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

• Tribox (http://www.tribox.org)
• Elastix (http://www.elastix.org) - my preference

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