Asterisk

21 Dec 2005

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!)