OK so ive heard that to setup an asterisk phone system you need some kind of special router that has a phone input and that allows the phone input to be somehow linked to the asterisk box - i belive this router is known as the “linksys wrt54g”
however the thing is, im currently using smoothwall express router instead of a little box made by d-link or linksys with flashy lights and arials.
Does anyone know if there is any kind of asterisk + smoothwall type thing going on?
Maybe some kind of modification of a fax modem connected to a phone or something like that?
Regards
-lenswipe
PS: forgot to mention that this is all going on in a home environment so i dont have alot of cash to spend on expensive cisco routers
You don’t need any particular router. However, depending on your set up, you might need to route sip, rtp and iax traffic to the IP address of your Asterisk box - I’m assuming you have a typical SOHO set up with a NAT’d network behind a DSL or cable modem/router. The router therefore should be able to direct traffic on certain ports to a particular IP address. On most routers this is under the firewall or gaming settings.
Why don’t you use the router, firewall and the wireless network on the Livebox?
Anyway, if you want to run Asterisk in the network and connect to phones or SIP termination outside the network, you have to open up the firewall as I described above. If you just want to use a SIP phone, you probably don’t have to do anything, but you will probably need to configure the phone to use a STUN server.
I wouldnt use it at all except i can plug a phone in and get orange voip through it. But it will be a cold day in hell before i use a livebox as my main router.
Anyway what i wanted to do was have an automated line using Asterisk.
Sorry to tell you this but my experience of orange is that the wireless is total crap (you have to put the router into pairing mode or some crap like that before you can connect anything, the maximum wireless devices you can connect at one time is 4 and the web GUI is horrid) and the tech support is terrible and if you’re using linux well you can just bugger off as far as they’re concerned.
So i think ill stick with my smoothwall router for now
Smoothwall Express 3.0 > Livebox IMHO
EDIT: When ringing up orange broadband asking if port 25 was blocked one guy actually asked me what a port was and the others i spoke to just lied to me until i got through to someone who finally told me the truth. So yeah…
The community based support for smoothwall is better becuase the people who provide the community and forum support actually have a clue about the subject area.
pmlco: you know why they make liveboxes that shape? ITS SO YOU CAN USE THEM AS A FREAKIN’ DOORSTOP!!!
This sounded like you’re talking two different things here, i.e. hosting asterisk on an embedded system with a built-in ATA device. Sure you can find a VoIP router, i.e. an embeded system acts as a (WiFi) router + a Voice Module (VM) as the ATA device. However, the source code on the VM of most VoIP routers is proprietary code. Even though you can find some open-source firmware community to suport the VoIP router, chances are the support is limited to the router modem and not VM.
OTOH, a Linksys WRT54G WiFi router (built-in 8/16MB Flash/RAM) you mentioned above is well supported by most open-source firmware community, i.e. OpenWRT. Since Asterisk has been ported to OpenWRT, a Linksys WRT54G router should be able to run OpenWRT + asterisk. I have my asterisk-1.6.1.1 PBX system hosted on an underpowered and mediocre LaFonera FON2100 WiFi router running on a selft-built OpenWRT firmware. If you had a Linksys WRT54G WiFi router, I am sure you can do the same thing, too.
I hear Smoothwall uses linux kernel, can you ssh in and get a root prompt? If so then probably yes.[/quote]
yeah it does have a linux kernel, however they deliberately removed parts of it (like support for samba ( i think) and support for other things) for security reasons…
