On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 11:06:56AM +0000, Ben Buxton wrote: > Kevin Saenz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> uttered the following thing: > > I am looking at using Asterisk for home. > > > > I have a VOIP wireless DSL router. Do I have to have any other > > specific piece of hardware? > > > > I would like to have a linux box running Asterisk that will manage > > all the incoming and out going calls, that way I could also pre-empt > > the bill I will get charged in the following month. > > > > I would like to use my desktops as phones. That means that my PCs > > (both windows and Linux) > > and Notebook Pro will need to be able to answer the call and allow us > > to talk back. > > > > Is what I am planning possible? > > Not a problem at all. The setup for this can be quite involved - your > best bet would be going with a dedicated Asterisk distribution such as > Trixbox. It will install a Redhat based OS on a machine (wiping > everything else!) with all the asterisk goodies you'll need to get > started. www.trixbox.org has all the goodies. > > BB >
Kevin, what you are asking is very possible with Asterisk, as it is a very flexible system whose behaviour is basically dependant upon how you set up the dialplan. However, where my opinion would differ with Ben is that I would recommend going with standard Asterisk on the distribution your are most comfortable with administering. Trixbox is technically a fork of Asterisk with an included GUI and is aimed at persons unfaimilar with the Linux CLI. It can be a useful tool to learn off in some cases, but unfortunately it masks a lot of the functionality of Asterisk and you will find very little support for it from experienced Asterisk users and VoIP experts. A good starting point for learning Asterisk is the O'Reily book "Asterisk: The Future of Telephony" which is available for free download at: http://www.asteriskdocs.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=11 In the next one or two months I hope to give a presentation at SLUG on Asterisk, so keep a look out for that. If you have any troubles with your setup, #asterisk on Freenode IRC is usually a fairly good resource. Regards, Jon -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
