Asterisk

It is imperative that you read and fully understand the contents of the security information document before you attempt to configure and run an Asterisk server. Asterisk is an Open Source PBX and telephony toolkit. It is, in a sense, middleware between Internet and telephony channels on the bottom, and Internet and telephony applications at the top. However, Asterisk supports more telephony interfaces than just Internet telephony. Asterisk also has a vast amount of support for traditional PSTN telephony, as well. For more information on the project itself, please visit the Asterisk Home Page and the official Asterisk Documentation. The Asterisk Open Source PBX is developed and tested primarily on the GNU/Linux operating system, and is supported on every major GNU/Linux distribution. Asterisk has also been 'ported' and reportedly runs properly on other operating systems as well, Apple's Mac OS X, and the BSD variants. Most users are using VoIP/SIP exclusively these days but if you need to interface to TDM or analog services or devices, be sure you've got supported hardware. If you are updating from a previous version of Asterisk, make sure you read the Change Logs. Ensure that your system contains a compatible compiler and development libraries. Asterisk requires either the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) version 4.1 or higher, or a compiler that supports the C99 specification and some of the gcc language extensions. In addition, your system needs to have the C library headers available, and the headers and libraries for ncurses. On many distributions, these dependencies are installed by packages with names like 'glibc-devel', 'ncurses-devel', 'openssl-devel' and 'zlib-devel' or similar. The contrib/scripts/install prereq script can be used to install the dependencies for most Debian and Redhat based Linux distributions. The script also handles SUSE, Arch, Gentoo, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD but those distributions mightnoit have complete support or they might be out of date. 1. Read the documentation. The Asterisk Documentation website has full information for building, installing, configuring and running Asterisk. 2. Run ./configure Execute the configure script to guess values for system-dependent variables used during compilation. If the script indicates that some required components are missing, you can run ./contrib/scripts/install prereq install to install the necessary components. Note that this will install all dependencies for every functionality of Asterisk. After running the script, you will need to rerun ./configure . 5. Run make install If this is your first time working with Asterisk, you may wish to install the sample PBX, with demonstration extensions, etc. If so, run: 6. Run make samples Doing so will overwrite any existing configuration files you have installed. 7. Finally, you can launch Asterisk in the foreground mode (not a daemon) with asterisk -vvvc You'll see a bunch of verbose messages fly by your screen as Asterisk initializes (that's the "very very verbose" mode). When it's ready, if you specified the "c" then you'll get a command line console, that looks like this: CLI You can type core show help at any time to get help with the system. For help with a specific command, type core show help . man asterisk at the Unix/Linux command prompt will give you detailed information on how to start and stop Asterisk, as well as all the command line options for starting Asterisk. Those using SIP phones should be aware that Asterisk is sensitive to large jumps in time. Manually changing the system time using date(1) (or other similar commands) may cause SIP registrations and other internal processes to fail. For this reason, you should always use a time synchronization package to keep your system time accurate. All OS/distributions make one or more of the following packages available: Be sure to install and configure one (and only one) of them. Depending on the size of your system and your configur