anyone run asterisk/trixbox

A

AMD_Gamer

Fully [H]
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Jan 20, 2002
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i was looking into asterik as a little project a few months back but it seemed extremely complicated to setup and im not very familiar with all the terminolgy, but today i just picked up the latest PC Magazine and was surprised to see it has a pretty good article on how to setup a asterik server using trixbox and simple softphone clients, it seems very easy there are alot of options you can configure that get tricky but setting it up and making extensions for simple phones on your internal network looks easy.

now setting up a trunk so you can place and get calls from the outside world im not sure how about, how exactly do you go about doing this? if you get a single telephone/pots line from your local phone company you just hook it up to a modem and configure the settings in trixbox?

now what if you want your internal users to be able to all make and get calls from the utside world at the same time can you use a single cheap line or would you need something like a t1?

like if you have 3 exenstions inside your network would only one of them be able to make or get a call from the outside world 1 at a time?
 
I would really recommend trying out TrixBox. I've been running it (A@H before that) for about 4 months now and we're using it as our primary phone. My wife evens says that it's great.

The setup can be as simple as you want it such as just a single POTS line with 1 phone or as complex as you want.

To answer your question, if you have a single POTS line and 3 extensions, then yes, only one extension will be able to make outbound calls. What I would recommend checking out would be a cheap VoIP provider that would allow you to connect trixbox to a SIP or IAX account. Broadvoice, which is the provider I use (they've received a lot of negative reviews lately but I've had awesome service from them) have a $5.99 / month Bring Your Own Device plan that you can use with trixbox. There are some other providers that provide some free calls, but I have not used any of them.

If you do decide to set it up and try it out, I would highly recommend a visit to http://www.nerdvittles.com . They have some awesome guides on setting it up and you will also get an idea of some of the really cool things you can do with it.

I'm by no means an expert in Linux or VoIP, but after installing Trixbox (A@H at the time) and signing up for my Broadvoice account, I was making phone calls within about 15 minutes.
 
yeah broadvoice was mentioned in the PC Magazine article so if you get broadvoice service and set it up on your trixbox you can have the internal extensions on your network send a recieve phone calls to any phone on the outside world? sounds like a good deal i will have to look into it

you can also setup trixbox to record voicemail and do all the other things it can do if you have a service like broadvoice?
 
I don't know about trixbox, but I can speak about asterisk; It's awsome. Once you get the terms down, and the concepts, it's incredibily easy.

If you have a single pots line, then you can only make a single call at a time. However, you can always add voip lines, which effectively give you any number of outgoing lines you need. I use teliax and voicepulse, both of which have been reliable for me.

In this setup, I'd default drop calls out on your voip lines, so your incoming line is open to ring through.

Anyway, if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
 
so if you use a voip provider you can have unlimited amount of incoming and outgoing calls at once? i would want all the extensions to be able to make outgoing and incoming calls at the same time
 
Some VoIP services will only allow you to have a certain number of concurrent calls or will charge you if you have more than a certain number of concurrent calls. Through Broadvoice, I have had 3 outgoing calls at the same time and was not charged any additional for it. One factor in multiple calls will be your connection. Depending on your connection speed, you may only be able to have 1 or 2 simultaneous calls at a time before it starts to break up and start dropping calls.

To answer your question about voicemail, you can use your Asterisk box for VM. It will also handle the other features that Broadvoice and others may offer such as call waiting, forwarding, conferencing and the list just continues. I've disabled voicemail on the Broadvoice side so that Asterisk handles all of that for me.

To give you an example from yesterday, I've got Asterisk setup to send a notification to my Blackberry whenever someone leaves me a voicemail (it also send an e-mail to my main e-mail account with the message attached so I can check it at work). So anyway, I was at a wedding reception yesterday and got a message on my Blackberry that I had a new VM message. It gives me the time the message was left, the length of the message, and caller ID information on who left the message. I was then able to call our home phone, listen to my voicemail and then return the call back to the person that left the message.

There are almost unlimited possibilities.
 
flyboy747 said:
Some VoIP services will only allow you to have a certain number of concurrent calls or will charge you if you have more than a certain number of concurrent calls. Through Broadvoice, I have had 3 outgoing calls at the same time and was not charged any additional for it. One factor in multiple calls will be your connection. Depending on your connection speed, you may only be able to have 1 or 2 simultaneous calls at a time before it starts to break up and start dropping calls.

