Hi all! 
I have a hypothetical situation here which i’d like some help with (go easy on me)
In front of me is a brand new, fresh server and a bunch of phones. What is the process I would have to go through from that start point, to where I can have Asterisk installed & send/receive calls.
ANY and ALL information will be a great help, and if possible could a solution be laid out clearly!
Many thanks,
Sam
Hello Sam,
If you can tell specifically what do you want to achieve and which type of help you need then I can help you.
Shafi
Hypothetically? You hire someone on this forum! Depends really on what your doing. Here are your basic challenges to overcome.
How to get the phones to talk to Asterisk. If they are VoIP phones you just have to figure out how to provision or configure them to attempt to register to the Asterisk box. If they are analog phones you are going to have to by hardware to convert the analog in to digital in the Asterisk box. Channel banks will give you more bang for your buck if you have more than 2-4 phones.
How to get the phone lines to talk to Asterisk. Same deal here. If you are looking to get voice lines from a SIP provider you just have to get Asterisk to register / speak with the SIP company over the internet. If they are analog lines same thing applies as the phones. Only if you are doing more than 2-3 lines you won’t use a channel bank you will get a T1 line and PRI service with the phone company once you get up to the 10+ lines size.
The rest is Asterisk configuration and not going to happen in this thread end to end. SIP phones cannot register until the Asterisk SIP configuration is complete. Analog phones cannot speak until the FXO/FXS card or channel bank is configured with DAHDI. Once you have all that in place it is really just a matter of making phone 1 to talk to phone 2 when a number is dialed.