So many choices for a newbie, please help!

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Greetings all.
I really need some help here please.
I own a business in Zimbabwe and have decided to go the VOIP route as, it’s the future. Unfortunately, living in the country I do, has it’s drawbacks. Mainly, complete lack of anyone to get advice or support from. I have worked in IT for 15 years but got out of it 7 years ago when I came back from London and started my own business here.
It’s amazing how much one forgets over 7 years. You should have seen me scratching my head when I tried to edit a conf file and couldn’t remember how to drive vim :smile:

I have spent about two weeks reading various PDF’s and websites trying to work out what software I need and am no closer to a conclusion than when I started. I need someone who knows what they are talking about to point me in the right direction please. I don’t want to spend two weeks learning how to configure something, only to discover I went in the wrong direction in the first place.

What we have:
Current PABX - Crusty old ancient Panasonic with a destiny involving a 14lb hammer.
6 PSTN copper lines from telco (Tone dial). All will be used to connect the system to the world.
16 extensions / phones / users

What we have purchased so far to install system.

HP Proliant ML110 G5 Server with 2gb Ram
CPU: Intel® Pentium® Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz stepping 0d
Total of 2 processors activated (7181.81 BogoMIPS).
Drive 1: Seagate Barracuda ST3160827AS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb
Drive 2: HP 250GB 3G SATA 7.2K RMP
1Gb Lan card
Sangoma A200 card (PCI) with daughter board and 6 FXO cards with built-in hardware echo cancellation.

2 x Edimax 16 port POE 10/100 switches
16 x Snom300 VOIP Phones

What is on order:
4 x Siemens E46 ruggedised mobile hand sets which will connect to a base station connected to the lan.

We have a 512k internet connection via UHF directional radio to our ISP which works very well at night but
can get pretty congested during work hours as we share the access point with a bunch of other corporate users.
I wouldn’t think it’s reliable enough for us to make use of internet connections to other voip networks.
This will be tested once the system is in and working.

What we want.

A reliable phone system with good voice quality for all our staff.
I don’t want to be struggling for weeks to get this thing to work.
It must be secure.
The VOIP PBX will sit behind our internet router (Firewall of sorts) and an OpenBSD firewall.
It’s not of great importance that we make phone calls using our internet connection but would be nice to have working.
The ability to record some / all calls to and from an extension. Hence the quite large second disk in the machine.

My Thoughts
Not particularly fussy which Linux distro it runs on. Would prefer Centos as know it already and it seems to work well.
Really, the PBX software should run on whatever is the best design / most proven platform.
I’m aware of AsteriskNow but not sure if it’s the way to go as the Esterix verion number seems quite far behind the current version of Asterisk. (stated under correction)
The HP box running asterisk will do nothing else. We won’t install X. It will be a base linux installation with no other software / servers or daemons running other than those necessary for Asterisk / elastix.
There are a lot of different version numbers of Asterisk, Elastix, Centos, Wanpipe etc etc. Which one/s do I choose that will be current / latest and work together. This is probably the biggest confusion factor at the moment. Elastix without tears? Is that the way to go? What is FreePBX, it seems to be part of Elastix, but I thought Elastix runs on Asterisk?

Basically guys, I’m looking for someone who knows, to tell me, right Adams, install A, B, C, and D, download the howto’s from here, get that book from there and get busy. Once you’ve worked it out, it’ll work and you won’t be disappointed. My biggest worry at the moment is that I’ll spend weeks reading and learning and then find, I’ve gone or started in the wrong place.
My next concern is, I don’t want to install something that I will become a slave to. My primary job is to run the business and make money for the share holders. Not to sit continuously fiddling with a PBX system. Although, being a techie at heart, this may prove difficult! :wink:

I will really appreciate replies / help on this.

Thanks and regards

Dave Adams
Harare
Zimbabwe

2

Either you must have lived a good life or your background in IT isn’t solid. Pic your choice. :wink:

You may want to download/read this free Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition e-book. I don’t know how long will it take you to read the e-book, however, it took me about a week to slowly read chapters 4, 5, 6, and 9, to learn/understand how to configure, maintain, and operate my Asterisk PBX system hosted on an old and discontinued Netgear WGT634U device flashed with a self-built OpenWRT firmware.

