VOIP PBX solution for Switched On developer calls

[Richard Newbould]

Primarily directed at the BT Petes.

Chaps, again humble apologies for not being able to connect you in to the call today.

I had a quick look at Astericks - Open Source PBX with VOIP option.  Says can be set up in 15 mins and we can set up a (virtual) server easily enough...

As you chaps are at BT and have access (perhaps) to fountains of knowledge on the subject (if not your very own), would you be willing to give it a try - even if we need to ask the developers to install VOIP clients?

Hopefully all we'd need would be a simple configuration.

I have a longer-term motive - we'll  need conference calls to manage the different computer centres in India, do remote training (of the workers and students) etc.  The broadband offerings in India are improving drastically, perhaps enabling this.  The commercial offerings out there seem pretty expensive and we need to cost-cut as much as possible.  Feel free to recommend alternate open source solutions, though PBX-functionality as opposed to basic meet-me could stand us in good stead for the future.

What do you think?  Could we have it in place for the next developer call on 23rd Jan?

Thanks!

Richard

[samwise]

Richard,

15 mins to setup Asterisk to do everything you want is optimistic to
say the least. ;)

We can certainly step up to take on that task, though. Although I
don't work in VoIP anymore and haven't had much dealings with
Asterisk, I'm happy to get stuck in - and Pete still works with it for
his day job, so that's a good start.

However, we're going to need access to a server which /isn't/ behind a
NAT device. From what little I've heard you discuss of your virtual
servers, it sounds like they may be NAT'd. This really is a major
issue when it comes to SIP, which embeds the IP address in the SDP
payload of the message so, unless your NAT device is SIP-aware (almost
certainly not), it just plain won't work. I don't know what your
setup is, but if you have access to one un-NAT'd server directly on
the internet and are creating VMs on that, it would be much better to
install Asterisk directly on the host.

So, if you can provide us with SSH access to a server, preferably with
root access, we'll get started. Haven't checked yet but once we have
it setup, I assume Asterisk can probably be run as a non-root user -
we can setup an asterisk user account and set the permissions so you
can then change the root password, if you don't want us messing with
the server long-term.

In addition to this we're going to need some DNS SRV records created
for your chosen domain (switchedon.org, I assume). I don't know who
hosts your domain name, but many of the cheaper hosts are unlikely to
provide for that kind of record in their web control panel. That
means you may have to email their support dept. to get them to add the
records manually. I can provide you with the exact format of the SRV
records when you let me know what the IP address of the (non-NAT'd!)
server is.

Peter.

2009/12/5 Richard Newbould <ric...@switchedon.org>:

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[Richard Newbould]

Hi Pete and Pete,

Thanks for stepping up!  I am sure this will be an interesting work-package, and useful at that.

I have set up a basic Wiki page at:

http://code.google.com/p/so-class2/wiki/Workpackage_PBX?ts=1260189321&updated=Workpackage_PBX

I think you can have it non-NAT'd as, as there is an option to specify one of the servers behind the router as that.  However, I currently have that set up to a different machine.  I'll email the issue to you separately for security reasons.

I have just moved the nameserver management to Zoneedit which gives a lot of flexibility, so do please let me know what the record entries should be!  I'll try get the server set up within the next two weeks.  Sorry this week is rather difficult now as I'm off to Delhi with Edward to check out the computer centres.

Would you be able to let me know the memory and disk requirements of Asterisk?  I'd like to keep the memory footprint as small as reasonable as it's on a VM Host with a 4GB limit, and all our centralised resources on there.

Thanks again!

Richard

2009/12/7 samwise <sam...@bagshot-row.org>