To get started on some askerisk hackin’, let’s head on over to nerdvittles for a very nice treat from a fellow Charlestonian asterisk guru (much more than I).

What they are offering is a .torrent of a VMWare image containing a fully configured Trixbox instance with lots of goodies. Please do download the VMWare server console and the Trixbox virtual machine, and we can get started a-hackin’. Help save bandwidth and keep your torrent tracker open to distribute the load among lots-n-lots of peers.

Also consider all of nerdvittles’ hard work and click the paypal link to donate.

When you have followed the directions and downloaded all the pieces, I have one small recommendation. Open the Virtual Machine and select Ethernet. Choose the setting - ‘Bridged’. Since I don’t like to think very much about this, this allows me to have the machine run and appear on my LAN as a separate IP.

You may have to shutdown and restart the virtual machine for this to take effect.
After I start mine, from the command line I type:

ifconfig

and receive info about the virtual machine appearing on my LAN. Look for the ‘inet addr’, mine is 192.168.1.93.

From the command line of the host box, just for grins, I then tried to ping the virtual trixbox instance:

C:Documents and SettingsDan>ping 192.168.1.93
Pinging 192.168.1.93 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.93: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.93: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64

If you have a couple of boxes on your lan, put the XLite softphone on both and call each other. Here’s how. In the Trixbox vmware instance provided by Nerdvittles, they kindly set up several extensions you can use.

Click the little setup button on your XLite softphone and choose ‘System Settings’, then ‘SIP Proxy’, then ‘Default’. Enter the IP address of the Trixbox image running in your VMWare player.

For one phone I chose extension 500, for the other on the other box, 501. I hopped over to my wife’s PC, now running XLite as extension 501, and dialed 500. I ran back over and answered the line and had a nice little conversation with myself.

For our next installment, we’ll show you how to get nitty-gritty and watch the actual IP packets traverse our LAN. It’s really enlightening!

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