Traffic Shaping for VOIP: Visible Proof
I just love it when things work as expected. Having been out of town for a couple of days I came back today and needed upload quite a few things to servers in the UK. As I was doing this…
What Interests You?
I must admit that I'm more than a little surprised a what people read around here. The single most popular article is the one I wrote back in January 2006 about Building An Embedded Asterisk Server Using Astlinux On a…
CMPs No Jitter Revisits QoS
Josh Bartlett over at CMPs No Jitter is again touching on Qos in a post called QoS Has Four Parts. It's a good summary of some of the mechanics underlying the implementation I describe in my series on VOIP over…
A Beginners Guide To Successful VOIP Over DSL (Collection)
Now that this little series of mine appears to have wound itself to an end I've collected all five posts in a PDF for your download convenience.
A Beginners Guide To Successful VOIP Over DSL
For the past ten years I have worked from a home office full time. This has been the major motivation for my education in networking, and onward into VOIP technologies. Since the middle of 2005 we have not used traditional…
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).