Asterisk Geekz

Asterisk Installation: Future of Telephony

We will be using the default install of Debian and installing Asterisk from source and compiling.

Debian in my opinion is the best Linux distribution, Asterisk is the best PBX available to us. I have used both of these things in the past and find them a great combination as do many others.

We really need to appreciate all the people who give us this great software free of charge, they are truly generous.

Consider that if you use a setup like this in a business with 5 or more phones, you can save thousands of dollars a year in call costs, hardware and licensing.

Prerequisites
You will need

Internet connection
Spare computer with at least 10gb hard disk space
Pentium class machine somewhere above 500mhz at least or AMD equivalent

Some will disagree on the CPU requirements mentioned here and I am not going to argue about that. What I will say is that for a 100 person call center, this pc is not going to cut it. In all cases, monitor the cpu and memory usage on your machine under different call loads. The easiest way to do that is to login to the console and run “top”

Timeline

This howto was written from a bare metal install and took many days to research, install and document. It should take you considerably less time to get running. Somewhere around the 3 hour mark you should be able to dial a couple of extensions. Following this, the configuration fun is endless.

What will I end up with?

This howto is not a magic bullet. Finishing this howto will ensure you have a working VOIP server that you can add extentions and communicate between them. There are no hardware components required (other than the machine itself) You will also be able to add conference rooms and communicate with the outside world.

Can I use this for a company or business?

Yes, this is a solid and stable build suitable for deployment in an office environment. Be aware there is no security in its basic form. Things such as firewalls and usernames and passwords should be added to protect the box from bad things. That is a whole other document.

Getting Started

Install Debian Etch

If you are not familiar with Debian, have a look at the step by step Debian install document installing_debian then come back here and continue.

Installing Asterisk
After doing the above, we need to get Asterisk from the Digium website. We use the source and compile it ourselves.

Downloading the source files
At this point we are going to get the source files so make sure you are logged in as root and change to the linux src directory

cd /usr/src

Get Asterisk
wget -c http://downloads.digium.com/pub/asterisk/releases/asterisk-1.4.21.2.tar.gz

i am using Asterisk-1.4.21.2, as i found this highly stable.

Get libpri
wget -c http://downloads.digium.com/pub/libpri/releases/libpri-1.4.7.tar.gz

Get Zaptel
wget -c http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/zaptel/zaptel-1.4.12.1.tar.gz

Get Asterisk-Addons
wget -c http://downloads.digium.com/pub/asterisk/releases/asterisk-addons-1.4.7.tar.gz

This is what we need to install asterisk. Lets Move on Milestone 2