consider setting one of these up, but does anyone know from a phone-line connection aspect weather I could use my existing telephone line or would there be any sort of "call the phone company to talk it over" type configuration (does it work like answering machine on first ring with a supported modem card or will I need to set up another sort of line?). I wouldnt mind the bottleneck of just one phoneline for 6 people on a pbx, I'm assuming that there is a busy signal etc for every other caller after the first and some sort of warning for someone who picks up to try to call out on a busy line. This would be amazing for those "somebody called for you, I forgot who it was and where I wrote the number" situations, along with the classic case of nobody answering because theres a 1 in 6 chance its for them etc etc.... anyways just some brainstorming, time to hunt down an old clunker to install it on...
Aint nothing automatic about linux. It's somehow powered by the kinetic energy you expend by endlessly tweaking conf files.
I like your waffles. I buy as many as I can with counterfeit yen.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Not a commercial, but you can add regular telephones to this great PBX system by going to www.voipsupply.com Most consumer SIP equipment is locked for Vonage, CallVantage, or Net2Phone. This shop sells non-configured versions which you can simply plug into your network, configure, and go. There are single- and dual-port analog adapters with FSX support, and fairly nice (and cheap) desktop phone sets, all SIP compatible.
Kriston
I'm dying, quick, what's the google keyword for 911?
Those Lin/Winmodems are simply a soundcard with a telephone interface. They are of no value to most of us that have had fast Internet connections for years. Wait a minute: They have been approved to be connected to the PSTN! That is by far the greatest expence of producing this hardware.
Might I add, with a bit of experience, and perhaps a 'trade school' education in electronics it is trivial to reverse them and make 'ATA' devices. (Actually I think they are called 'FXS' devices in telco lingo. The devices that must be approved for connection to the PSTN are 'FXO' modules.) At somewhere between zero and a couple Euros per linmodem, used, this is a great idea.
As for the software, I'll stick to FreeBSD or Gentoo Linux and install my own Asterisk. Binaries give me the creaps. Computers a couple or three years old are likely to have more PCI slots and maybe an onboard 'Lin/Winmodem and lan card. While ee100s are a very good NIC (get them for as little as EUR 5,--) Linux and the BSDs have drivers for just about all types -- far more than Windows ever had.
Maintenance is the problem on older ROLM boxes. We once lost phone service for an entire day when one card in teh switch died. They had to fly the part from Toronto because there was no local supply here in Vancouver.
There may be no shortage of ROLM parts floating around on eBay, but the know-how to install and configure these switches is what is in short supply these days.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Not just him, but a lot of other people, including me. Obviously not everyday 'geeks' know what they are, just a self-important few.
As for saying 'well google it', it's not my job to find out something so I'm interested in an article, it's up to the article submitter to sell the story to me, if he wants me to read it. Every salesman worth his salt knows that.
On a somewhat related note, I've found this website to be invaluable when dealing with avalanches of acronyms.
Great! So now you can have real PABX functionality at home (SOHO) But how does it scale? How many people can actually have working phones on a system? Is it just the Hardware which needs to scale or are there limitations to Asterisk itself? If I could play with this at work, how many guys could I conceivably hook up to this (using just SIP calls, no external connections needed) What would be the number of concurrent calls? Is there any info on that (yeah, I know it's "@Home" but just wondered...) I've been aware of Astersk for ages, but having a 'self-intalling' PBX does lower the bar quite a bit.
# Post Early: If an article has over a certain number of posts on it already, yours is less likely to be moderated. This is less likely both statistically (there are more to choose from) and due to positioning (as a moderator I have to actually find your post waaay at the end of a long list.)
You use this word, "geeks" in your post as if I'm supposed to know what it is. Are you all self-important that defining your words is beneath you? If you're worth your salt, you would have sold me on it so that I would consider your post worthy.
However, for your benefit, I hope slashdot institutes an auto-acronym feature. So that next time there's a story about a new BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), SCO (Santa Cruz Operation), IBM (International Business Machines), or even 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation) you'll (you will) know what those acronyms mean.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That's overkill. Phone lines aren't power lines.
Jacking into the junction box isn't any harder than making an ethernet cord (which just takes a spool of CAT-5, a crimping tool, some vampire clips, and an IQ somewhere around Forrest Gump's).
In fact, a lot of junction boxes have rj-11 jacks on them so you don't have to do anything to the wires. You'd just disconnect the main from the outgoing line and connect it to the ata adapter.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
It's pretty much general knowledge what a PBX is.
Some trivia: PBXs used to be known as PABXs, when it was new and highly advanced for a company to have a private AUTOMATIC branch exchange, rather than one where a switchboard operator would plug plugs into the right holes to manually route calls. The original PABXs were electromechanical - some large companies had Strowger private exchanges the size of a typical telco exchange unit.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
When I read the headline and noticed PBX I was thinking about Lego Mindstorms. Guess my mind was in bad weather to... as Mindstorms has a RCX not a PBX.
