Practical VoIP Using VOCAL

Chapter 2. Setting Up a Phone System at Home

This chapter provides instructions about installing a phone system on a PC running the Linux operating system. If you prefer to install VOCAL on a machine running Sun Solaris , those instructions are available from the VOCAL home page at http://Vovida.org (http://www.vovida.org). From these instructions, you will be able to install VOCAL, configure a couple of IP telephony devices, and make calls to other phones over an IP network. Your IP telephony devices can be softphones running on PCs, analog phones plugged into translating devices, IP telephone sets, or any combination of these. If you don’t have any IP phone devices, VOCAL provides a softphone that is useful for testing purposes, and most of the instructions in this chapter are directed toward using this device. Once you have your single-host system set up, you can use it as a hobby box at home, a test machine in a lab, and/or a demonstration machine at a trade show.

VOCAL has been designed to run on either a single PC or a multihost network. This can create some confusion in the networking terminology used to describe the system. As VOCAL is a distributed system, the term server is used to describe software modules, and the term host is used to describe the machines where those servers reside. In large networks, it is common for one type of server to be duplicated onto many hosts for redundancy. See Chapter 3 for more information about loading VOCAL onto larger systems.

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