Switching to VoIP

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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

A clumsy keystroke took the softPBX down during peak business hours

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When my PBX routes a call to IAXTel or another Internet voice destination,

the sound quality is awful

Chances are, you’re trying to use a bandwidth-absorbent codec like G.711 over the

Internet VoIP trunk that connects to IAXTel. Switch to a more miserly codec like

GSM or, if the destination supports it, Speex.

A clumsy keystroke took the softPBX down during peak business hours

This is a rare occurrence, but every seasoned system administrator knows the danger

of a rashly typed command or a misplaced mouse click. One second, everything’s

humming along fine, and the next, a critical system is, well, gone. Aside from careful

consideration of every administrative move you make, your best defense against this

scenario is, of course, a good backup of your PBX configuration. This will also pro-

tect you against another possibility: a hard drive crash or data corruption on a PBX.

Some commercial PBXs offer built-in backup capabilities and even an undo feature

to roll back a botched config. But if you’re using a noncommercial solution like

Asterisk or Open H.323, you’ll need to brew your own backup recipe. Here’s a shell

script that you could trigger from cron on Linux to back up the Asterisk

configuration:

mkdir /var/backup/$(date) ...