Asterisk with VICIdial

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I’m completely frustrated at this point (I’ve been trying to get all this working for a week now… I need to get VICIdial (or something similar) working with Asterisk so that we can send automated voice messages out through X-Lite (running on a Windows machine) under software control. The idea is that we’d record a message, probably in MP3 format and then send it to a list of phone numbers by feeding them to X-Lite via Asterisk and etc.

Some background:

I’ve been away from most of the Linux internals for over 10 years and my skills are rusty. I can build packages from tarballs and install others using yum but this task is way out of my league at the moment. What I’ve been doing most (for the past several years) is coding in PHP to automate processes, create and send cURL commands to APIs, etc. I’m pretty good at that, but my boss thinks I know everything. :frowning:

We have VMs at a hosting company, so installing AsteriskNOW from a CD is not possible.
The VM I’m working on runs CentOS 7.5 and has PHP 7 and MySQL 5.6 installed.
By now, I’ve installed (with “yum install package_name”) or else built from a source tarball pretty much every conceivable package/utility/etc that asterisk could possibly need. I put the .tar.gz files to be unpacked and built in /usr/src.

VICIdial has a very long set of instructions that I’ve tried my best to follow, despite them referencing much older versions of various parts of the system! I’ve located and installed the most recent versions of the required packages that I could find.

In /usr/src, I have these folders (from unpacking tarballs):
agc_2.13
asterisk-13.21.0
asterisk-14.7.6
asterisk-15.4.0
asterisk-gui
eaccelerator
eaccelerator-0.9.5.3
dahdi-linux-complete-2.11.1+2.11.1
dahdi-linux
dahdi-tools
gnudialer
jansson
kernels
libpcap-1.8.1
libpri-1.6.0
pl241src
screen-4.6.2
sipsak-0.9.6
sox-14.4.1
sounds
zaptel-1.4.12.1

I’ve configured, compiled and installed Asterisk asterisk-13.21.0(should I be using a more version?). I’ve edited the .conf files (although I’m not certain that everything in them is correct). I can get the module started and verified that it started. I can give the command asterisk -r and get the CLI prompt.

I want this to work:

http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/:8088/asterisk/manager?action=login&username=mark&secret=mysecret so that I can manage asterisk in a browser but that doesn’t work. I get this error:

Not Found
The requested URL /:8088/asterisk/manager was not found on this server.

Fixing that would be a big help.

Ultimately, I think I should be able to enter something like:

http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx//agc/vicidial.php and bring up VICIdial.

With all that said, can anyone here give me some useful, constructive advice for getting this VICIdial gizmo up and running? Please, please, please, don’t ask, me “Did you do X?” I’m so far behind (and in danger of losing my job due to deadline pressure to do something that at the moment seems nearly impossible) that I don’t have time for questions that have already been asked and answered. Just suggest that if I haven’t already done/checked/edited/updated/etc “X”, that I should so {something specific}.

Any help and/or advice will be greatly appreciated.

2

Also, I do have apache (most recent version) up and running. I can see the output of index.html file in a browser.

3

I give you the shortest 2 options

    • Install Asterisk and create a PHP or Python script who initiate the call to the numbers on the CSV file and then play the mp3 file, you will need to use Asterisk AMI action Originate.
    • Install vicidial and configure a press 1 campaing, use the vicidial ISO file to avoid installation errors (This method it is not supported on this forum).
4

We don’t support Vicidial.

MP3 is a poor choice of media format for anything being sent down a phone line. It is much too high quality for any phone line and requires quite a lot of CPU power to convert t a format that is actually usable on a phone line.

The options that affect your error message will be in http.conf or manager.conf. However, I have never used AMI over http, so am not familiar with how to configure that variation.

1 Like
5

Thanks for the info, David. What media format would be best? I don’t really have a preference; mp3 just came to mind. Our text-to-speech converter outputs mp3, if I remember correctly. But if necessary, I can install ffmpeg or something to convert to a more suitable format if mp3 is all I have to work with.

6

A-law or mu-law, depending on where in the world you connect to the PSTN, as those are the formats use by the PSTN itself.