To answer your question about voicemail, you can use your Asterisk box for VM. It will also handle the other features that Broadvoice and others may offer such as call waiting, forwarding, conferencing and the list just continues. I've disabled voicemail on the Broadvoice side so that Asterisk handles all of that for me.

To give you an example from yesterday, I've got Asterisk setup to send a notification to my Blackberry whenever someone leaves me a voicemail (it also send an e-mail to my main e-mail account with the message attached so I can check it at work). So anyway, I was at a wedding reception yesterday and got a message on my Blackberry that I had a new VM message. It gives me the time the message was left, the length of the message, and caller ID information on who left the message. I was then able to call our home phone, listen to my voicemail and then return the call back to the person that left the message.

There are almost unlimited possibilities.
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damn that sounds cool,

so the voicemail recordings are stored on the trixbox server? it says you dont need a big hdd but if you are going to want voicemail i guess yu will want to have lots
of storage room

now im still a bit confused about incoming calls if you get a service like broadvoice or any connection to the outside world you will have 1 number, now if some calls that can you set the trixbox to let people calling route the call to a certain extension? how does that workout
 
AMD_Gamer said:
damn that sounds cool,

so the voicemail recordings are stored on the trixbox server? it says you dont need a big hdd but if you are going to want voicemail i guess yu will want to have lots
of storage room

now im still a bit confused about incoming calls if you get a service like broadvoice or any connection to the outside world you will have 1 number, now if some calls that can you set the trixbox to let people calling route the call to a certain extension? how does that workout
Click to expand...


Yes, the voicemails are saved on the trixbox server. Unless you're planning on leaving the messages on there for a long term and expect a lot of messages, you don't need a very large drive. I currently have a 14 GB drive in mine and I'm only using 1.36 GB.

When you sign up for a service like Broadvoice, they give you a DID number in whatever area code you want. For example, I live in Nashville, TN and have a 615 area code phone number. So anyone with any type of phone (POTS, Cell, VoIP, etc) can call that number. You can program incoming routes into Asterisk. You can set it up to route by caller ID information (phone number) or DID information and pass it to a specific extension or ring a group of phones, send it straight to VM and so on.

For example: I have setup multiple inbound routes (mostly for testing) that do different things. One of them that I tested was creating extensions for both my cell phone and my wifes cell phone. I setup an inbound route for my cell phone number so that just when I called from my cell phone, it would automatically go to her cell and not ring any of the other phones. I also tried it by setting up a hunt group meaning that it would first ring the phones at our house and then if no one picked up after a certain number of rings it would start ringing her cell. I hope I haven't made this too confusing.

I would highly recommend checking out the guides at nerdvittles.com to see how easy it is to setup all of this through Trixbox with FreePBX.
 
MorfiusX said:
You know about asterisk@home right? TrixBox = Asterisk@home 2.0 (for the most part).
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actually no. I know about it, but I haven't used it.
 
XOR != OR said:
I don't know about trixbox, but I can speak about asterisk; It's awsome. Once you get the terms down, and the concepts, it's incredibily easy.
Click to expand...

That's for sure.

If you have a single pots line, then you can only make a single call at a time. However, you can always add voip lines, which effectively give you any number of outgoing lines you need. I use teliax and voicepulse, both of which have been reliable for me.
Click to expand...

I just use a single POTS line at home. Looking to add broadvoice (or something like you mentioned) to the mix.

In this setup, I'd default drop calls out on your voip lines, so your incoming line is open to ring through.
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Don't forget to route 911 calls out your POTS line. Most VOIP providers don't have access for that.

Anyway, if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
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Asterisk@Home = Trixbox = Full GUI for Asterisk = As if Asterisk wasn't easy enough already, they built a GUI for it.
 
AMD_Gamer said:
but today i just picked up the latest PC Magazine and was surprised to see it has a pretty good article on
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Heh..that's funny...I keep my PCM and PCW in the bathroom..this morning was getting towards the end of this months issue...I see that article on Asterisk/Trix...and say to myself "Hey...I recognize that..someone made a post over at HOCPs forums. :D

Looks interesting..purely from the standpoint of doing it.
 
shade91 said:
Don't forget to route 911 calls out your POTS line. Most VOIP providers don't have access for that.
Click to expand...
Good point. While I have 911 trying the pots line first, it does roll over to the voip lines. What I did was I called the police dept and asked what the local number was for 911. I then used that number when calling over the voip lines. Combined with me faking my callerid to my land line, it's just about the same thing.
 
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