On Jan 27, 2009, at 10:50 PM, Wilton Helm wrote:
>YMMV. Mine certainly did. For the better.
My comments were more negative than I intended. My installation is
"worthless" at this point because it is only a cookbook example and
I haven't tried to modify it to meet my needs. I didn't intend to
imply that Asterisk is worthless, just that I've only gotten to the
point of a trivial demo.
My main concern is that the documentation isn't for the faint of
heart. If one doesn't devote many hours, on a regular, ongoing
basis, they may never get to the point of understanding it enough to
apply it to a real-world situation. The more I explore and the more
feedback I get, the more I find is there. I just got a very nice
posting from Tzafir showing me a web domain I didn't even know
existed. Not surprising, it is a lot like Linux--everyone has there
own idea of what is needed and how it should be done, so it becomes
a monster that is hard to get a handle on. From what I've seen so
far, the commands far exceed any commercial PABX I've ever used or
evaluated. It is very powerful, but the learning curve is immense,
and I'm both a CS professional and a telephony professional.
I'm not abandoning it by any means, but am frustrated at even where
to jump in. I excitedly bought the O-Reily book, only to find that
for all 1000 pages, it never provided anything that could be
considered a reference manual and that its tutorials weren't even a
good fit to my needs. It did get me two SIP phones talking to each
other and to a softphone, but only after hours of experimenting with
SIP phone settings and contacts with the manufacturers (who knew
even less about VoIP).
I think part of the problem is that the only people who know enough
about * to address the documentation problems are busy either
developing hardware and software for it or using it to run their
businesses and don't have time to address the documentation problem,
which is understandable. Also, once a person gets to that level of
knowledge, its easy to forget how little a newcomer knows and leave
out a lot of necessary details.
Very true, but what you have to understand is that we all started out
with zero knowledge about *. One thing i have learned over the years
with * (& linux/unix), that there is plenty of info readily available
as long as you know where to look. Best place to start is always the
README file or man pages.Also, apart from google I found voip-info.org
to be an excellent online recourse. If you are not comfortable with
using linux, then i would suggest using something like trixbox (www.trixbox.org
) which can be configured via a webinterface.
userfriendly
Wilton
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