New and onboard

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Hello all,

New to Asterisk, and I would say to Linux as well. I had played around with Linux in the past … some 5-6 years ago. Apache, BIND, DHCPD, everything I’ve done was command line at the time. I taught myself enough perl to work on some cgi scripts as well.

Years later, I’ll say I’m new to it all over again. I have a small amount of telephony background though and I have been reading through some of the concepts of asterisk for the past few weeks. I am extremely interested in taking the next couple of months and putting a few hundred hours toward it. I will have the next 2 months off of work which will afford me the time.

I have a couple of questions:

Will this be a realistic amount of time to become capable of deploying asterisk as least in a home environment?

What scripting languages should I begin to brush up on as well? Perl/Bash/PHP?

I’ve started reading Asterisk - The Future of Telephony, and I would like to know I’m on the most efficient path. I might not have the freedom of time off like this in the next 5 years, so any suggestions please fire away.

Also, is a command on linux administration essential? I’m wondering if I should be spending more time on that before diving into Asterisk.

Thanks for all of your help. I’m looking forward to making a few contacts so emailing me directly is more then welcome.

Thanks again,

James Morin

2

Two months should be more than enough to get things down pat. The way I learned asterisk was by trial and error. I would play with it all day. For scripting (if you want to write your own AGI’s you can use php or perl. I personally like PHP so I use it.

The book “Asterisk: The future of Telephony” is a great place to start. Make sure you are reading the second version. For pointers you can have a look a the wiki (voip-info.org) and #asterisk on irc.freenode.net.

There aren’t many commands that are ran from the Linux shell. Most of your work will be done in the configuration files or in the asterisk CLI.