Hello and thanks for previous help. I’ll be testing FXO channels and voip this weekend. I’ll be using “the book” chapter 4 and may not be ready with hardware. My question is can use regular pci modems for testing? or need idea on FXO cards to use for this test. I just want to use the asterisk and see how it works to get a better feel for the system. I’m using asterisk 1.09 with fedora. Thank you.
I don’t know why, but most regular old modems don’t seem to work with asterisk (at least I haven’t been able to get them to do it).
The good news is that you can pick up a Digium Wildcard X100P clone off of ebay for $9.99 plus shipping & handling.
Once you have the card installed, you’ll need to set up your /etc/zaptel.conf (http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk+config+zaptel.conf), and your /etc/asterisk/zapata.conf (http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk+config+zapata.conf) files to recognize the card, and to define the channels. After you do that, do a ‘modprobe wcfxo’ to load the drivers, and then do a ‘ztcfg -vv’ to load the channels. The ‘-vv’ part should show you what channels you have defined.
Now you’re ready to set up some extensions to test it out.
The way that I started learning a little bit of this stuff, was to use a copy of Asterisk@Home (http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/) to set up my test server. It’ll get an asterisk installation up and running for you with almost zero effort. Then you can use the AMP web interface to start learning a few of the features, without messing around with editing .conf files (at least right away).
A couple of things to be aware of with A@H:
1.) A@H is cool for home use, or for a really small office (maybe 1-2 people), but It’s designed to be a demo tool, and not for an actual business phone system. Your mileage may vary
2.) Asterisk has a lot more features than AMP presents to you. Just because you don’t see something on the web interface, doesn’t mean that you can’t do it.
3.) A@H 1.5 is still using the 2.4 Kernel, which doesn’t use udev. Using zaptel cards under 2.6 requires some extra steps, outlined (for the most part) in /usr/src/zaptel/README.udev
so much for the world’s longest post.
hope I answered some of your questions.
Thanks Jared. I don’t know how else you could have explain this to me if it wasn’t the way you did and you are correct, it’s overwhelming when you dive into something like this. I may just take your advise and try A@H to get some knowledge although I have such good asterisk installation now but then again what good is it if you can’t use it.
Yesterday I was editing some files for the sip cofiguration and could not get it to work. I have set up my fedora server from install within a windows network and I’m working from the book chapter four as soon as I finished the editing of the conf file the book asks to test it with xten but, no success here. To the end then, thank you so very much for your help, I will look it up and check out the links and give it a try.
Thanks again for all the help.