I am considering delving into asterisk on my own, as a learning experience and as a potentially useful office addition and as an addition to my bag of tricks offered to clients.
I have some basic questions.
Since I have only analog (POTS) lines available at my “office” what hardware would be most cost effective? Meaning cheap yet reliable and allowing as full a feature set implimentation as possible. Meaning the telco interface board, mainly, not necessarily the other POC innerds.
I am most familiar (FWIW) with SUSE. Any reason I cannot, with basic skills, get this working on SUSE, say SLES 9 or 10 (basically as distro’d by Novell).
How well might this learning translate to a system where T1 connectivity is envisioned?
Have I lost my mind? A non rhetorical question, as this point, given the learning curve I’m facing in PBX land.
joea
no, if you understand linux, you’re 3/4 of the way to having a working system.
fedora, cent OS, debian, and slackware are popular distros, and digium has actually released a rPath-based appliance CD that installs a custom Cent OS along with asterisk - you might try that if you’re stuck on the OS install.
as far as hardware goes, the analog FXS/FXO hardware is different and not compatible with T1/E1 lines, so if you start with POTS lines and move to a T1, you’ll need new hardware. thankfully, it’s not that expensive, at least compared to a $40,000 Dialogic board.
Digium and Sangoma are both popular and work well - I have a slight leaning towards Sangoma as they have a nice driver package with good reporting tools.
If I were in your shoes, I’d go grab a copy of Pound Key (rpath.org/rbuilder/project/asterisk/), get it installed, and play with SIP lines and/or an ITSP. this would allow you to learn asterisk without purchasing a TDM or T1 card.
have fun, and pick up a copy of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony if you haven’t - it will teach you almost all of the basics and give you a good foundation.
[quote=“whoiswes”]. . .
If I were in your shoes, I’d go grab a copy of Pound Key (rpath.org/rbuilder/project/asterisk/), get it installed, and play with SIP lines and/or an ITSP. this would allow you to learn asterisk without purchasing a TDM or T1 card.
have fun, and pick up a copy of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony if you haven’t - it will teach you almost all of the basics and give you a good foundation.[/quote]
Thanks. I do not get the reference to SIP/ITSP but if it involves VOIP, it may be a non starter for me. My “broadband” is via a Wildblue satellite connection and is a bit “latent” for VOIP. But, still . . . it would be cheap(er).
I will check on that book.
joea
yeah, satellite wouldn’t work too well for VOIP, but you can do a bunch internally and when it comes time to connect to the outside world, you shouldn’t have THAT much trouble.
keep us posted.