From: "Dave Donovan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 19:05:03 -0500
On 1/23/07, Paul Wouters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, Terry D. Cudney wrote:
> Any suggestions? recommendations?
http://www.pjsip.org/pjsua.htm
Hey, that's cool. I've never seen that before.
Another option, although I haven't tried it in a long time, is to use
the sound card ins and outs as an extension supported directly by
Asterisk. It has been used as a poor man's paging interface and a few
other things, but I'm pretty sure I hooked a headset up and made
calls. It was good when I only had one phone or when I was
troubleshooting.
I'm not sure if this feature is still supported. Someone speak up if it's not.
Dave
Howdy folks,
This use-the-sound-card-as-an-extension idea gets at one of the hardest
things to wrap my newbie head around. All the information on
Asterisk.org is all "Digium hardware!" "Digium hardware!". I would
have thought the no-special-hardware option would be the very first
thing presented to new Asterisk users (i.e. use the sound card built in
to many motherboards or the old PCI sound card from the old hardware
pile at the back of everyone's closet). I understand Asterisk.org are
sponsored by Digium and one grew out of the other. Still I just found
it very tough to grasp why it wouldn't be covered, when a soft phone
seemed like the most obvious first thing you'd want to connect to a soft
PBX - so obvious, I figured it should be made way clearer how to do it,
or should even be included in the default install. In other words, the
lack of this topic which I thought should for sure be front and center,
made me doubt that I was understanding ANYTHING correctly.
I guess the reason they don't have it, is that any soft phone (with
protocols/codecs matching what I set up on my Asterisk server) should
work, is that the idea?
So I could try a bunch from the list at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_VoIP_software and use which
ever one I like?
Anyway, to try and avoid asking all the newbiest questions, I've read
the list archives straight through from Dec. 1 2006 to the present.
I've also read the asterisk.org About / Architecture / getting started/
how-to/ glossary page (numerous times on the glossary actually). I've
browsed through all the Digium hardware pages.
My goal is to figure out how to use Asterisk for -- and how expensive
the hardware and monthly service provider cost will be -- for a scenario
with a small home system... A bunch of say 6 family member voice mail
boxes, plus 3 or 4 family members' home businesses each having a mail
box, possibly a bunch of voice menus and such in front of that.
So I guess I could focus on taking incoming calls only (from the public
phone network) for now. And hopefully (if my gradually-forming
understanding of things is not totally wrong), I could use a soft phone
from my home LAN to check the various voice mail boxes.
How am I supposed to know whether I want a "Digital Interface Card",
"Analog Interface Card", "Analog Module", or "Analog Telephone
Adapter"? I can't even decide among their (Digium's) top-most level of
product organization which one I should be looking at. (I know that's a
rhetorical question, I'm not trying to gripe, just trying to highlight
some of the jargon barrier I saw as a newbie to let you know where I'm at).
I mean I can make a guess that I need some hardware with "analog" in the
name, since a normal Bell phone line is obviously an analog line, but
that still only narrows it down to the last 3 of the 4 major divisions
of their product catalog. That's if I want to add this Asterisk server
on the end of my current incoming Bell phone line. And I guess from my
glossary-learnings, it'd have to be something with FXO in the product name.
If I couldn't or didn't want to get the soft phone working, I could also
get something with FXS in the name, then I could plug in any of my old
phone sets into the Asterisk server. (mainly just to check the voice
mail messages in the above scenario, though I could actually answer the
calls and make outgoing calls too which would go through the Asterisk
server and out on the Bell phone line).
Any gross errors in the above or am I on the right track here?
Then the other option is to ditch the conventional phone line, sign up
with some VOIP provider (that offers some protocol that matches what I
can set up on Asterisk) and that gives me the publicly-accessible phone
number (instead of an analog phone line coming to my house), and
internet-accessible whatzitcalled that allows these incoming calls to
arrive at my Asterisk server.
Again, am I getting this right, or have I completely garbled the jargon?
Thanks in advance.
Regards.
Martin
