Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Initial Configuration of Asterisk

I don’t always know what I’m talking about, but I know I’m right.

—Muhammad Ali

Completing all the steps in Chapter 3 should have left you with a working Asterisk system. If it did not, please take the time to go back and review the steps, consult the wiki, engage the community, and get your system running.

Unfortunately, we cannot yet make any calls, because we have not yet created any channels. To get this plane to fly, we’re going to need some runways. While there are dozens of different channel types, and dozens of different ways to configure each type of channel, we just want to get some calls happening, so let’s try and keep things simple. We have decided to guide you through the configuration of four channels: a Foreign eXchange Office (FXO) channel, a Foreign eXchange Station (FXS) channel, a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) channel, and an Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX) channel.^[49] We selected these channel types because they are far and away the most popular channel types in use in small Asterisk systems, and one of the goals of this book is to keep things as simple as is reasonable. If we cover the basics of these channels, we will not have done an exhaustive survey of all channel types or topologies, but we will have created a base platform on which to develop your telecommunications system. Further scenarios and channel configuration details can be found in Appendix D.

Our first effort will be to explore the basic configuration ...