Practical VoIP Using VOCAL

How This Book Is Organized

We have organized the book so that you can get started and make something happen on your home or test PC quickly and easily. We’re hoping that your excitement from making calls on your own phone system will inspire you to look further into the system’s complexity.

In order to make our delivery of this material as straightforward as possible, we have refrained from discussing the technical details of the signaling methods and architectural models throughout the first six chapters. If you want the theory first and the practical second, turn to Chapter 7 and read through the rest of the book before returning to Chapter 2. We think that most readers will prefer getting their hands dirty first.

Chapter 1, VOCAL: Say, What?

Gives you a brief overview of what this book, the software, and Voice over IP are all about.

Chapter 2, Setting Up a Phone System at Home

Provides instructions about getting a phone system working at home on a single Linux host and then adding new phone devices to your system.

Chapter 3, Setting Up an Internal Trial System

Provides instructions about setting up an internal system that can support dozens of users working in a professional environment. This chapter also includes configuration instructions for gateways and how to deploy the system onto a distributed network of hosts.

Chapter 4, Provisioning Users

Provides information about adding users to the system and the different options available for features and other end-user parameters. ...