Good luck.

3

Thanks for the response.

I am currently reading The future of technology 2nd edition and many other sources of information.
As someone with no experience with Asterisk, it’s raising more questions than providing answers.
Conflicts between various kernels, versions of Asterisk, versions of hardware.
It doesn’t look (from what I have read so far) like AsteriskNow will pick up my Sangoma A200 card automatically.
As I have stated, I don’t want to end up in a situation where I spend days or weeks learning and hacking, only to find I should have gone in a different direction to start off with.
What I’m really after here is, for someone with experience to look at my scenario and hardware then point me in the right direction. I’ll then know that I’m not wasting my time.

Regards

Dave

4

With all due respect pay for that or read the books. I mean me and many others can sell you a service if you dont want to learn or spend time and you want a professional system

5

Wow, amazing response. Your great ambassadors for Asterisk and open source.

You know guys, all I’m asking here is equivalent to this.
I want to do DTP, I have a choice between Linux, Windows and MAC
I get on a forum and ask the question, someone says, get a MAC, you wont look back.
I do, it works. Everyone gets on with their lives.

Thanks for your help and encouragement!

6

While I don’t like to delve into the negative, take a look at what you wrote in your original post:

[quote]My biggest worry at the moment is that I’ll spend weeks reading and learning and then find, I’ve gone or started in the wrong place.
My next concern is, I don’t want to install something that I will become a slave to. My primary job is to run the business and make money for the share holders. Not to sit continuously fiddling with a PBX system.[/quote]

…Pretty much every point you make above suggests that you need to hire a professional to do it for you. The open source “philosophy” is based in no small part on learning things yourself, asking intelligent questions, and devoting significant amounts of time. Since you apparently aren’t willing to do any of those things without incurring some risk that it might not work out, I see no reason why we should recommend anything besides hiring someone.

If you want to get your hands dirty and run into a problem, it’s fairly clear that we’ll be more than willing to troubleshoot. Personally I don’t know why you would buy brand-new hardware to experiment with a PBX you have no idea how to implement, use, or maintain. Why don’t you try renting server space, installing Asterisk there, and get things running between a couple of SIP phones? This will cost you $10/month, you won’t lose much if everything screws up, and you can wipe your disk space and reinstall a clean OS on a whim.

What you should NOT do is start sniping at members for giving honest responses to your question, especially when many of the questions could have been answered yourself with 2 seconds of Googling.

7

Assuming the internet works in Zimbabwe, advice or support is easy to find.

If you need sound technical advice, you need to hire a professional. Consulting can be done over the phone or via e-mail.

This makes no sense to me. Your available resources should dictate your setup, saying that you’ll test out the capabilities of your network once your PBX is installed just sounds like a headache waiting to happen.

…a given, which Asterisk can provide.

Hire someone to install it.

[quote]
It must be secure.[/quote]

An Asterisk professional should know how to lock the system down.

Easily handled by Asterisk.

[quote]It’s not of great importance that we make phone calls using our internet connection but would be nice to have working.
The ability to record some / all calls to and from an extension.[/quote]

All easily doable with Asterisk.

[quote]
Not particularly fussy which Linux distro it runs on. Would prefer Centos as know it already and it seems to work well.[/quote]

The book covers which OSs Asterisk was designed to work on.

[quote]
I’m aware of AsteriskNow but not sure if it’s the way to go as the Esterix verion number seems quite far behind the current version of Asterisk. (stated under correction)[/quote]

??? AsteriskNOW and Asterisk aren’t the same thing. Read the book for a description of both.

Asterisk is all you need. The current version is 1.6.something. You can compile it from source from the command line.

This is generally true, but you can’t learn Asterisk overnight any more than you can learn C++ overnight. It’s a process, not a magic wand.

As you [should] know, no software suite is maintenance-free. There will be updates, electronics problems, customization problems, user complaints, etc. etc. you will have to deal with. If you don’t wan’t to “waste” your time doing it yourself, you need to hire someone. You say your primary job is to “run the business” - wouldn’t that include maintaining your phone system? If your phone system goes down, surely that affects your bottom line?