Hey guys! Long time no see! I'm back now, after a lot of things going on.

So, here I am, and my current project is to get an Asterisk PBX behind my current in-house Norstar.

I have a vision of being able to use the Asterisk as voicemail, wake-up calls, the 'fiesta' calling feature (your extension is xxx), and all of those. However, I am not wanting to put any phones on the asterisk, just dial an extension number to get the asterisk (if the asterisk is an extension) or the out-side line access code.

My question for the people that have done this already is: There are two cards for the Asterisk, the FXS and FXO. If I want the asterisk to be able to be called into for voicemail and etc and then be able to call out for wake-up calls, how do I need to setup the cards and which cards would work best?

I have ATA2's to use to hook up the Asterisk to the extension if it will work that way or through the Norstar TRUNK port. (All ports are loopstart)

I'd be interested to know what you lot think about this and and ideas with it.

Thanks,

topher

Big K,

I wanna be nice here, but asking for wake-up calls on an in-house system is a little too much. Business can't be that bad, or are you part Maytag?

LOL, It's my personal system. I just think it's a neat feature that comes with Asterisk. I'm more interested in the Auto-Attendant and VoiceMail. I have guests a lot and think it would be awesome to have neat features for em. (not to mention myself.)

I use wake up on my Tadiran all the time for an alarm clock.

It's something I think I would use Coral Tech. Seems like a good idea.

So, I've been reading and I think I can use an FXO card and hook the Norstar extension to the Asterisk pstn line. Hopefully, with that setup and can use the features there. If I'm horribly mistaken, someone let me know before I buy the wrong card 0_o

Okay. Here I am thinking that for the Asterisk to pickup the calls it has to have the FXO card and have the Norstar extension act like a regular phone line. I'm not sure how Asterisk but I'm worried that you can only use the features on the extension lines.

The FXO port would connect to the ATA from the Norstar, acting like a CO coming into the Asterisk box. I haven't worked in Asterisk, but I don't see why you couldn't use all of the features you want through an FXO port. How else would Asterisk provide integration with message waiting lights etc.

If you do need to use a feature that can only be used through an FXS port, perhaps you could connect an unused CO port on the Nortel to an FXS port and have the Asterisk dial in that way.

I would get a card with at least one FXS port so you have some options to play with.

Awesome, thanks clinton.

The way I was thinking was: Most of the Asterisk features are supposed to be for the asterisk extensions, so im not sure if they could be accessed through the CO port. But, hooking up both of them like that sounds like a good idea. Asterisk can just be Line 3 on the norstar, and extension 227.

The only bad part is that Asterisk has to receive calls through the ATA/station port from the Norstar. Nortel ATA's won't pass any CID information so you are losing that feature.

I'm not too interested in Caller ID since my norstar doesn't have that feature yet either.

Well the only reason I mentioned it was because the Asterisk has a pretty cool ACD for routing calls but of course it needs that CID info.

That's pretty cool. That would be a good feature for sure.

Unfortunately, I don't see myself getting out of spending $100.00 for an FXS card. However, I can get the FXO for around $25.00 This kind of sucks at this point. I'm not sure about it, but im wishing that the features were all available to the lines and not the extensions. LOL

For Asterisk, the cheapest FXO you can get is the X100 clone. It doesnt always work right, and is frequently to blame for a number of 'odd' issues; I would never use it for anything important. But they work decently well, most of the time. This costs about $10-20/card, each card has one port. (the X100 clone is a rebadged voice modem, thus the two physical ports on the card. It's a one channel card.)

The cheapest FXS you can get is an ATA. This is harder to configure much of the time, but a cheap ATA (linksys pap2-na) is about $60 and has 2 ports ($30/port).

If you want to add features to your PBX then you need to dedicate a few ports (FXO or FXS, both will work depending on how you set it up) for a trunk between * and your PBX. What happens next will determine how you set it up.


FXS port on * to FXO (line) port on PBX-
In asterisk, put your FXO ports in a context (using zapata.conf). Then make this context in extensions.conf, and put into it exten's that can do things you want, like this:
exten => 1234,1,AGI(wakeup.php) ; (calls the wakeup.php agi script if you have it)

If you watn * to be able to call back, you will have to setup DID for the ports * is connected to. If set up correctly asterisk can dial the channel then send the dtmf to dial the exten...
IE

exten => _XXXX,1,Dial(Zap/g1/,,D(${EXTEN})) ; rings a port in zap group 1. When it's answered, sends as DTMF whatever extension was dialed. Matches 4 digit extensions.

Hope that helps even if this thread is old...

Wow thanks IronHelix . When I get around to doing this I'll do what you said.

You know a lot about asterisk judging by your more recent posts!

Thanks again.