In preparation for the launch of a new Fubra VOIP service later this year, I decided that it would be wise if I knew a little more about asterisk (our chosen PBX software). Although I’m not building the underlying phone system (we have an asterisk expert working on that), nor the user control panel (our in-house developers will be doing that), I think it’s always helpful as a director of a technology company to have a fairly in-depth knowledge of your systems.
So over the next few weeks I will be installing an asterisk PBX at my house, and setting it up to make and receive calls via VOIP to the PSTN and beyond.
We’ve been using asterisk in our office to power our phone system since 2005, and so I’ve gotten pretty good at configuring Snom phones and other sip devices, but this is the first time I will have actually tried to setup an asterisk box from scratch.
Did you by any chance, finished this project? How was it? How much did you learn?
I learned that it’s quite tricky to configure Asterisk manually via the configuration files, and that it’s a lot easier to use something like FreePBX.
The easiest of all is to use a distribution such as Fonica PABX:
http://www.fonicaprojects.com/downloads/ISO/pabx-i386-1.0.iso
http://www.fonicaprojects.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page