[asterisk-biz] Asterisk on Mac OS X...newbie questions

[John Todd]

On Apr 23, 2009, at 11:24 AM, Rick Dwyer wrote:

>
> On Apr 23, 2009, at 2:01 PM, Rob Lith wrote:
>
>> I don't think you'll get much support or have much luck with Asterisk
>> on a Mac for any production environment. You can't get any of the
>> interface cards to connect to the PSTN going on a Mac. I's a Mac fan
>> and only use them, but our Asterisk systems are on Linux - as 99.9%  
>> of
>
> Wow.... that's depressing.
>
> I don't know the first thing about Linux.  Maybe I will try to learn
> or see if other Mac products will do what I need.
>
> Can you recommend a Linux version, the hardware to run it on and if
> so, is there a gui interface for the Linux version of Asterisk?
>
> --Rick



To clear up some concerns:  Asterisk runs quite well on MacOS X.  I  
have been running it on my laptop as a test environment for quite some  
time, and I have never had any problems that would make me hesitate to  
use it in a production system.  There are many Linux-only binary  
things which won't work, but I see no reason that you would need any  
of them (speech recognition modules, proprietary codecs, and the  
like.)  Your app is very simple and would work fine on MacOS.

That being said, you will probably not be able to use the TDM cards  
that are sold by Digium to connect your Asterisk system directly to  
POTS lines or T1 trunks.  The DAHDI driver toolkit that acts as the  
interface layer for various cards is not Mac-compatible at this time.   
But don't despair!  There are lots of hardware solutions out there  
which are stand-alone, and turn POTS lines into VOIP SIP calls, which  
work just fine.  In fact, that's probably what you want to do anyway  
if you already run a call center of some sort.  Just turn all your  
calls into SIP and feed them to your Asterisk system.

Since Asterisk runs fine on MacOS, you could probably even cobble  
together some sort of AppleScript to it via the System call or the AGI  
methods, but that's outside my territory of familiarity.  I don't know  
about FileMaker, but there's an ODBC driver for Asterisk as well as  
MySQL drivers.

What you're looking for is not difficult to do, though as a first- 
timer with Asterisk it may take a bit of getting used to the system.

JT


---
John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW -  Huntsville AL 35806  -   USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083         http://www.digium.com/