pbx recco

Robert E. Seastrom rs at seastrom.com
Tue May 15 19:33:48 UTC 2012


Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> writes:

> have a friend who is a penguinista and wants to run a simple soft pbx.
> support of soft phones, 7960s, connect to a commercial sip gate, ...
> reccos for a packaged solution.

While Asterisk's configuration files are horrible (and written by
people who didn't understand what a tokenizer is) it's really a case
of the more clueful you are the worse off you'll find it.  You just
have to take a megadose of stupid pills in order to be happy with
Asterisk's configuration.

I've been using Astlinux, which allows access to the underlying files
(in fact you edit them through a web interface) successfully with
voip.ms (wholesale voip provider for cheap) for almost three years
now.  My experience fooling around with stuff like Trixbox, Askozia,
and FreePBX is that there are plenty of cute GUI wrappers out there
for configuring stuff, but at the end of the day as painful as
handling the files directly is, it's a lot less painful than trying to
work around the GUI's lossage whenever you want to do something that
the designers didn't anticipate, which is pretty much all the time.

Making Cisco 7940/7960 phones with SIP loads talk to Asterisk is
well-documented, and their lossage modes are well-understood.

Back to Astlinux, it's a pre-baked distro with click-here
upgradability that will run nicely from CF on an embedded box like a
PCEngines ALIX 2d3 (~15 simultaneous calls if you're not transcoding).
6 watts of power.  Not a bad deal.

> i run a raw asterisk and would not wish it on my worst enemy.

Sure you would, you'd encourage your competitors to use it.  :)

-r





More information about the NANOG mailing list