I’m completely new at Asterisk so I’ve been going through through the 2nd edition of “Asterisk: The Future of Telephony” to try and teach myself how to set up a system. It seems that it onlyi covers version 1.4. The problem is that I’ve installed version 1.6 and have followed the instructions in that book to a tee only find that it is out of date. Among other things, it has no mention of Dahdi superseding zaptel. I’m at a point where I don’t even know what config files I need to be using, my sip phones (soft and hard) can’t call one another and I’m getting errors loading the chan_dahdi.so module.
Am I better off burning this to the ground and rebuilding it to v1.4 or is there some good documentation to help me out with v1.6? I’m at a complete impass.
I personally would suggest going back to 1.4 stable and Zaptel. There are still a lot of bugs being worked out with 1.6 and DAHDI. That being said, trying to learn a new technology and getting stuck on issues which may, or may not, be bugs could be a major headache.
Chances are very good that you won’t need the new features/functionality available in 1.6 for quite some time… I haven’t found any road blocks in 1.4, and it has been extremely stable.
Thanks for the replies and those links. I’ve already invested a lot of time in 1.6 so I’m going to chase it down a little further before I throw in the towel. At this point I’ve at least got the ‘Weasels have eaten our phone system’ message working when you dial in and I can finally dial internal extensions. Sometimes even small victories are great victories.
Good luck - I hope your victories continue - we’ve all been there
My first six months with asterisk I was working part-time for someone else and part-time for myself doing java dev. Because the person I worked for was a telephony guru, he spent all his time testing stuff. My days were spent fixing broken asterisk builds. I would go in 3 days per week for half a day (and night) to a broken machine - “oh chris, this doesn’t work - can you try fixing it” - day in, day out - it was very rewarding to know the idiosyncrasies of such a system. We even tried getting asterisk to work with a bunch of BRI cards well before Digium had their BRI card. Some of those CAPI cards work better with faxing than the wildfires.
