I am interesting in setting up Asterisk, and just had a few starter questions. I want to use Asterisk for home use, with just a few phones. I was curious about the hardware requirements. Will I need an FXO/FXS card? I have an analog line that I currently use for phone, and plan to use this in my setup. Also if I do purchase some IP-enabled phones, will they be able to work off the LAN or will additional hardware be needed? Additionally I plan on using FreeBSD for my OS. Is this a good setup to go with? Thanks for any help you can offer.
If you are making a standalone server, I would suggest going with a prebuilt ISO image like PBX in a Flash, they’ve done all the hard work and there is no point in re-inventing the wheel. You would need either an FXO card or ATA device to connect to the PSTN. The VoIP phones will work without additional hardware that you have on your network as is - ethernet ports /switch. For starters, you can use free softphones like Xlite, or Adore.
If I might ask, Why freeBSD? I’m just curious.
PBX in a flash is pretty cool, Dont rule out Askozia either. Which used to run on freeBSD, but now is linux. I prefer to have control of asterisk, so i hand write everything. It was a little bit of a learning curve, So I support the previous post if you want to run something fairly stable fairly quickly. At first I ran Askozia While I learned Asterisk. I find it fun, Asterisk is so flexible.
If you want to use a PSTN line you will need an FXO card. I was always curious if a SPA2103 could be used to get a PSTN line into asterisk.
Good Luck! I Say Try Em All…
Contrary to the previous advice, I would say that if you really want to learn about Asterisk, start with a fresh Linux system and install Asterisk from source. It will take longer, be frustrating at times, but in the end you will understand so much more, which will enable you to adapt your system to do things you haven’t thought about yet.
Have fun
Ian
I’m a fan of installing from the sources…but its also even easier than that now.
Just install linux on a box…then do the yum install for Asterisk http://www.asterisk.org/downloads/yum. You can have a Asterisk up in no time. Of course, configuring it is were the real work is.