Build Your Own PBX

Kerbo writes "Kerry Garrison has written up a complete guide to building your own PBX with Asterisk@Home to create your own working PBX system. In the article, he shows how you can build a complete, working system for under $20 (assuming you have some old hardware laying around the house)."

Lousy Submissions

[ilyagordon]

One of the major problems with Slashdot articles is that they provide absolutely NO background information to what the hell they're referencing. We may all be geeks and nerds, but that doesn't mean we know what a PBX box is. I'm not going to click on your damn link just to find out what the hell you're trying to say with your stinking news submission.

If a standard, everyday IT geek can read your submission without clicking on any links and be able to understand what's in store within those links, you've done a good job. This particular submission is not an example of this.

Re:Lousy Submissions

[Kerbo]

If you don't know what a PBX is, then this probably isn't of interest to you in the first place. I have no idea what "Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) and Elliptic Curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV) for key agreement, and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for signature generation/verification" means, but that didnt stop me from reading about it.

SOHO

[erick99]

It you just opened your own cottage industry style consulting business out of your home, something like this could make you look like a bigger business. I could see the advantage to that. The features of the system would be handy too for a new and very small business.

Re:Lousy Submissions

[DNS-and-BIND]

Standard, everyday IT geeks know what PBX systems are.

HINT: When the article provides absolutely NO background information, it can safely be said that everyone but you knows what we're talking about.

eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

The most recommended card is the Digium Wildcard X100P FXO card which can be purchased brand new on eBay for $6.95 each.

Not for long...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Asterisk has good WAF...

[blackbear]

Another tactic for call screening that I use is to require the caller to press a number in order to leave a message. For me, this stops a lot of telemarketing calls. It seems they either can't or don't want to press 1 before leaving me a message. Which makes me VERY happy.

Linux ISO for PBX

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux PBX based ISO, Asterisk@Home [sourceforge.net]
You still need some hardware though!

Re:Next on Slashdot

[Eil]

Mod me up! :)...

Um, no. I have mod points, but I'm not modding you up. Rather than modding you down, however, I'd like to point out a couple things that have been bugging me about a lot of Slashdot comments recently.

1) You felt the need to ASK to be modded up instead of letting the content of your comment stand on its own.

2) Your reply has sweet fuck all to do with the comment that you replied to and you did this solely to give your post higher placement in the comments. A sad tactic, and the one that I most often give out negative mod points for. Next time, start a new thread. If you feel that what you have to say is so important that it must reach the largest audience possible, take out a few banner ads. Don't further wreck the continually derailing train that is Slashdot commentry.

Re:Lousy Submissions

[Fjornir]

Sir, the thing is that slashdot is targetted at people who can read the front page. PBX is by no means obscure, at least as far as the slashdot readership is concerned. This is not a problem with the slashdot submission process as you had said in a previous post, the problem is the fact that you are ignorant of things which are just assumed to be known. I'm not saying this to trash on you in any way -- maybe twice a month I'll hit google and ask it to "define: tla".

But the fact is that I'd rather slashdot erred on the terse side, instead of excessive verbosity. If I started seeing a lot of "In case you don't know, a CPU is a Central Processing Unit...", "In case you don't know an LED is a light emitting diode", "In case you don't know a ...." garbage in the submissions, I'd stop reading. If there's something that's too obscure I can always look it up.

Re:Totally offtopic: Is Slashdot dying?

[humberthumbert]

Not to mention all the dupes recently.

To the editors: I do hope that you get off your asses and do something. Editors are supposed to editorialise right?

So, pen your thoughts on topics of interest to the geek world. All we get so far is this immense wall of silence from you. It's like you're just going through the motions nowadays.

At least address the complaints we see daily. You owe the paying subscribers this much.

I recall the heyday of /. when I could look forward to really thought-inspiring articles. Hell, even Jon Katz was worth a gander now and then, if only to laugh at how clueless he was/is.

Articles on tired Sci-Fi franchises and barely concealed adverts are boring me to tears.

As an aside, can anyone can recommend another good forum for geeks to hang out on?

Re:Lousy Submissions

[drsquare]

Not just him, but a lot of other people, including me. Obviously not everyday 'geeks' know what they are, just a self-important few.

As for saying 'well google it', it's not my job to find out something so I'm interested in an article, it's up to the article submitter to sell the story to me, if he wants me to read it. Every salesman worth his salt knows that.

Re:Answer and a Question

[Solder Fumes]

I'll answer your question with another question: if you already have Vonage, why would you need Asterisk? Vonage already has most of the goodies you'd regularly use with Asterisk. Now, if you want to run a little business and do some fancy work with multiple phone lines, just ditch Vonage and save $5 a month with Broadvoice.

If you don't need to put your grandmother through a five-level voice menu every time she calls, then Asterisk doesn't offer that much of an advantage. The Vonage box is actually pretty cool, you can take it with you on extended trips. My job often puts me in other parts of the country for a week or two, it's nice to have a phone that uses zero precious anytime cellphone minutes. Basically, with a laptop computer, access to a printer, high-speed internet, and a Vonage box, you are in your office.

Re:Confusion

[fireboy1919]

That's overkill. Phone lines aren't power lines.

Jacking into the junction box isn't any harder than making an ethernet cord (which just takes a spool of CAT-5, a crimping tool, some vampire clips, and an IQ somewhere around Forrest Gump's).

In fact, a lot of junction boxes have rj-11 jacks on them so you don't have to do anything to the wires. You'd just disconnect the main from the outgoing line and connect it to the ata adapter.

Telephony Hardware is becoming redundant

[datafr0g]

There are thousands and thousands of small businesses who this sort of thing could work really well for. While it costs next to nothing to set up, anyone who spends the time learning about how the technology works could potentially run a nice little side business, rolling premade boxes out by charging perhaps for hardware, install, config and ongoing support. The telco market is pretty competitive but as software is now becoming more important than hardware in this business, these sorts of things are going to get easier. I work for a company that supports and designs complex converged communications solutions for large corporates and what's become clear over the past couple of years is that the IP Telephony market is overtaking traditional TDM based systems exponetially. The vendors used to make the majority of their cash from the hardware side. The type of hardware that systems run on is becoming less important, as is the manufacturer - it's the software and what you can do with it that's driving a lot of decisions nowadays. One example is that there are a lot of good open standards now on most platforms which allows for easier integration of other existing systems in a business from databases to other PBX's - this is all enabled because of software, not hardware. Interesting side note for the linux peeps - Avaya, who is probably the largest telephony vender in the world for large corps (they spun off from Lucent in 2001) use Red Hat - they use proprietry hardware and software of course, but thought this may interest some...

Re:Is it cost effective to become a mini-Vonage?

[bwass24]

In a large real world implementation you would never use a single D channel for 20 PRI's. For diversity and overall manageability sake you would create trunk groups of 5 or 6 PRI's and use 2 channels--each on a different PRI--for a primary and a backup D channel for each trunk group. I've implemented this arrangement many times and it works great as long as the PRI carrier has their act together at their switch end.

Re:Anyone else find it weird...

[syukton]

You build a PBX because buying one would be too expensive. The opposite is going on here, he's using somebody else's service (blogspot) because rolling his own would be too time consuming/expensive/whatever. I like to say: Don't reinvent the wheel unless that reinvention is done at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.