Unix Sysadmin » VoIP

General Asterisk Installation Instructions

elizar — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:03:30 +0000

After reading the Asterisk Overview a few post back, let’s continue with our adventure in the world of Asterisk – the open source telephone toolkit.

We need to do two things (that is, two steps) in order install Asterisk on our vmware powered Red hat enterprise server:

Get the source code
Compile to produce the binaries

http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/general_asterisk_installation_compilation.html

Get the Source Code

Click the links below to get a copy of Asterisk

Asterisk 1.2.4
Zaptel 1.2.4
Libpri 1.2.2

Asterisk-sounds 1.2.1 – Additional sound prompts
Asterisk-addons 1.2.1 – Additional modules
Or to get the latest version with the latest update, get the source of Asterisk from the CVS server:

To get a fresh copy from the CVS server use these commands:

# cd /usr/src
#mkdir asterisk
# export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.digium.com:/usr/cvsroot
# cvs login

Compiling Asterisk

To install Asterisk, we need to update (if you donwloaded the source) and change to that asterisk directory. Example:

#cd /usr/src/asterisk

You can then start the compiling process…
Follow this installation order: libpri, zaptel, asterisk

-Installing libpri

#cd /usr/src/asterisk/libpri
#make clean
#make
#make install

-Installing zaptel

#cd /usr/src/asterisk/zaptel
#make clean

Note: If you are using kernel 2.6 enter the following command ‘#make linux26′, before doing ‘#make install’.

#make install

-Installing asterisk

#cd /usr/src/asterisk/asterisk
#make clean

Note: If you want to use a mp3 files for music-on-hold enter the following command ‘#make mpg123′, before doing ‘#make install’.

#make install

If this is your first installation perform ‘make samples’ to install sample configuration files.

AsteriskNOW – Asterisk Out Of The Box

elizar — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:11:47 +0000

I recently found a nice read about a Linux Project or Distro that includes Asterisk. It contains all the Asterisk stuff one will ever need. The project is called AsteriskNOW.

You can donwload the package at asteriskNOW.com. You can choose to download and ISO image or a VMWare image on the donwload page.

The is so easy to use and install that AsteriskNOW claims that you can install it 30 minutes!

Mark Spencer, the original author of Asterisk and founder of Digium, said

“What we did was take the Asterisk, the GUI, and a variety of other packages and put it all in a CD that you drop it in a computer and install. And that is what AsteriskNOW is.”

Here’s a video of Mr. Spencer himself, showing how easy it is to install and get started with AsteriskNOW.

Asterisk Overview: An Open Source VoIP Application

elizar — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 09:58:32 +0000

Asterisk is an open source application on telephony applications and a full-featured call-processing server. It’s is one of the last technology that has been in existence too long that the open source group has touched on.

There has been and open source web server (Apache), mail server (qmail, sendmail, postfix etc), proxy server (squid), CMS (joomla, wordpress), streaming media (icecast) but never, until now, has anyone every tried offering voice application to the open.

Good thing about Asterisk is that it can be used as a stand alone, Asterisk-Only system, or it can integrate with an existing PBX system.

Features of Asterisk Open Source PBX

Asterisk has tons of feature that could take my whole day listing and explaining them here. Let’s just say that everything you ever knew about PBX capabilities are also in Asterisk.

Let’s list a couple for example’s sake:

Call Forward
Call Forward on Busy
Call Forward on No Answer
Call Monitoring

Call Parking
Call Queuing
Call Recording
Call Retrieval
Call Transfer
Call Waiting
Caller ID
Caller ID Blocking
Supervised Transfer
Talk Detection
Text-to-Speech (via Festival)
Three-way Calling
Time and Date

And tons more!! You can check all the features here if you’re interested.