Paul Skinner

Someone get a mop!

Digging through the FC8 available package list, what do I see but a long list of Asterisk components and features! This is fantastic news for both Asterisk and the Fedora Project. This will vastly simplify things for anyone interested in giving Asterisk a try as it’s no more than a few clicks away requiring no compiling and related complexities.

Was all this in FC7 and I didn’t notice??!

I couldn’t wait. I jumped ahead and installed some of the basic Asterisk packages:

• Asterisk
• Asterisk-voicemail
• Asterisk-conference
• Asterisk-voicemail-plain
• Asterisk-curl

This is my first taste of Asterisk 1.4 so I’m going to keep this really simple. I’m going to setup this Asterisk install as a SIP peer to my existing 1.2 installation. For the most part, default installation files will be used on the FC8 side of things.

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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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Looking over my blog stats, most of you reach me via a Google search for FC7 and Asterisk. With that, this post will detail installing Asterisk on FC6-7 or any modern Linux distribution for that matter as nothing here is Fedora specific anyways.

Getting Asterisk compiled and installed is quite trivial, so I thought it would be wise to spend a few moments examining the hardware you intend to use with Asterisk. If you are using a PSTN interface card through ZapTel such as Digium TDM or something else, you need to be aware that these cards generate a tremendous number of interrupts during their operation and the target system must be able to handle these interrupts quickly.

I’ve deployed Asterisk at the office where it provides call queues, automatic attendant, voice-mail and telephony services for 30+ people. This particular setup runs on a Dell 2850 with 1GB of RAM at 3.0ghz with a Digium TDM2400 card to analog PSTN lines. This setup’s load average rarely peeks over 0.01 during the day and the only complaint is occasional echo on the PSTN lines. We will soon be ditching the PSTN lines in favour of SIP channels from Primus providing both a huge cost savings and improved call quality.

At home, I’ve run Asterisk on a PIII-800 with 256MB of RAM using SIP only (no PSTN hardware) and have never had a problem with load related glitching or call drops.

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Following the theme of my previous post on Fedora Core 7, I really wanted to touch on my experience with OpenPBX.

Just for a bit of background, we’ve opted out of traditional telephone in favour of a SIP based VoIP, provided by a Montreal area re-seller named BabyTel. I had figured out and configured BabyTel to run under Asterisk 1.2 on my HP NetServ machine where it was happily doing its job answering the phone and taking messages etc… However, with all this swapping and upgrading, the HP NetServ is being retired.

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