Or does it ??? lego pbx
There are thousands and thousands of small businesses who this sort of thing could work really well for. While it costs next to nothing to set up, anyone who spends the time learning about how the technology works could potentially run a nice little side business, rolling premade boxes out by charging perhaps for hardware, install, config and ongoing support. The telco market is pretty competitive but as software is now becoming more important than hardware in this business, these sorts of things are going to get easier. I work for a company that supports and designs complex converged communications solutions for large corporates and what's become clear over the past couple of years is that the IP Telephony market is overtaking traditional TDM based systems exponetially. The vendors used to make the majority of their cash from the hardware side. The type of hardware that systems run on is becoming less important, as is the manufacturer - it's the software and what you can do with it that's driving a lot of decisions nowadays. One example is that there are a lot of good open standards now on most platforms which allows for easier integration of other existing systems in a business from databases to other PBX's - this is all enabled because of software, not hardware. Interesting side note for the linux peeps - Avaya, who is probably the largest telephony vender in the world for large corps (they spun off from Lucent in 2001) use Red Hat - they use proprietry hardware and software of course, but thought this may interest some...
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
DO NOT BOOT THE Asterisk@Home ISO !!!!!!
IT WILLE AUTOMATICALLY FROMAT YOUR / PARTITION WITHOUT AKSING YOU A THING.
OMG this is freekin' Unbelievable!!!
I've downloaded the Asterisk@Home and like every other n00b around I just booted up from it (no I've not read any warning s or FULL documentation). I bet 98% of people around to the same thing. After the kernel boot and X detection phase it started formatting my / partition. NOT even a ONE question asked. Of course it screwed my system.
The good part is that I booted from this ISO in a virtual machine (not my real box) and I just lost a default Debian installation (installed on a virtual machine).
Is this the latest way to distribute bad things on the net? Post an article regarding an open source project that do a lot of good things after it FORMAT your / partition?
Please if you wanna try Asterisk@Home ISO do it in a blank new virtual machine not your development/home primary box.
Regards,
the3ngineer
How do I know if I'm interested in it or not if I have no idea what it is?
/. to tell you what you should be interested in :)
I'm guessing you already know if something interests you or not.
Or are you asking if you should be interested? Take my advice, kid--don't depend on
Especially if you are stripping the wire with your teeth at the time!
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
About a month ago, I took the plunge. I bought the Digium Card with 1 FXS and 3 FXO ports (~$300). I had a running Redhat 9.0 system that was doing nothing.
I installed the Digium Card, and installed the stable 1.0 release of Asterisk in about an hour.
It took me about a day, to figure out the "world of telephony". The telephone people in general have built a world of acronyms that are confusing to the non-initiated. But after some study, and reading the WIKI, I had a fully functional PBX system.
I purchased a number through connect.voicepulse.com and set that up easily. I kept one land line, for 911 calls, my DirectTivo, free local calls, and because everyone still calls us on that land line (10 years+).
EVERYTHING WORKS!
I now have true "extensions" in the house. My wife can now call me when I am out in the shop via the extension. The kids now get calls directed to their phone, so I am no longer picking up their phone calls. Voicemessages delivered via email.
But the best feature of all is: Because the initial voice menu requires you to enter a one(1) or a two(2) this puts a stop to the telemarketers and wrong numbers and the midnight faxes!!!
Another great feature of connect.voicepulse.com is that you get 4 simultaneous incoming/outgoing calls. This means that with one account, and one number, we can all be making outbound calls at the same time!
If someone calls in on our number, and another call comes in at the same time. Asterisk handles it. Up to 4 calls in a row. This feature I like!
Finally, I bought a second Digium card (works great btw) and now we have 7 independent extensions in the house. Overkill, I know, but it is extremely convenient!
I do not work for Digium, I have no reason to give them a good review, except that I have bought their product, been very pleased with the quality, and I am a very happy user of Asterisk.
You build a PBX because buying one would be too expensive. The opposite is going on here, he's using somebody else's service (blogspot) because rolling his own would be too time consuming/expensive/whatever. I like to say: Don't reinvent the wheel unless that reinvention is done at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I have never ran into the conflict where I wanted to post to a story as much as I wanted to moderate. I can understand the overall reasoning for not allowing moderation and commenting. I am wondering if limiting it to specific threads would be enough? I suppose someone would try to make problems in that setup as well. The issue is after reading flat and newest post I moderated several comments up I found a comment with a question and no "full" response. So I decided to respond. This of course kills all the previous moderations that you do. So is there any solution?
BTW, is there some area for discussing these sort of things? It would be nice to have a forum or something dedicated to talking about how slashdot runs it self.
You can use a Digium TDM400P with 3 FXO modules. The TDM400P can accomodate up to 4 modules, with whatever combination of FXO or FXS. Works great here. :)