Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Working with Interface Configuration Files

In this chapter, we’re going to build an Asterisk configuration on the platform we have just installed. For the first few sections on FXO and FXS channels, we’ll assume that you have a Digium TDM11B kit (which comes with one FXO and one FXS interface). This will allow you to connect to an analog circuit (FXO) and to an analog telephone (FXS). Note that this hardware interface isn’t necessary; if you want to build an IP-only configuration, you can skip to the section on configuring SIP after reading the section on creating configuration files..

The configuration we do in this chapter won’t be particularly useful on its own, but it will be a kernel to build on. We’re going to touch on the following files:

zaptel.conf

Here, we’ll do low-level configuration for the hardware interface. We’ll set up one FXO channel and one FXS channel. This configures the driver for the Linux kernel.

zapata.conf

In this file, we’ll configure Asterisk’s interface to the hardware. This file contains a slightly higher-level configuration of the hardware in the Asterisk user-level process.

extensions.conf

The dialplans we create will be extremely primitive, but they will prove that the system is working.

sip.conf

This is where we’ll configure the SIP protocol.

iax.conf

This is where we’ll configure incoming and outgoing IAX channels.

In the following sections, you will be editing several configuration files. You’ll have to reload these files for your changes to take effect. ...