There is an interesting new VoIP PBX product that has caught my attention.  I even felt compelled enough to get off my lazy butt and write a little review about it.  What caught my attention was that it's from one of my favorite hardware manufacturers.  I make no secret of my love for Aastra SIP phones so when I heard about the AastraLink Pro 160 PBX I had to find out more.  It's not actually shipping till late May 2008 and I’m not enough of a big shot to get any special love from Aastra so I haven't held one in my hands much less tak

The following is an update to a case study of a VoIP PBX phone system I installed back in October 2006 using this guide.  I feel it is time for an update to see how things have worked out long term.

I needed a PoE switch for doing VoIP demos and for use in my office with my SIP VoIP phones. After searching high and low for the lowest cost solution I settled on the Netgear FS108P.

Setting up your Asterisk PBX for XML auto provisioning has 2 primary advantages.  It allows non-technical people to install phones and speeds up the process of adding a large number of phones.

XML auto provisioning is installed as follows. This assumes you already have the other XML scripts installed on the server end as discussed previously.

So you got a brand spanking new Aastra 5xi phone that you want to connect to your Asterisk PBX. Implementing XML on your phones opens up a whole world of possibilities. I'll show you how to do it.

These have all been tested on my Aastra 57i phone. It should work on the 55i as well. I am not sure what will work on other phones. Some things will and some things won't.

FreePBX-Asterisk install and configure guide using CentOS 5.x, Asterisk 1.4.x, and FreePBX 2.3.x.

For printer friendly version of this guide create an account and login.  It will only take a few seconds.

For printer friendly version of this guide create an account and login.  It will only take a few seconds.

UPDATE:Try this to fix the problems with mysql permissions.  This was suggested by someone else.  I have not tried it myself.  "The 'astrundir' must be changed to  /var/run/asterisk before installing FreePBX. Otherwise, the owner for /var/run/mysqld will be changed to asterisk and that causes mysqld to fail starting. Or you can just change permission of /var/run/mysqld to 777"

This document describes my attempt to build a hardened Asterisk based VoIP PBX of equivalent reliability to a traditional PBX.  It was done using an embedded design philosophy just like traditional PBX’s.  At the same time it takes advantage of the commodity pricing of standard computer hardware that Linux and Asterisk make possible.

Take 2 minutes to create an account to get the printer friendly version.