[clue-tech] Asterisk

[Chris Hirsch]

Mike Staver wrote:
> I apologize if this has been asked before, but I'm researching VoIP
> for my office in Denver and I have many, many questions.  I'm
> considering setting up an Asterisk PBX Server, but before I even begin
> doing that, I need some questions answered from a very newbie
> perspective.  We have an existing traditional phone system which we
> rent from the landlords of the building.  I know they have an old PBX
> running it.  We will have an entirely new system which I hope to
> piggy-back off our existing T1 line.  So, my largest question is, how
> does this work?  Meaning, I assume I'll need a provider of some kind
> of route phone calls to specific numbers to my PBX server running off
> my T1.  I'm curious as to what my options are and how this works. I
> would just like a general explanation of how the calls get routed to
> the PBX running on my network, etc.  Once I get that figured out, I'll
> start playing with Asterisk and possibly attempting to set it up here.
For starters I'd suggest taking a look at AAH (Asterisk @ Home
http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/ ). This is probably the easiest
way to get started with Asterisk and VoIP. As long as you have a old
computer (PII or so with maybe 128M) you're good to go. AAH give you the
ease of menu driven setup and  has some of the more popular GUI apps for
Asterisk already installed. This includes the excellent Sugar CRM,
Asterisk Management Portal (AMP) and others.

Nerd Vittles just released today a step by howto on getting AAH setup.
http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=112.

I've setup several people with AAH and they love it. The trick is of
course that they are either purely VoIP or POTS and VoIP so I can't help
you too much with your T1 except to say that you need to one of the
channel bank cards from Digium
http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=product_category&category=hardware
or another asterisk compatible card.

The great thing about Asterisk is that it's more of a gateway than just
a PBX and can convert between POTS/VoIP/T1/younameit so you can mix and
match.

Good luck!
Chris
_______________________________________________
CLUE-tech mailing list
CLUE-tech at cluedenver.org
http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue-tech