[PLUG] Asterisk hints?

Kurt Sussman plug at merlot.com
Sat Oct 8 05:38:17 UTC 2005


I found out that my nice little PBX appliance, a 3 year old Talkswitch
24, can't be adjusted to work with the impedance of my Packet8 ATA, so I
get a nasty echo when it forwards calls to remote extensions. Talkswitch
support says that it's a hardware issue, and my box is too old to
upgrade to the newer hardware. For the $700 that a new Talkswitch will
cost, I should be able to build a perfectly adequate (or better)
Asterisk box, right?

I don't want to spend a pile of money or time on this, though I think it
will be a fun project and good for some quality geeking time.
Asterisk at Home looks like the way to go; a nice GUI, usable defaults,
etc.

I currently have one analog line and one VoIP line. If I can get a good
deal on raw VoIP lines I could use two of those, but I'm keeping one
analog line for emergencies. I want to continue to use three analog
phone devices: a Polycom speakerphone, a Panasonic cordless, and my fax
machine, an HP all-in-one. I'm not grokking the FXO/FXS distinction...
is there a link that explains those TLAs in terms of phone devices and
phone lines?

The Talkswitch is only a little bigger than my broadband router, and
handles 2 phone lines, 4 local extensions, 8 remote extensions, and 22
voicemail boxes. It has no fan, and makes noise only when it's ringing a
local extension (a little relay-like clicking). I like that a lot. So if
I'm going to build an Asterisk box, I want it to be as close to silent
and as frugal on power as possible. A very small footprint would be
great.

Any suggestions? Favorite links? Any and all advice is welcome.

Thanks!

--Kurt
-- 
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    Merlot Research Group, Inc               http://www.merlot.com
    kls[at]merlot.com       GPG key 82505A74      Jabber: MerlotQA



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