Thursday 13 November 2008

Asterisk web GUI doesn't work

After the last post where I thought asterisk was pretty much set up, I was really disappointed to find I couldn't for the life of me get the web gui to work properly. By this time however, I knew all about how to get the zaptel driver configured and running properly, so we went back to the machine we set up following the guide here. After restoring the backup I found that the driver didn't work properly, but that was fixed by just compiling and installing it again. Then going into the asterisk command line, we still didn't have the 'zap' commands. After searching around I finally found that it was due to the asterisk people renaming everything to do with zaptel to DAHDI (Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface). So now that we got that working its just a question of getting the correct configurations and the correct rules set up. So, hopefully another day or two should sort it.

Tuesday 11 November 2008

Asterisk on a debian box

The job I'm currently doing at the moment is trying to set up a VoIP/PBX box which sits on the network and basically routes all local calls through the PSTN and routes all international calls through a VoIP provider (kind of like Skype). So the idea is that you save money on international calls by not having to use the telco's network.

So the idea was pretty good, and it seemed that the Asterisk software was pretty mature, but I did run into some problems. The first time I tried setting this up I tried downloading, compiling and installing the zaptel driver and the asterisk software manually. This led to some kind of error where no matter what happened Asterisk could not see the telephone cards. Although, for some reason the web interface working on top of Asterisk could.

But anyway, the way I finally got it working was to download and install the zaptel source code for the drivers from the debian repositories and then compile the driver. Apparently you can't get pre-compiled drivers from the debian repo's. The package itself (zaptel-source) had a dependency on another package called 'module-assistant'. After installing the zaptel-source package through apt, I compiled and installed the package using the command 'm-a a-i zaptel' i.e. 'module-assistant auto-install zaptel'. This managed to install the drivers properly. Then, I installed the asterisk version in the debian repository as well by just running 'apt-get install asterisk'.

Tomorrow, I start configuring the asterisk installation.