Asterisk 1.4 - the Professional's Guide PDF
Preview Asterisk 1.4 - the Professional's Guide
Asterisk 1.4 The Professional's Guide Implementing, administering, and consulting on commercial IP telephony solutions Colman Carpenter David Duffett Nik Middleton Ian Plain BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 Asterisk 1.4 The Professional's Guide Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: August 2009 Production Reference: 1030809 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 978-1-847194-38-1 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar ([email protected]) This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 Credits Authors Editorial Team Leader Colman Carpenter Gagandeep Singh David Duffett Project Team Leader Nik Middleton Lata Basantani Ian Plain Project Coordinator Reviewers Neelkanth Mehta Ian Plain Jared Smith Proofreader Philippe Lindheimer Laura Booth Acquisition Editor Production Coordinator James Lumsden Aparna Bhagat Technical Editors Cover Work Gagandeep Singh Aparna Bhagat Charumathi Sankaran Indexer Rekha Nair This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 Foreword Watching Asterisk move from being a personal coding project to a community of tens of thousands of programmers and millions of users has been quite the ride so far! Asterisk is only now hitting its prime, and there are so many more things that creative people are going to do with the code. The growth of the project over the years has stunned and pleased me, and it's amazing that well-written and comprehensive books like this now exist to help more advanced users navigate the waters of larger and more complex Asterisk installations. Asterisk installations are now huge, both in numbers of locations and the unimaginably large size of many of those locations—thousands or tens of thousands of users! Asterisk implementations are rarely limited by the capability of the software but more often by not knowing how to utilize it. Books like this play an important role in getting the experience of those who have already done in the hands of those who want to do. Hopefully the knowledge here allows you to continue your adventure with Asterisk, moving from the basics of PBX construction to having the ability to quickly implement advanced call logic processes and work with the more exotic telephony and VoIP interfaces. The motto of "There's more than one way to do it!" is almost always true with Asterisk—this book seems to contain an excellent cross-section of at least one of those ways to do "it" (whatever "it" happens to be for your application) and you'll quickly think of many other ways once you've mastered the methods shown. The authors here have really shown some excellent detailed explanations of how to use Asterisk, and I hope this provides the incentive for you, the reader, to experiment in more wide-ranging ways with Asterisk once you've understood the basics. Most of the Asterisk community has learned with hands-on experimentation, and it's great to see more encouragement of this type of learning as is contained in these pages. Kudos to the authors, especially David Duffett, who has been involved with Asterisk for so long and has taught so many people their first dialplan routines (and hopefully has left them uninjured from his famous habit of throwing candy at people who give correct answers in class or in his talks). This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 Soon you'll be doing least-cost-routing, integrating your instant messenger system with your mobile phone calls, controlling robots with voice commands via your phone, or dreaming up a new company based on some voice-based service that nobody has tapped into yet. And the best thing about Asterisk is that it remains open source—if you come up with a feature or enhancement that you think must be in Asterisk, then the good news is that it can be! Become a member of the Asterisk community, and your contributed code could be included. We all anxiously await your book, your product, or just your involvement with the Asterisk community. Mark Spencer Chairman and CTO of Digium This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 About the Authors Colman Carpenter is the MD of Voicespan, a Kent-based company that offers Asterisk-based systems to the SME market across the UK. He is an IT professional of over 20 years standing, with experience in diverse areas such as IBM mid-range software development, Lotus Notes and Domino consultancy, Data Management, E-marketing consultancy, IT Management, Project Management, Wordpress Website Design, and lately, Asterisk consultancy. He is a qualified PRINCE2 practitioner. Voicespan (http://www.voicespan.co.uk) offers Asterisk-based systems as the cornerstone of a holistic VoIP-telephony service for SMEs. They offer companies a one-stop shop for implementing a VoIP-capable system, encompassing Asterisk-based systems, endpoints, trunks, telephony interfaces and network equipment, and the consultancy necessary to bring it all together into a coherent whole. This is his first book. I would like to thank my wife, Hazel, and daughters, Caiti and Fay, for their support during the writing of this book. At times it seemed like you believed more than I in my ability to do so! David Duffett delivers Asterisk training and consultancy around the world through his own company (TeleSpeak Limited, www.telespeak.co.uk), in addition to designing and delivering training for a number of companies, including Digium, Inc. A keen Asterisk enthusiast, David also enjoys podcasting, radio presenting, and teaching public-speaking skills. He is a Chartered Engineer with experience in fields including Air Traffic Control communications, Wireless Local Loop, Mobile Networks, VoIP, and Asterisk. David has been in the telecoms sector for nearly 20 years and has had a number of computer telephony, VoIP, and Asterisk articles published through various industry publications and web sites. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 Nik Middleton has been in wide-area communications since the mid-eighties. He spent most of the nineties working in the US, where he developed a shareware Microsoft mail to SMTP/POP3 connector that sold some 287,000 copies. He spent six years working for DuPont in VA, developing remote monitoring systems for their global Lycra business. In late 2000, he returned to the UK where he held various senior positions in British Telecom, LogicaCMG, and Computer Science Corp. In 2005, tired of working in London, he set up his own company (Noble Solutions) providing VoIP solutions in rural Devon, where he now lives with his wife Georgina and three children, Mathew, Vicky, and Isabel. A keen amateur pilot, his favorite place when not in the office is flying over the beautiful Devon countryside. Ian Plain has worked in the telecoms industry since 1981 and has designed some of the largest PBX networks in the UK. Since the late 1990s, he has been involved with VoIP initially for links between systems, and with IP PBX systems since 1999. Since 2003, he has been running a telecoms consultancy based near Bath in the UK, working primarily on high-availability Asterisk-based solutions for corporate customers. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 About the Reviewers Ian Plain: Please see the entry in About the Authors. Jared Smith is the Training Manager for Digium, Inc. As a long time Asterisk user, contributor, and evangelist, he has spent the last several years helping the Asterisk community. Jared is a dynamic and knowledgeable instructor with several years of experience in leading various Asterisk training classes. He is also co-author of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, O'Reilly Media and regularly writes other Asterisk documentation as well. Jared holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the Utah State University and currently lives in Virginia with his wife and two children. Philippe Lindheimer is the project leader and primary developer of FreePBX and serves as the Open Source Community Director at Bandwidth.com, the corporate sponsor of the FreePBX project (the most widely deployed Asterisk-based PBX/ GUI open-source application in the world). He cofounded and runs the Open Telephony Training Seminar providing FreePBX/Asterisk technical and marketing training to resellers and end users. Originally with Hewlett Packard, he has been in the engineering industry for over two decades, working on a range of technical consulting roles with many Fortune 500 Companies. He has a BS (Hons) in EE/CS from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He now lives in the Seattle, WA area. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824 This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009 PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
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