Hot Buttered IT

This video explains how to download and setup the virtual appliance, VMware Player, and accessing Trixbox for the first time: Asterisk Video Tutorial  - Introduction To Trixbox

Trixbox introduction

This video will show you how asterisk can be easily managed with web interface available freely to download and use.

I know what you are thinking, asterisk is a such complicated thing, you have to know about voice protocols, extensions, contexts and many other stuff in order to build something, and it all takes too much time and effort to learn those. Moreover you have to know something about configuring and running linux and some other software that asterisk needs to run smoothly.
Yes, it is true. And you are not the only one  who are thinking like this. Some guys thought about this too, and guess what, they wrote a nice looking, easy to adapt and full-featured web interface, then they put it on a CD and… made it free and opensource – anybody can download it and use it free of charge! Yes, you’ve heard it right there is a free and easy web interface for asterisk, along with preinstalled linux, that is prepared to be run or installed off the CD in a few easy steps.

It is called trixbox, in order to download it you have to go to their web site which www.trixbox.org and choose Trixbox CE (which stands for Community Edition) and then choose “download”. Here comes another surprise, if you are a home user, chances are that you do not have a spare computer to play with installing linux and asterisk, and then you have another option – you can download a VMWare image of linux system along with asterisk and web interface already installed and configured for easy usage.

VMWare is a virtualization software that allows your computer to run another operating system within, without changing anything on your hard drives and sharing resources between your system and guest system. They have got free product that is called “VMWare Player”, it allows you to run already existing images of operating systems, but does not allow you to create new. That will suit our needs for 100%.
So, first thing we need to do is to get VMWare player. You can download it for free at www.vwware.com, here click on the “Products” and then on “Desktop Virtualization Platform” and then on “VMWare Player”. Here it is.

Once you have downloaded and installed VMWare player, lets continue and download trixbox vmware image archive. Here it is. After downloading and unpacking trixbox’ image, you have to run your vmware player, click on the open button and find the place where you put your unpacked image of trixbox, and click on the “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5” file, and as you can see linux system is booting now.

You will need to login to system to get basic information on how to access it, in order to do this, type “root” as username and “trixbox” as password (all letters are lowercase).

Here is information we need to know – how to access web interface, just go ahead and type it in your browser and you’ll be taken to interface of your newly installed and configured asterisk system. Wasn’t it easy?

In the next 2 videos I will do an overview of trixbox features.

Tags: Asterisk, Open Source, Telecommunications, VOIP // Add Comment »

Watch lesson 6 on Softphones: Asterisk Video Tutorials - Using Softphones

Setting up softphones and hardphones

In this video I will tell you about software and hardware that can be used with asterisk.

As asterisk supports a number of VoIP protocols, any standard compliant software and hardware will do the job. VoIP market is booming and there already are a lot of devices that work with asterisk and number of those is increasing every day. One of the best devices for doing VoIP is linksys (a former sipura company), they provide a wide range of telephone adapters  that are easy to configure and use. A lot of websites on internet offer you configuration tools for such devices. You can find them by searching by your device name. (more…)

Tags: Asterisk, Open Source, Telecommunications, VOIP // Add Comment »

Here is video number 5: Using Contexts and Dial Plans - Part 2

Contexts and dialplan Part 2

Ok, moving to next context which is called “incoming-calls-wildcard”. Lets imagine situation when you have, say, hundreds of extensions, and writing rules for each one of them can take really much time. In this case wildcards are coming to save us.

Lets take a look at single rule with 2 steps in “incoming-calls-wildcard” context, as you can see I have changed last digit of dialled extension to capital “X”, which is any number from 1 to 9 and 0. But you also have to tell asterisk that this rule contains wildcard, you do it with putting subscribe sign in the beginning. But how can we tell asterisk what to dial when we have wildcards in our rules? We use built-in variables, one of them is ${EXTEN}. This is the way all variables are referenced in asterisk – dollar sign, opening curly bracket, variable name and closing curly bracket. (more…)

Tags: Asterisk, Open Source, Telecommunications, VOIP // Add Comment »

This video provides a further explanation: Using Contexts and Dial Plans - Part 1

Contexts and dialplan Part 1

This video will get you introduced to concept of dialplan in asterisk.

The dialplan is a set of instructions in asterisk specific language that tells the system what to do with the call. Dialplan is stored in extension.conf file, so lets open this file and begin.

Dialplan is divided into contexts, and as you can see each context starts with square brackets, just like  extensions, and can have any name. However there are 2 names that are reserved ”general” and “globals”, in “general section” you define general settings of dialplan and in “globals” section you define some global variables that will be used in your dialplan, as an example here TRUNK is a global variable that you can use in your further dialplan, and each occurrence of TRUNK will be replaced with its values which is Zap/G2. (more…)

Tags: Asterisk, Open Source, Telecommunications, VOIP // Add Comment »

Let’s review the extension configuration in the 3rd video: Asterisk Video Tutorials - Using Extensions with Asterisk
Extension

In this video I will show you one of the main principle of asterisk, those are extensions.

As I have showed you before, all asterisk’s configuration files are lying in /etc/asterisk directory. The files we are interested now are sip.conf and iax.conf.

An extension in asterisk is a user that is able to connect and use the system to place or receive calls, use voicemail and other features of asterisk. In order to define asterisk extension we should edit users.conf file. As you can see each extension starts with name in square brackets, like [205] here, next come some definition on what that extension is, its credentails and some asterisk specific options you have to setup. Let’s talk about each of this option:

- username is the username that this extension will use for registering with asterisk. Usually you will want to leave it same as name, which 205 in this case. The difference between name and username is that asterisk will use name to refer to extension through dialplan, but username is used to register with it. Leaving both of them the same will not make a mess out of your dialplan. (more…)

Tags: Asterisk, Open Source, Telecommunications, VOIP // Add Comment »