[Asterisk-Users] Help Connecting server districts

[Rich Adamson]

> I am working on a project to unite several local school districts.  We will 
> have 14 different districts, every district would have their own asterisk box 
> on location.  We all have fiber lines running to a central location at our 
> isd. This provides connectivity to all the districts. 
> 1. would it be wiser to install a asterisk box at the central location 
> of the ISD and have all asterisk boxes register with that? 

One asterisk box at each district/school would be wiser, keeping local
sip to sip calls on the LAN, and local community calls on local pstn
facilities.

There is no real need to "register" one asterisk to another. Simply define
a single entry in iax.conf using a type=user, and an assoicated entry in
the receiving * box with type=peer. That will minimize the register keep-
a-live packets, etc. (That assumes your fiber network is very stable in
terms of uptime.)

> or would it be better to create a mesh-network of registrations. 

Create a mesh network without the registrations (as noted above). The amount
of traffic between districts is likely to be rather low given that a large
percentage of communications is likely centered are each districts 
"community of interest". (eg, local calls, room to office calls, etc.)

> If so can this be acomplished easily using iax or dundi? 

Yes, with iax very simple. No need for dundi in this case.

> What would be the best way to link all of these boxes together so that 
> from any location they can call each other using simple extenion headers 
> such as _10xxx for district 1, and _11xxx for distrct two and make that 
> conssistant?
 
Personally, I'd look at setting up your dialplan in such a way as to use
real 7-digit or 10-digit telephone numbers in all cases. If school district
#8 has local telephone number like 312-456-1000 (assuming no DID numbers),
then use something like that in each remote school district's asterisk
dialplan. So, if someone in district #12 dials 312-456-1000, the dialplan
determines whether to send that call via iax to district #8 or overflow
onto the pstn network. If you already have an extension number scheme in
each school, the above can be augmented with something like 312-456-1xxx
(even though they aren't DID's right now).