>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. Wilton
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