Astlinux Lives!
After a relatively long quiet period the Astlinux mailing list has been fairly active lately. This is thanks in part to some new users who have been extending the distro to meet their needs. Like any open source project, the…
What is IAX2? And Why Does It Matter To Me?
Randy (aka Zeeek or Randulo), founder of the VOIP Users Conference, was able to get his hands on a sample of the Allnet 7960 today and sent his initial thoughts on the device to the conference mailing list. This prompted another reader to pose the simple question, “Why does this matter?” (or something similar) More specifically, why does IAX2 matter in the light of a larger trends toward widespread SIP and IMS?
It’s a good question. So here’s my response.
IAX2 Capable Hard Phone From Allnet in Germany
The weekly VOIP Users Conference calls have often mentioned the Chinese made IAX phones, including both their strengths and weaknesses. Jared Smith posted a brief but positive comment on the Asterisk Users mailing list today with respect to a new…
How To: Building an Embedded Asterisk PBX
This article was originally published at www.smallnetbuilder.com.
Michael Graves
January 13, 2006
The Asterisk open source Voice over IP (VoIP) PBX is usually set up on a standalone PC. But Michael Graves shows how the combination of a special Asterisk distribution and a single board computer can provide a compact, quiet and low-power alternative.
Introduction
Astlinux is a bundled distribution of the Asterisk open source iPBX private branch exchange (PBX) software and a Linux operating system. Originally developed by Mark Spencer at Digium, Asterisk is the leading open source software in the telephony/VoIP space. Asterisk excels at combining traditional TDM telephony capability – provided through hardware from Digium and others – with VOIPservices. These include call routing, media gateway, media server and SIP signaling capabilities.
The Asterisk user community has been growing tremendously over the past two years, especially since the v1.0 release in the fall of 2004. With that growth has come the development of new distributions that bundle suites of software tools, to ease the setup and administration of a new Asterisk system. Asterisk@Home and Xorcom Rapid are both fine examples of this sort of activity.
Astlinux was developed by Kristian Kielhofner, and intended to go in a fundamentally different direction. Astlinux provides an Asterisk installation on a Linux distribution that has been built from scratch and optimized for small format hardware platforms – it takes what is essentially an embedded systems approach to Linux and Asterisk. In this article, I’ll show you how to build an VoIP PBX using Astlinux and a Soekris Net4801 single board computer (SBC).
Successful VOIP Over DSL, Part 4: Traffic Shaping
My experience has been that the QoS mechanisms covered previously don’t provide a complete solution to the need for assured bandwidth when using VOIP over DSL. When the connection to the ISP becomes saturated for any reason VOIP traffic can be delayed which is always a problem. When managed QoS was combined with “traffic shaping” our VOIP phone service became much more reliable. This has proven to be true even on a very busy connection to my ISP.
Like the QoS mechanisms covered previously, traffic shaping is an edge process that occurs in your router. Traffic shaping is actually a process of reserving bandwidth specifically for selected applications. That bandwidth will not be used for other forms of internet access. As before, this tends to be most critical with outbound traffic where available bandwidth is most limited. It’s also true with inbound traffic, but this tends to be less of an issue.
Successful VOIP Over DSL, Part 2: What is QoS?
You hear an awful lot about “QoS, which stands for “Quality Of Service.” In point of fact it means different things to different people depending upon their perspective, telco or IP networking.