Cheap home setup

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Hello,

As a hobby i want to setup an asterisk server for my home.

I have 2 normal (not digital) phone lines that i would like to use.
Currently i have 2 separate phones, each one for each line.

Would like to be able to use my current phones plus softphones with the idea to incorporate sip hard phones in a future. As i want to use this as a weekend hobby i would like to setup at least 10 extensions and a conference room or smth.

I have read some docs about setting up asterisk but would like to ask what would i need to accomplish such a task? I don’t have much money to invest so the minium requirements are ok.

Sorry for the so newbie question but i have read on how to install asterisk but i haven’t seen anything on the hardware.

Thanks

2

for two analog extensions and two analog lines from the phone company you will need a 4 port card with 2 FXS ports and 2 FXO ports. I would suggest the Digium TDM22B. It is more expensive that the cheap clone cards but is much more reliable and you get free support if you have trouble installing/configuring it.

For the “server” a desktop machine that is less than 3 years old with 256MB ram or more will be fine for your use.

3

Thank you very much for your response.

Will this allow me to expand in a future with digital phones? I would like to create extensions and use different sip hard phones to learn/experiment.

Thanks!

4

Sure thing. With * you can do anything :smile:

5

Dont know if i understand correctly.

What i meant to say is that with this recommended digium card will i be able to extend my system (maybe with smth like an expandable card?) with more FXO / FXS ports?

Thanks! :smiley:

6

You can add any number of digital (SIP or IAX -based) phones as they connect via ethernet, they don’t need individual ports on the asterisk machine.

You can add extra ports for analog extenstions using ATA boxes, which also connect via ethernet so you can fit them wherever convenient.

7

Awesome! Thanks everybody for your responses.

8

We didn’t mention the best part. If it is your mother in law calling, you can have asterisk automatically hang up on her :wink: