I’ve recently been reflecting upon my history as an Asterisk user and the evolution of my preference for embedded systems (aka appliance) approach to Asterisk servers.
The path that I’ve followed is probably typical of a lot of people in many ways. Perhaps by sharing my experience I can help some people avoid some of the problems that I have faced, and understand how I arrived at my personal definition of an “Asterisk Appliance.”
Ward Mundy over at Nerd Vittles has a great post today about SIP security. It’s entitled The Incredible PBX: Adding Remotes, Preserving Security. If you run an Asterisk based PBX you should probably read this. Now!
Ward’s advice really rings true (sorry for the telecom geek pun, it couldn’t be helped!) His “Baker’s Dozen SIP Security Checklist” makes perfect sense. That doesn’t mean that I can’t add my own two cents.
If you were keeping an eye on the realm of open source PBX offerings you might be lulled into thinking that there is Digium with Asterisk and Switchvox, then everyone else. Where “everyone else” was basically hobbyists and Freeswitch fanatics. Well, that’s easy to understand, but you’d be wrong. I know that I was.
TMC recently posted an interview with Tony Lewis of Schmooze Communications. I know, I know…how do you take a company with a name like that seriously? It’s just one step above Goober Networks..oh,wait…they’re a real player, too! Well, what’s in a name?
Until today Schmooze Communications didn’t mean anything to me. However, I was enlightened by Michael White from E4 Technologies who is distributing Schmooze Communications‘ product….PBXact.
You just know that I'm a sucker for embedded Asterisk distributions. It's true. Combine this with my long time use of m0n0wall and pfsense and you'll see that I can help but be drawn to AskoziaPBX. AskoziaPBX combines the web…
This is one last thing from the Astricon '09 presentation. With this slide set all the material created for that presentation is now online. View more presentations from mjgraves.
Having read & listened this far into this series you should now have some grasp of how narrowband (G.711) compares to wideband (G.722/G.722.1) and even super-wideband (G.722.1C) audio for telephony applications. The differences in many cases are quite pronounced, even startling. What you hear in the examples are just the most obvious properties of the encoding, sampling rate and by implication, the available audio bandwidth. It’s worth understanding a bit more about the evolution of the role of the codec over time. This will help you frame up how the Siren codecs fit into the Asterisk realm.