Asterisk

Here are some notes on Asterisk.....

I generally use a packaged distro of asterisk rather than install from scratch. The reason is that the first time I install asterisk, I used one of these and it went flawlessly. Then, my IT guy told me this was definitely not the way to go and on top of that - everything had to work on the one true linux distro called opensuse. So the next three days (and I include nearly all of the night too), we worked to get the 'right' version of opensuse to work with asterisk - and failed. On the forth day (I'm not as patient as god), we blew everything away and started with a packaged distro. Some days later, he managed to get it sorted out. When we migrated everything over, we had countless troubles tweaking settings to work like the packaged distro - so no he's gone, I tend to use the packaged distro and then dive in to the detail as an when needed. Rant over......

Packaged Distros

Using SIP with your mobile phone

I've tried sip on a number of phones with very limited success. You are unlikely to get any help from your operator to make this work, and I found especially on phones distributed from the network operators, that sip functionality had been disabled. With windows mobile 6Pro, my operator had removed the sip software, which I was able to reload - but I was unable to make this work. I also purchased a network free phone Mwg Zinc II which had windows mobile 6Pro and managed to get that to work for outbound call - although I found the quality very poor. Eventually, I purchased a HTC Hero (Android) from my network provided. The market place includes a special version of sipdroid which only works on wifi networks. In order to use sipdroid over your network provider you need to download the full version from: http://code.google.com/p/sipdroid/downloads/list

There is a problem (see here:http://code.google.com/p/sipdroid/issues/detail?id=109) which means you will have to change your asterisk config for the extension to qualify=no until this issue is resolved. You can then use your phone like an extension.

Good Resources

  • Elastix without tears: elastixconnection.com/downloads/elastix_without_tears.pdf

--darkmoon