Paul Skinner

I really like the stats package included with WordPress, it provides an excellent source of ideas for what I should write about next. Many of you reach me through a post titled Asterisk and Fedora Core 7 looking for more specifics on how to configure Asterisk. If you need to install Asterisk on FC7, read the Asterisk and Fedora Core 7 post first.

Alright, so you’ve got Asterisk installed but its not configured or has the default Asterisk sample configuration files.

The Asterisk configuration files are found in /etc/asterisk. If you are using Asterisk without telephony hardware, you really need to be concerned with 2 or 3 files. Of importance are the following files

1. sip.conf: this file contains everything to do with the SIP protocol, settings and authentication for Asterisk.
2. extensions.conf: At the most basic level, this file contains the call-plan; what happens on in-bound calls and how outgoing calls are to be treated.

You’re also going to need something to test Asterisk with. Either a soft-phone such as X-Lite or a handset device such as a Polycom 430, or a ATA device, such as the LinkSys PAP-2.

For the sake of this sample, we’re going to configure Asterisk to handle the SIP registration of 3 IP devices.

1. X-Lite Softphone [extension 203]
2. a Polycom 301 [extension 200]
3. a Linksys PAP-2 (Vonage un-locked) [extensions 201 and 202]

sip.conf is easy enough to get going; some advanced features found on some handsets may require additional settings but to keep things simple lets start with the softphone alone.

Backup your existing /etc/asterisk/sip.conf and go with something like this..

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Earlier this week I ran into an issue with Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) after upgrading to the latest version (Europa 3.?). My development platform is Windows XP and IIS, 3.2 P4 1GB RAM, IIS, PHP 5 ISAPI, MySQL. We call this the WIMP configuration (Windows IIS MySQl PHP) .

Some of the scripts in our application are quite large and something happened with the PDT; it simply takes forever for Eclipse to parse the script and extract all the classes/variables to render the Outline perspective. This gets really frustrating as it goes through this process on regular intervals as you work through the script. I can’t really complain about Eclipse up until now, its been my development workhorse for the past while and will eventually get fixed in this regard. I have faith. What do you want for free after all?

This lead me down a path where I uncovered things I’d rather not know or have experienced…

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