atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones asterisk install

hi everyone

Kumba this post is largely addressed to you, but any and all input is ofcourse appreciated.

Ive been in the phone industry for 2 years and have been using linux (total novice) for about six months now, just to let you know where im coming from experience wise.

Now at the advice of some friends in the know, ive decided to begin learning about asterisk.

As with so many things in linux however, i seem to get stuck before i ever begin. Im reading the O'reilly book on Asterisk and the instructions it gives for downloading the software do not work, or im doing something wrong, and it seems like everything i read tells me i need to do something different and im feeling lost.

How do i install Asterisk?
What packages do i need? libpri? zaptel? asterisksounds?
What are bison and ncurses? How do i find out if I have them already? Do i even need them?

Im using fc6 on a dell dimension 8250.

Seems like everything i read is outdated and the information i need has yet to be documented.

i prefer using a shell to gui so if the help can be given in command form that would be awesome. im trying to break free of the gui crutches, but ill take whatever i can get.

Any and all help is GREATLY appreciated.

hey j2tel, If you go to trixbox, which is the purchaser of Asterisk@Home, you can download the ISO file. You install this instead of ontop of the fc6. I am running fc7 and have tried an asterisk install. It is much easier on TrixBox.

First off, welcome to the dark side

Trixbox is really for smaller SOHO systems. The way it is coded is extremely inefficient and will usually start becoming unreliable around 50 channels. Trixbox will usually work good for the small mom/pop shops. It's easy to configure and maintain for them and it's pretty self inclusive on the install. You wont really learn much real Asterisk with it tho. One word of advice for Trixbox is to NOT USE THE UPDATE FEATURE. It will break more things then it fixes. If you install it, and it works, leave it alone!

Base Asterisk (or Vanilla Asterisk) will work with 300-350 channels before it hits a soft limit. If you buy the business edition you have a 500 channel soft limit. No, you wont find that info available from digium unless you sign a NDA.

Keep in mind that you load Asterisk based on channels and not ports. A channel is a basic connection from Asterisk to any module. So if you take a simple telephone conversation then you will use a channel from the incoming connection (SIP/POTS/TDM/etc) to Asterisk, then another channel from Asterisk to the Phone (SIP/POTS/TDM/etc). That means one 'simple' phone call is 2 channels. Things like conferencing will add more channels as each conference member uses 2 channels just to get to the conference.

Also, the RedHat family of distributions (I.E. FC, CentOS) are known to have problems with installation. I use Slackware for my installs but this is not the friendliest linux distro around. You will learn linux using it tho.

The O'Reilly book "Asterisk: The Future of Telephony" if based on the v.1.2 branch of Asterisk. So the concepts in that book may not apply to v.1.4.

However, here is a link for installing Asterisk 1.2 or 1.4 onto FC: AsteriskGuru: FC Install

The only addendum I would make to the above tutortorial is that you get your sources directly from here . I would also suggest that you download all of the packages offered for you branch (Either v.1.2 or v.1.4) and do a 'make' and 'make install' in the their directories.

Once you learn the install procedure you will then need to learn dialplans. There is no real easy way to go about it other then just looking at commented examples and reading up on it. I have a sample set of configuration files for a Hybrid system that you are more then welcome to look at. They are fairly commented on what lines do what. You can get them here: Sample Hybrid Asterisk

I would also get very familiar with www.voip-info.org and search for 'Dialplan' and start reading everything that says "Introduction" in the title. This will give you a rough idea of how to read a dialplan so that you can then start looking through code samples to understand what they are doing.

Dialplans are the most complicated part of Asterisk. Primarily because you create them from nothing, and there are many different ways to route a call.

Hope this helps to get you started in the right direction. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

Thanks for the words guys. Dont have any time now but I'll get back to this later.

By the way topher, how do you like f7?

J2: fc7 isn't bad really, I like it! It is much like Deb4 which my servers run on. Much better than RH8 too.I'm going to see if I can get Beryl installed on it

Hello again.

Ok so here's the latest scoop. I've downloaded and extracted the current asterisk, zaptel and some addons but before compiling them, running the ./config file is returning an error that wont allow the make command. Here's what's returned.

[root@localhost asterisk-1.4.9]# ./configure
checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking for gcc... gcc
#
#
#
checking whether g++ accepts -g... no
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking how to run the C++ preprocessor... /lib/cpp
configure: error: C++ preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check
See `config.log' for more details.

[root@localhost asterisk-1.4.9]# make
****
**** The configure script must be executed before running 'make'.
**** Please run "./configure".
****
make: *** [makeopts] Error 1

Any ideas as to why the /lib/cpp file would return sanity failures?

I'm looking into it but i wanted to ask here first.

Thanks guys.

If you look above there is no C++ compiler installed on your system. You would need to find the package for your linux distro and install it.

If your distro uses Yum then it would be something like: yum install gcc-c++

If your distro uses apt-get then it would be something like: apt-get update && apt-get install gcc-c++

Great advice Kumba.

Here are the results of my efforts.

Forgive me but I will pick your brain until you get sick of me.

[root@localhost ~]# yum install gcc-c++
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
updates 100% |=========================| 1.2 kB 00:00
#
#
#
Complete!


#My next block is here


[root@localhost ~]# cd /usr/src/asterisk-1.4.9
[root@localhost asterisk-1.4.9]# ./configure
checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking for gcc... gcc
#
#
#
checking for ZT_DIAL_OP_CANCEL in zaptel/zaptel.h... no
configure: error: *** termcap support not found
[root@localhost asterisk-1.4.9]#


#What the heck is termcap support?

Just a side note... thanks Kumba.

Good Lord Man! My mouse wheel hates you

In the future, you can just paste like the last 20 lines or so. Usually any error's will be spawned within the last lines of the output.

Also, if it compiles, no need to paste anything other then "Sucessfully Compiled"

Now then, on to your issue. I have not spent a lot of extensive time on the 1.4 branch as I have on 1.2 but i'm going to take a stab at it. Compiling should be compiling despite the branch. Once you get inside Asterisk I will be of less help since 1.4 has some different mechanisms for handling things.

Since you are using YUM as your update manager, and it says it cant load the termcap libraries, i'm going to say that you dont have the development libraries installed. You could ALSO not have the kernel libraries installed as well. I'm also assuming that since you are using YUM that you are using some sort of a RedHat Linux (CentOS, Fedora Core, RedHat, etc).

Run the following command:
yum install libtermcap-devel

Then run the follow commands where the instructions in parenthesis applies to YOUR set-up:
yum install kernel-devel (if using a single-core CPU)
yum install kernel-smp-devel (if using multiple or multiple-core CPU)
yum install kernel-hugemem-devel (If you have MORE then 756-megs in this machine)

Try installing Asterisk again

Thanks again for your help kumba. It's hard to find anyone to help you when youre a total linux novice like myself. How did you learn this stuff if you dont me asking? Short of the countless hours I spend online hunting for bits of usable knowledge and the trial and error (mostly error) with a command shell, I have no idea how one goes about learning linux. Especially with the constant stream of newness that makes linux both powerful and a pain in the arse.

I'll give your suggestions a shot.