Asterisk VOIP Tips

So now we have Asterisk set up for home use. What can we do with it now? If you happen to have mischevous teenage kids, you can log all your calls! Maybe you want to have a seperate line for those teens. The great thing about Asterisk is flexibility. You can do almost anything you can think of.

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When setting up Asterisk for home use, you’ve got a million and a half ways to do it. If you want to take the easy way, Asterisk@Home is the way to go, thus the name. It provides a GUI that you can use, instead of having to write all your own code. However, if it were me, I like writing my own code. So that’s what I would do.

Now, for this kind of thing you have a few options.

1. Use VOIP
2. Use your existing Landline
3. Turn your Landline into VOIP

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There are hundreds of distro’s of linux that you could run Asterisk on. There is even a Windows port out now. However I would hesitate running in on Windows as it’s still beyond buggy.

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A computer. A clunker. A piece o’ trash! Nothing exciting really. If you’ve got an old dusty computer sitting in your closet, pull it out and throw knoppix on that bad boy!

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Here are two protocols that I have played with using Asterisk. They are the most common in my opinion as well, IAX and SIP. Of course you’ve also got H.323 but I’ve never played with that one.

So first of all, I bet you are asking yourself, what the hell am I talking about protocols and geese and tear ducts, oh my! Well, a protocol is simply a way that a call is made. It’s the system that it goes through. SIP is going to be through a standard telephone line. If you connected your Asterisk box to your home phone line, that’s SIP, thus you would have to set it up using SIP specific terms and utilizations. IAX however is a bit more interesting to me. IAX is a protocol that Mark Spencer actually created. It’s in the second version now, so it’s usually referred to as IAX2. Read the rest of this entry »

These two functions are going to be commonly used in your dial plan. They are virtually the same thing with the exception of one detail, interactivity. First of all, let me share with you a piece of my dial plan that I am currently using on this computer.

[incoming]
exten => 866*******,1,Answer()
exten => 866*******,2,AGI(call_log.agi)
exten => 866*******,3,Wait(2)
exten => 866*******,4,Background(main)
exten => 866*******,5,Wait(15)
exten => 866*******,6,Hangup()

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