Switching to VoIP

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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LDAP as a directory server for large VoIP networks. You could allow anonymous

access to your LDAP server from foreign networks so callers can browse your direc-

tory, but beware of the security risks.

LDAP can solve some administrative headaches for Asterisk. If you’ve

got a find-me-follow-me user with three cell phones, a home phone,

and two office phones who’s already listed in your LDAP directory, it

may be easier to link that user’s extension to the LDAP directory than

it would be to program all of these phone numbers into the dial-plan.

Asterisk offers LDAP integration in the dial-plan using the

LDAPGet

command, which is configured in /etc/asterisk/ldap.conf. You can

download the LDAP Asterisk module from http://www.mezzo.net/

asterisk. With

LDAPGet and Asterisk’s IVR commands, you could even

make Asterisk audibly read the data from the LDAP server to callers.

Commercial directory services for VoIP don’t tend to interoperate, but they are usu-

ally very slick and work well as long as you stick with a single vendor’s PBX and

phones. Cisco’s AVVID architecture implements a directory system that is included

with the CallManager softPBX. It uses XML to drive the displays and command but-

tons on the 7960/7970 SCCP phones to make an interactive, searchable ...