Practical VoIP Using VOCAL

Working with VOCAL

The difference between the system that you just tested and a full-blown trial system is simply scale. You need to provision the servers over a network that suits your needs (review Table 3-1), provision your users (see Chapters 2 and 4), configure their phone sets, and, if you want, run the Network Management utilities (see Chapter 17 and the readme files). If you have more than one gateway, you need to provision a separate Gateway Marshal server for each one and add each of these Marshal servers as separate contacts for each digital dial pattern that is intended for connecting to the PSTN (see Chapter 5).

This is pretty exciting stuff. In the summer of 2000, when we first started documenting our installation instructions, we compiled and deployed VOCAL onto a network of hosts and SIP/PSTN gateways. We then provisioned two IP phone sets, made them call each other, and then called home to our spouses.

Calling home from a phone system that we had just built was enormously satisfying. If you think about most people who work in industrial environments such as large-scale bakeries or automobile factories, many individuals receive rewards for a job well done, but they rarely, if ever, receive the satisfaction of participating in the entire assembly process from the component stage up to the completed end product. If you can imagine what it would be like to drive home in a new car that you had made at work that day, you can imagine how we felt the first time we got ...