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)."

And what's neat...

[Pig Hogger]

And what's neat is that it's ready to go VOIP at the same time.

Hmmmm. How about making a Linux distro that gives out a PBX/bastion host/firewall???

Confusion

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

I may be incredibly dense (drunk), and I have never messed about with my home phones. Essentially, I would like all my phones to go through Vonage, but act exactly like normal phones. Is this a way of doing this? The article goes into detail about Soft Phones, but I have no interest in that.

Any points for a beginner looking for information?

Asterisk has good WAF...

[mutterc]

(Wife Acceptance Factor)

Ours (done in a modern machine, so it would have PCI 2.2 for the cards to drive Plain Old Phones) has a (not hard to do once the basics are working) callpath that's a caller-ID whitelist.

Calls from numbers "on the list" ring the phones, then go to voicemail, like "normal" calls would. Calls from one of our cellphones tell the caller how many new voicemails are waiting, then distinctive-ring the phones, then go to voicemail. Calls from unknown, private, or not-on-the-list numbers go straight to voicemail without ringing the phones.

You'll pry it out of my wife's cold dead hands...

Could someone please explain the last mile?

[Sark666]

With all this talk of voip here and there, I've never understood how the actual conversion from ip to pots actually takes place.

Basically I want to know how these companies do it. How do the perform this termination service? How small a scale could one do this himself?

Is it cost effective to become a mini-Vonage?

[Cryofan]

So, this is a PBX. So, I can hook this hardware up to the telco and take incoming calls from clients anywhere in the world over IP and make a call for them to a telco phone number, and let them talk over my PBX, correct?

OK, but what I do not know is what kind of connection to the telco do I need to do this? Can I do it using my standard phone connection? I would think you need multiple lines outgoing to the telco POTS (plain old telephone system), correct? So, if I have N lines to the telco, I can handle a max of N calls from clients on my IP to Telco PBX, correct?

So, would this be cost effective as a business model? Is a certain number of lines required, etc?

TIA

Silly question about Asterisk@home

[mikeage]

Hi,
I'm considering setting up Asterisk at home, however, the WAF (wife acceptance factor) is going to be very important here, so I'd like to make sure I know what I'm doing before I start. How hard is it to deploy an Asterisk@home with the following configuration:
Two outgoing lines (one for local calls via local telecom, one for US calls via VoIP (packet8 -- using their DTA-310), and three local extensions (only one will be a "real" telephone.
As I understand it, this means I need two FXOs, and one FXS. Can I use three separate cards for this, instead of buying a 2 or 4 port FXO, which seem to be more than 2* the cost of a single?

Then what?

[JPriest]

Once I have the PBX running, how do I get my phone number routed to it? Do I have to sign a lease agreement with a CLEC for them to host and forward my number? What paperwork do I fill out to get my number released from the ILEC and to whom do I send it?

I could probably swing running the software and equipment, but I am lost with the administrative and telephony portion of having my own PBX.

Just so you appreciate what you are doing,

[pair-a-noyd]

Here's a REAL PBX that is my personal property [systemrecycler.com].
It's a Rolm CBX II 9000 that is configured to handle 10,000 lines. (Yes, it's operational) It was purchased for $3,000,000 when it was brand new. It's had additional upgrades installed, it's net value was over $5,000,000 at one point in the very recent past.

It fills an entire building. So, compare that with this new tech and you'll all the more appreciate what you have in front of you...

Re:Confusion

[TheMysteriousFuture]

Yes.

order vonage service

receive vonage ata (analog telephone adapter)

disconnect ILEC telephone lines from inside house telephone lines at your dmarc on the side of your home

plug vonage ata into phone jack inside

enjoy

You are the man, here's why:

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Fucking THANK YOU!!

Once my SO figured out she could have this too if, and only if, daddy gets to buy a new machine. i said it'd probably needs a good amount of horsepower and needed a lot of ram - she was still stunned by the idea of having such a phone system, she didn't even question it.

Hot damn, new server AND a new phone system to play with - i looked at the gui screenshots of the astGUI client - holy shit, this is going to be fun.

GNU Bayonne?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody care to comment on the relative merits and approaches of Asterisk and Bayonne?

Student Solution

[geekboxjockey]

This looks like a great idea for student houses. I'm going to seriously consider setting one of these up, but does anyone know from a phone-line connection aspect weather I could use my existing telephone line or would there be any sort of "call the phone company to talk it over" type configuration (does it work like answering machine on first ring with a supported modem card or will I need to set up another sort of line?). I wouldnt mind the bottleneck of just one phoneline for 6 people on a pbx, I'm assuming that there is a busy signal etc for every other caller after the first and some sort of warning for someone who picks up to try to call out on a busy line. This would be amazing for those "somebody called for you, I forgot who it was and where I wrote the number" situations, along with the classic case of nobody answering because theres a 1 in 6 chance its for them etc etc.... anyways just some brainstorming, time to hunt down an old clunker to install it on...

