Actu­ally got an Aster­isk server func­tion­ing today at work. It’s pretty straight­for­ward when all the pack­ages are there… Asterisk@Home goes some way to doing all that for you. For those fer­vently par­tial to any par­tic­u­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion — or morally/ethically opposed to CentOS’s pack­ag­ing tac­tics… I can see why peo­ple may be, but don’t have those reser­va­tions myself –, let your fury be abated. There is a plain tar.gz file that has a script and some other stuff that basi­cally means you can install it on what­ever plat­form you like, depen­den­cies aside.

Depen­den­cies, inci­den­tally, were the main rea­son it didn’t get installed on a Debian sys­tem as orig­i­nally planned. Pacific Internet’s apt repos­i­tory seems to have been borked the last few days, so there were miss­ing pack­ages and pack­ages in the data­base but unable to be installed and all other kinds of junk… When it got to the point I couldn’t even get some­thing to install from CPAN because of lower-level depen­den­cies in Perl itself, I kind of gave up and started down­load­ing Asterisk@Home. That was yes­ter­day. I can­celled the down­load because Pacific was being too slow for my lik­ing (Tel­stra Cable has spoilt me with down­stream), and this morn­ing before head­ing in I down­loaded the dis­tri­b­u­tion from Source­forge in about 10 min­utes. Bad check­sum. Down­loaded again. Burnt to CD. Still faster than it would have been to down­load at work. Ah well.

I didn’t get in til 9.30 because I was burn­ing CDs etc, and had a func­tional sys­tem call­ing between PCs and with voice­mail, recep­tion mes­sage, etc., by 11.11 (I noted the time, it being a sem­i­nal moment in my per­sonal VoIP-using his­tory, even if I did cheat and use a pre-packaged ver­sion!). Good stuff.

Also, if you’re going to use Asterisk@Home in Aus­tralia, install the Open­Voice IVR prompts and record­ings. It’s much bet­ter than lis­ten­ing to that Amer­i­can voice which was dri­ving us nuts even whilst test­ing :P Hav­ing said that, you may need to restart the server when chang­ing voice files… ours was doing some weird thing where it seems to have cached the old files in voice­mail IVR prompts. The voice would be chiefly Aus­tralian, but for a “one” sound. Might’ve been the inflex­ion (falling “one” or neu­tral “one” instead of ris­ing “one”), but I didn’t think they had par­tic­u­larly con­cerned them­selves with that when writ­ing most PBX/voicemail sys­tems… could be wrong. Any­way redi­al­ing the voice­mail exten­sion a few times seemed to help resolve things. Bizarre.

The Aster­isk box, to bor­row a term (Hi Steve :P), is run­ning with 256MB of RAM — but is sit­ting per­ilously close to swap whilst run­ning. It doesn’t help that it leaves two instances of mpg123 run­ning in the back­ground for hold music, as well as vsftpd (seri­ously, who’d use that on a tele­phony server? If you need to backup voice­mail, write a cron job to copy the files to a remote server. Bingo, no FTP server required! Grr.) and a hand­ful of other crap. Any­way, it’s prob­a­bly going to get more mem­ory before it moves into pro­duc­tion use. There are two Fritz! ISDN cards in it, but they haven’t been set up yet. Any­one seen a site about installing Fritz! cards with Aster­isk? All I’ve seen about them is that they need ker­nel recom­pi­la­tion for chan_capi stuff… and recom­pil­ing ker­nels has never struck me as par­tic­u­larly fun. (The few times I have tried, boot­load­ers have been unco-operative… i.e. I didn’t know what I was doing!)

Tags: australia, CentOS, ISDN, PBX, Perl, RAM, remote server, telephony server, Telstra, VOIP