Trixbox 2.6 and Sangoma Hardware

Trixbox (formerly Asterisk At Home – A@H) has definitely come a long since its beginnings in November 2004 and since I started playing around with Asterisk 2 months earlier. The convenience of being able to download an ISO and have a functional PBX in less than an hour was and is amazing.

An excellent resource is Ward Mundy’s blog Nerd Vittles, which I have also followed since early 2005 and has worked on some very cool and interesting projects augmenting Asterisk functionality. Most recently in November 2007, they released PBX In A Flash (PIAF) and have also announced a under $500 appliance with PIAF running on it.

What is Asterisk?

Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX) originally created in 1999 by Mark Spencer of Digium. Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Its name comes from the asterisk symbol, “*”.

What is Trixbox?

Trixbox is a turnkey business class PBX voice communication system based on the Open Source Asterisk project. It’s no longer necessary to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a proprietary phone system. By simply downloading software and installing it on a low end system you can have a powerful, open, and robust pbx system. From small systems with only a couple analog phone lines and extensions to large installs with multiple T1/E1 connections and hundreds of extensions, you can easily use Trixbox to meet your telephony needs.

I believe Trixbox to be the most complete distribution of Asterisk out there, although many of its features might not be used in many cases. On the other side I have heard complaints on the lack of collaboration in adding new features and fixing bugs by the guys at Fonality, which makes it less open as it were.

Parts List:

• Trixbox 2.6.1.13 IS
  • trixbox CE 2.6.1.13 (Stable) – 474,263,552 bytes – Released 10/02/08
    MD5: 0424baa0dd061e313062441083672427
    This is the current development release.
    [ Download ISO Image ] from SourceForge

• Dell GX-150 with 512MB and 80Gb

• Sangoma A200 card with 4 FXO ports

• Sangoma drivers
  

Todo List:

• Upgrade the RAM to 512Mb and the hard drive to 80Gb
• Install the Sangoma PCI A200 card
• Insert CD into CD drive and boot from disk
• Go through wizard and install Trixbox
• Login to the computer, update Cent OS and download and install the drivers
  • yum update
  • yum upgrade
  • cd /opt
  • wget ftp://ftp.sangoma.com/linux/RPMS/2.6.1.13/wanpipe-util-3.2.7.1-0.i686.rpm
  • wget ftp://ftp.sangoma.com/linux/RPMS/2.6.1.13/wanpipe-modules-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5-3.2.7.1-0.i686.rpm
  • wanrouter hwprobe
  • wanrouter hwprobe verbose
  • setup-sangoma
    • When asked which codec will be used, select MULAW – North America
    • When configuration of the analog card completes, select 1 to continue
    • When configuration of Zaptel and Wanpipe completes, select 1 to save and restart deamons
    • When asked to start wanrouter at boot time, select 1 for yes
  • ztcfg -vv (to display the analog card installed and its modules.)
• Install DynDNS client:
  • Install DAG’s GPG key
    • rpm –import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
  • Verify the package you have downloaded
    • rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.*.rpm
  • yum install ddclient
• Create DynDNS account
• Configuration ddclient: (Add to the end of the /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf file)
  • use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.com/, web-skip=’IP Address’
  • server=members.dyndns.org,      \
  • protocol=dyndns2,       \
  • login=your-login,        \
  • password=your-password        \
  • pbx.dnsalias.com

Trixbox links to several good quick install guides here and a comprehensive list of documentation here.