Practical VoIP Using VOCAL

Chapter 3. Setting Up an Internal Trial System

Since the summer of 2000, we have used our internal trial system as an office phone system. When we were working at Vovida Networks, just about everyone had a Cisco 7960 IP phone at their desk and had stored their analog phone away in a drawer for emergency use only. We liked to refer to our use of our development project for practical purposes as “eating our own dog food.” This chapter speaks from our experience: we’ve been there, and we want to take you with us.

The instructions in Chapter 2 covered setting up a single-host phone system and running IP phones. This chapter covers how to run different servers from different hosts after setting up the allinone system.

There are three phases to setting up an internal trial system:

Configuring a gateway to permit calling to and from the PSTN

We will discuss configuring dial peers and show the complete configuration listing for a Cisco 5300 gateway for our setup as it was at Vovida Networks.

Deploying VOCAL onto a distributed, redundant network

We will give you an example of how to distribute VOCAL over a small system. You can extrapolate those instructions to match the system size and server distribution suggested later in the "Distributed Hosting Guidelines" section.

Provisioning your users

Provisioning users was demonstrated in Chapter 2 and is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4.

Before we talk about expanding your deployment, we need to make a few remarks about some basic concepts ...