On 11/28/10 3:43 PM, Stephen Rodgers wrote:
On 11/28/2010 06:37 AM, Greg Thornwall wrote:
How hard would it be to get allstar asterisk to work on our home phones? Voice mail, a phone patch to allstar maybe, on hold music etc.
Information on this sort of configuration is generally available from sources on the web such as: voip-info.org
I guess we would need a PCI phone board to interface with the phones in the house and outside line (POT)?
There are interface cards available which will allow you to interface to an existing POTS line; but another option you might consider is finding an Internet phone company to use (ie callcentric.com) - they offer rather affordable options for phone service with only a network connection required. You can also use SIP phones (in the house) to interface to the Asterisk PBX - in lieu of purchasing hardware interfaces and running phone lines; just use your local network.
Any good detailed documentation on how to do this?
It can be done, but there are no instructions to do this with an app_rpt/asterrisk as that would not be worth the effort to maintain and document as few hams would be interested.
Not sure I would agree with the "few hams would be interested" -- maybe more of them need to know about this ability. That's one of the greatest features in my opinion - it's incredible flexibility in integrating with telecommunication systems.
The version of Asterisk used in ACID is version 1.4 and it probably will not be updated anytime soon as app_rpt is highly dependent on the way Asterisk 1.4 does things.
Digium recently released Asterisk 1.8 and Asterisk 1.6 is widely used. It may be better to use a more recent Asterisk version for a phone system.
I completely agree with this statement. If you are going to set up an Asterisk phone system - do it SEPERATELY from your AllStar system. AllStar being just another Asterisk system can be configured in a variety of ways to allow it to communicate with another Asterisk phone server (ie via IAX2). This will allow you to use some of the newer features of 1.6 (and 1.8).
I run an Asterisk box separate from my radio system to provide flexibility should I want to take the radio system down to work on it.
For dedicated standalone Asterisk system, the O'Reilly Asterisk book does a good job of explaining how to set Asterisk up.
Steve WA6ZFT