[ale] OT help ENDING unsolicited phone calls

[Scott Plante]

Hi Ron, 


* Could a Pentium 2.4 GHz, single core, 1 GB RAM machine run the Incredible PBX? Oh, and it's a laptop, so no PCI slots. I think it does have 2 pcmcia slots. My NEW laptop doesn't have ANY slots, as far as I know. 

That's plenty of horsepower for most Asterisk / IPBX stuff. There are a lot of add-ons included with that distro so it's always possible some particular add-on is horsepower hungry. We have an Asterisk system on a 2GH 4-core Xeon with 2GB memory serving ~50 IP phones, and it has plenty of headroom. 


The thing about PCI slots is how do you connect to analog phone lines, and analog phones? You basically have one line in and out at home, so that simplifies things. We use Digium cards, and you could get a single card with one FXO port for connecting to the phone line, and one FXS port for connecting to the phones, but that's not going to work for with the laptop. We mostly use Polycom IP phones, but we sometimes use Linksys ATA (Analog Telephone Adapters) for connecting cordless phones. VoIP would also save a bit because you wouldn't need to buy something to connect to the phone line, but the Linksys SPA3102 has both FXS and FXO support, and you can get it for less than a Digium card. 

* Can I support 3 separate phone lines, which is what I have now? 


Certainly, but that Linksys won't do it. There are ATAs that support more lines. We've only used the Linksys for connecting cordless phones, so I can't tell you which one to buy. Most connect via Ethernet, but Xorcom makes a number of USB devices and they have drivers that ship with Dahdi, Digium's driver layer. Of course, you could go to IP phones but then you're looking at spending some money ;-) However, if you have a home office and want your business line to ring only certain phones at certain times, among other things, it's the way to go. Still, you could start with one IP desk phone for the office and failover to ringing all your analog phones in certain circumstances. BTW: You can get wireless IP phones now, but they're more expensive again. 

* How do I, em, attach my real phones to the computer? My cable modem has 4 telephone ports, of which I'm using 3. 

See above. Connecting phones and connecting phone lines (i.e. from your cable modem) are two separate problems. You could keep your analog lines and go IP phones, or keep your analog phones and go VoIP for your lines, or any combination. 

* I'm not clear on the relationship between asterisk, PBX In A Flash, and Incredible PBX. Can someone explain that to me? 


Asterisk is the core call processor. It uses a scripting language (well, multiple are available). The original is basically a collection of fancy config files including, primarily, extensions.conf. It has pattern matching for phone numbers, looping, includes, macros, etc. It's not so much a procedural language like you're used to seeing, though. Asterisk out of the box includes support for SIP and their own protocol IAX for VoIP. It's usually paired with DAHDI for talking to analog or PRI cards, or the Xorcom devices. The ATAs usually talk SIP. 


FreePBX is a (mostly) PHP / MySQL web interface that allows you to use a browser to do the configuration. It generates the extensions.conf and other config files. Until recently, it was just the application, so you had to hook it up yourself or go to a distribution. FreePBX has their own distribution now, so you can download an ISO and get a running system up pretty quickly. 


PiaF included FreePBX and some other code together in a distribution, too. And Incredible PBX sits on top of PiaF and add still more features. 


There are a lot of ways to code your own Asterisk add-on features. We use Asterisk-Java, which allows us to code in Java for dedicated telephony apps. We've used a number of Asterisk distros over the years for PBX stuff, most recently the new FreePBX distro. We also just compile Asterisk on CentOS for our stuff that isn't a PBX (but does telephone call processing). We've looked at using PiaF and/or Incredible PBX, but we haven't really needed the extra features they provide, and when we do we usually want to integrate into some existing database (etc) and it's easier for us to just code the integration code ourselves. 


Scott 
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