Re:NOTE: This will erase all data...

[adolf]

Geez.

Us Gentoo folk just emerge asterisk, and call it a day. No data loss required.

*shrug*

(-1, Flamebait)

Functioning but not practical...

[ashitaka]

Maintenance is the problem on older ROLM boxes. We once lost phone service for an entire day when one card in teh switch died. They had to fly the part from Toronto because there was no local supply here in Vancouver.

There may be no shortage of ROLM parts floating around on eBay, but the know-how to install and configure these switches is what is in short supply these days.

Re:Lousy Submissions

[randomiam]

Why don't the people who post stories add appropriate [google.com] hyperlinks [google.com] to websites such as wikipedia [wikipedia.org] at the time of posting? That would seem to solve the whole problem.

On a somewhat related note, I've found this [wiley.com] website to be invaluable when dealing with avalanches of acronyms.

Question about setting one of these things up

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been wanting to set up a system like this but was confused by certain things about asterisk and never got around to reading up on them. This article doesn't clear things up, for a "complete guide" it is quite short actually. But it has sparked my interest again.

Let's say I have one PSTN phone line. Assuming two people won't be calling at once, I want the caller to be greeted with a menu "press 1, press 2, press 0 to speak to an operator, etc". Then if someone presses 0, I want my phone (a regular cordless phone) to ring, so that I can speak to this person. How can this be done?

I get the part about running the phone line into the computer, and interfacing with the Asterisk software. I can just buy one of the compliant modems or the Digium card mentioned in the article, stick it in the computer, and hook it up to the phone line. That would probably work for giving them the menu, and taking voice mail. But how to pass the call along to my cordless phone, should the caller press zero? Do I need to install another modem in the computer and run a line from that modem to the cordless phone base station?

Scalability?

[UglyMike]

Great! So now you can have real PABX functionality at home (SOHO) But how does it scale? How many people can actually have working phones on a system? Is it just the Hardware which needs to scale or are there limitations to Asterisk itself? If I could play with this at work, how many guys could I conceivably hook up to this (using just SIP calls, no external connections needed) What would be the number of concurrent calls? Is there any info on that (yeah, I know it's "@Home" but just wondered...) I've been aware of Astersk for ages, but having a 'self-intalling' PBX does lower the bar quite a bit.

Synopsis of an Asterisk Install

[tburt11]

I have wanted a home PBX for a long time. I looked at Asterisk once, a while back but could see it was too green.
About a month ago, I took the plunge. I bought the Digium Card with 1 FXS and 3 FXO ports (~$300). I had a running Redhat 9.0 system that was doing nothing.
I installed the Digium Card, and installed the stable 1.0 release of Asterisk in about an hour.
It took me about a day, to figure out the "world of telephony". The telephone people in general have built a world of acronyms that are confusing to the non-initiated. But after some study, and reading the WIKI, I had a fully functional PBX system.
I purchased a number through connect.voicepulse.com and set that up easily. I kept one land line, for 911 calls, my DirectTivo, free local calls, and because everyone still calls us on that land line (10 years+).
EVERYTHING WORKS!
I now have true "extensions" in the house. My wife can now call me when I am out in the shop via the extension. The kids now get calls directed to their phone, so I am no longer picking up their phone calls. Voicemessages delivered via email.

But the best feature of all is: Because the initial voice menu requires you to enter a one(1) or a two(2) this puts a stop to the telemarketers and wrong numbers and the midnight faxes!!!

Another great feature of connect.voicepulse.com is that you get 4 simultaneous incoming/outgoing calls. This means that with one account, and one number, we can all be making outbound calls at the same time!
If someone calls in on our number, and another call comes in at the same time. Asterisk handles it. Up to 4 calls in a row. This feature I like!

Finally, I bought a second Digium card (works great btw) and now we have 7 independent extensions in the house. Overkill, I know, but it is extremely convenient!
I do not work for Digium, I have no reason to give them a good review, except that I have bought their product, been very pleased with the quality, and I am a very happy user of Asterisk.

OFF TOPIC - comments and moderation points

[ixx]

I have never ran into the conflict where I wanted to post to a story as much as I wanted to moderate. I can understand the overall reasoning for not allowing moderation and commenting. I am wondering if limiting it to specific threads would be enough? I suppose someone would try to make problems in that setup as well. The issue is after reading flat and newest post I moderated several comments up I found a comment with a question and no "full" response. So I decided to respond. This of course kills all the previous moderations that you do. So is there any solution?

BTW, is there some area for discussing these sort of things? It would be nice to have a forum or something dedicated to talking about how slashdot runs it self.