Asterisk :: New toys and Making it Useful

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Settling in for the long haul (20-Oct-2004)

I decided it made sense to wait a few weeks before posting the next installment of my asterisk experiences. During that time I've made an effort to use asterisk as my primary telephone for inbound and outbound calls. Yesterday I gained enough comfort with the system to actually make an official cut-over. My cordless phone in the house routes through asterisk now and doesn't just sit beside it. I'm officially relying on the box for all my inbound and outbound calls.

Cisco 7960

I received the Cisco 7960 just a few days after writing up "page 4". It's installed on my desk in my office and it's functional, but to be honest I haven't spend much energy trying to customize it much beyond just getting it working. The phone is solid and sounds great -- it's probably the best quality phone I've used. I haven't even begun to build any web services for the phone to use and I'll hold off on a more complete writeup until I've had the time to really see what can be done with the thing.

TDM400P

I've also received and installed my TDM400P from Digium. This is a single card which came configured with one FXS port and one FXO port and open sockets to add up to two more FXS and/or FXO ports. An FXO is what allows you to plug a live phone line into an Asterisk box for the purpose of placing and receiving calls. An FXS port is the more interesting of the two, allowing you to produce a dial tone and turn a regular analog phone into a VoIP station. I'm using it to tie in my home phone line and to make my Siemens cordless phone system an extension within the house.

I had a terrible time getting the card working. It was backordered from Digium for a couple weeks and when it arrived it was a brand new version of the card. The Zaptel drivers for Linux had not caught up with the new flavor of card, though, and I along with tens of other people on the asterisk-users mailing list was having problems where the card would only intermittantly work when rebooting the server. A CVS checkout of the Zaptel drivers from last week or so seems to have resolved the problem, though, and things have seemed pretty stable since.

A Work server?

I've also set up a second Asterisk box, this time at a colo facility and on FreeBSD 5. I'd set up a few of my colleagues with SJPhone and accounts on my Asterisk box and the initial reaction was very positive. We decided that the whole team (we all work from our homes, all across the world) could benefit from the technology. My DSL was not going to be up to the task, so I got a colo box from 800hosting.com to server as our group server. This has provided me with ample opportunity to play with inter-asterisk routing using IAX2 and coordinating two different dialplans.

A modest dialplan

Part of my sluggishness in making the cut over to asterisk was a fundamental indecision about exactly how I wanted to route my calls. I wasn't very enthused about an auto-answer attendant requiring inbound callers to choose a proper extension. I think that routing residential calls in that manner is an inappropriate artifact of PBX technology having come over from the business world. What makes sense for Dell does not make sense for me personally, or even for consulting work.

I don't think that the value of asterisk to a home user has anything to do with fancy menus or voice prompts. The value, if there is any, will be from the succesful deployment of intelligent and transparent call routing and the less-cumbersome methods of accessing telephony services that comes from computer integration. Expecting callers to dial my extension to indicate that they want to talk to me instead of Monica is a big Lose. Having calls from my mom automatically find me on my mobile is a big Win. Adding complications to the caller's experience is a Lose. Listening to my voicemail from a web page is a Win.

In that spirit, I wanted to avoid having anything in Asterisk automatically answering the phone. This will prove to be a challenge for fax routing, I suspect, but it's the only approach I was ever able to be comfortable about.

Without much explanation, here's my current working copy of extensions.conf. I'm sure it will be suject to additional refinements as I gain experience using asterisk for all my phone calls.

Next: Proximity-based call routing