Asterisk for home use

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

I would like to try Asterisk at home. What is the minimum hardware I require?

I have a SIP enabled phone, can I use it?

Thank you.

2

[quote=“fernandoch”]I would like to try Asterisk at home. What is the minimum hardware I require?

I have a SIP enabled phone, can I use it?

Thank you.[/quote]

Sure :wink:

3

Thx root52 for the reply, but what other hardware will I need?

4

A machine to put asterisk on. You need no other hardware if you are going all IP (ie SIP).

5

So how can I test it?

With my SIP phone I can make calls directly via voipbuster.com

How to try it with Asterisk?

Do I have to configure my voipbuster username and password in Asterisk and then point my SIP phone to the machine where I have Asterisk installed?

6

[quote=“fernandoch”]I would like to try Asterisk at home. What is the minimum hardware I require?

I have a SIP enabled phone, can I use it?

[/quote]

I am a “newbie” to Asterisk and have recently set up a configuration consisting of a Linus sever and three SIP phone. I’m a novice in this field but my recent experiences may be of some help to you.

BTW, I am not 100% sure of whether you at looking at “Asterisk” for home use or the software known as “Asterisk at Home” -now know as Trixbox . (Unfortunately, I do not have any experience of the latter.)

As root52 said you need a machine for asterisk. This machine will be your (Asterisk) server. You can use pretty much any old PC (or server) that you have lying around.

  1. If you are going down the “Asterisk at home route” you can download as iso image that can be used to load an operating system and Asterisk at Home/Trixbox on your server. [sorry but I cannot help you further with asterisk at Home/Trixbox]
    See
    asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/h … ection_2.2
    trixbox.org/downloads

  2. If you are going down the Asterisk route then you need to load a Linux operating system onto your server and then install Asterisk.

Installing Linux is not too difficult. You download and ISO image and then burn it to a CD, boot the computer and follow the instructions. CentOs (ubuntu.com/). This server operating system has no GUI. I used it because the live environment for my Asterisk system has other Ubuntu 7.04 servers.

An easy way to install Asterisk on Ubuntu (and probably CentOS) is to install from the distribution’s online software repositories. However, I would not recommend this approach as the version installed seems to be quite old.

Very good instruction for installing Asterisk on CentOs and Ubuntu can be found here
cahilig.org/install-asterisk … gui-config
cahilig.org/install-asterisk … ebian-etch
A couple of comments -

  1. At first, I installed the Asterisk GUI but I found it a bit “over the top” for my needs.
  2. Do not install “Libpri” - I you do not need it for SIP only.
  3. Run “make config” instep 3 above after the “make examples” command. This will ensure an automatic start of asterisk on re-boot.

You now have a working asterisk system. You now need to configure it to connect to your SIP provider and your phone. This is done modifying by sip.con. You need to tell asterisk how to handle incoming calls and out going calls via “dial plan” which is set up in extensions.conf.

I don’t have any epxerience woth you sip supplier but here are a couple of resources that helped me to set my system with Sipgate but there is still a lot of general SIP information.
growse.com/projects/setting- … -asterisk/
velocityreviews.com/forums/t … pgate.html
geisterstunde.org/drupal/?q=asterisk_sipgate

Your phone
You need to configure it to “register” with asterisk. You sip.conf might contain-
[ext321]
type=friend
context=outgoing_line
username=ext321
secret=some_password
…
In this case your phone would be programmed with the user name and password above and your Asterisk’s server’s LAN IP address.

A MUST read The O’reiley book
digium.com/elqNow/elqRedir.h … 510480.pdf

Also take a look at other resources at
asterisknow.org/support/get-started

Hope this helps.

Vincent