[asterisk-users] asterisk on mini-itx

[Gordon Henderson]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Mail Lists wrote:

> Is your GUI something you wrote yourself or something that's commercially
> available?

I wrote it myself, and it's not currently avalable in any format other 
than that I supply it with the boxes I install...

It's tightly coupled with the dialplan and imposes a lot of restrctions on 
how things work in /etc/asterisk - but I suppose that's no different to 
FreePBX in a way. I do have "hooks" into the dialplan to edit in stuff by 
hand in the appropriate place - basically #includes at strategic places 
which includes files that are normally empty, but you can go in with an 
editor (only have nano, vi takes too much space )-: and put stuff in them 
for site sepcific stuff.

So at one point in extensions.conf, there is

#include "extensions.conf.dialExtras"

and for one site that file contains:

   ; dial 1571 on Zap 3
   exten => 1571,1,Dial(Zap/3/1571)
   exten => 1571,n,Hangup()

because Zap/3 is their main incoming line and they need to dial 1571 
directly on it. (Zap/4 and Zap/3 are normally dialed as G1, so Zap/4 has 
priority, but Zap/3 is their main published line and 1571 is the BT 
callminder service, so they need to dial it to get messages left on the BT 
service...

So that's the sort of thing I envisage being part of a "professional 
installation" ...

> I'm using freePBX on all of my installs and while it lets you do almost 
> everything from the interface I've come to find it's not very 
> user-friendly for novices not to mention having to have mysql as a 
> back-end. I've been looking for a leaner - more simplistic GUI but 
> haven't really come across anything. Maybe Digiums own GUI will meet the 
> needs for this at some point..

I looked at FreePBX, but it didn't feel quite right for what I wanted, and 
not wanting to dive in & hack someone else's code, I wrote my own. It's 
quite simplistic, but does everything that I wanted (and what my clients 
wanted which is more important. It hides lots of things - eg. it just 
refers to extensions, not SIP or IAX accounts, and has non telco terms for 
other things that your average office manager(ess) would understand 
without requiring a telco geek.

I designed it to be "professionally installed", (ie. you need to do 
command-line stuff to run fxotune) but gave it enough flexabiltiy to let 
the office manager(ess) add/remove/rename extensions, set outgoing call 
access levels, allow people to connect in with SIP or IAX clients without 
really knowing the technology underneath. (nor the names - I create a SIP 
and IAX accounts for everyone and arrange both to get called for the same 
number, but it's just "an extension" to the person setting it up)

Gordon