[Asterisk-Users] PBX Console

[steve]

On Wednesday 23 April 2003 21:25, Jayson Vantuyl wrote:
>
> Strictly speaking, text-based interface is not so much a
> requirement as text-based input.  A graphical system still
> potentially has a number of advantages.  That said, the overhead
> may not be worth it where a pure text-based interface will do.
>
> With an operator's panel, there is a clear benefit of having a
> geographic way to locate the appropriate "button" and fairly
> dense labelling of what they do.  In a text-based interface, the
> labelling cannot be so dense (you can fit a lot more text on an
> operators panel than 80x25) and you can't "reach out and touch"
> your option.  The interface, at that point, is relegated to
> entering numbers, which a good list will manage quite famously. 
> The only benefit I see from such a screen is "call monitoring"
> (is the line busy, in voicemail, etc), but there isn't much
> benefit in the actual routing.

There's no reason to stick to 80x25 as you can easily run it in a 
higher res to be able to display all the things one would like to.
(adding 'vga=0x317' f.ex. to kernel at boot.)

> > I'm betting almost all of this can be done the way you want by
> > using the same TCP based interface that gastman uses.  Check it
> > out.  You'd simply be writing your own call manager application
> > on top of the pre-existing API-ish interface, which was (I
> > assume) why that interface was abstracted to a TCP socket with
> > generic data about call states.
>
> After examining it, I can safely say the protocol is the height
> of simplicity.  It appears to be plaintext authentication
> followed by round-robin interrogation/answer pairs much like POP3
> or SMTP.  I highly suggest an application called tcpflow.  It
> takes filters like tcpdump but will either dump the
> sniffed/decoded stream to files or even to the console.  As such,
> you can easily get to work by watching gastman talk the Asterisk.
>
> I will mention that I'm interested in this because I've already
> started one of my own.  I've been using a Python script to
> mediate between * and an XMLRPC-enabled application (I'm using
> XWT but I'm trying to effectively expose the management API via
> XMLRPC, not create a new, proprietary protocol).  When it is done
> to the point of functioning (and I can hack out all of the
> built-in test passwords / build an auth interface) I'll post
> something to the list.
>
> Jayson

That sounds excellent! Python is a good language so it should be an 
interesting result.
-- 

Steve Szmidt
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