Project Asterisk - Part 1

[DRAFT] Introduction

I have implemented a few Asterisk installs at the office for various functions, including a conference bridge host with dedicated numbers for our various departments and Hylafax integration for an inbound fax server. These projects were in the earlier days of version 1.4. In order to integrate with our Avaya ACD at the office, it was necessary to use an H.323 trunk, which I could only get to connect using version 1.4.x. At that time, all the "packaged" Asterisk distributions I could find (Trixbox, FreePBX and others) were based on 1.2.x.

This was in Ubuntu 6.06's heyday, which also only included an older 1.2.x version in the package tree. This necessitated having to download and build Asterisk from source. Building Asterisk from source is a well documented affair. It is very satisfying when all the bits fall into place and you log into your first softphone and are able to successfully place your first test call. Establishing the H.323 trunk was the most difficult part - there is no particularly concise information on this topic and the various flavours of H.323 channel drivers exist in varying states of obscurity.

To cut what is turning into a long story short, through this process I got a bit of insight into the manual configuration aspects of Asterisk and was very impressed with how powerful the software was.

Installing Asterisk on Ubuntu 8.04 Edge Eft

$ sudo -i
# apt-get install asterisk
# apt-get install build-essential
# wget -zaptel-
# ./configure
make modules
make install-modules
modprobe ztdummy