Preface
This is a book for anyone who uses Asterisk.
Asterisk is an open source, converged telephony platform, which is designed primarily to run on Linux. Asterisk combines more than 100 years of telephony knowledge into a robust suite of tightly integrated telecommunications applications. The power of Asterisk lies in its customizable nature, complemented by unmatched standards compliance. No other private branch exchange (PBX) can be deployed in so many creative ways.
Applications such as voicemail, hosted conferencing, call queuing and agents, music on hold, and call parking are all standard features built right into the software. Moreover, Asterisk can integrate with other business technologies in ways that closed, proprietary PBXs can scarcely dream of.
Asterisk can appear quite daunting and complex to a new user, which is why documentation is so important to its growth. Documentation lowers the barrier to entry and helps people contemplate the possibilities.
Produced with the generous support of O’Reilly Media, Asterisk: The Definitive Guide is the fourth edition of what was formerly called Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. We decided to change the name because Asterisk has been so wildly successful that it is no longer an up-and-coming technology. Asterisk has arrived.
This book was written for, and by, members of the Asterisk community.
Audience
This book is intended to be gentle toward those new to Asterisk, but we assume that you’re familiar with basic Linux administration, networking, and other IT disciplines. If not, we encourage you to explore the vast and wonderful library of books that O’Reilly publishes on these subjects. We also assume you’re fairly new to telecommunications (both traditional switched telephony and the new world of Voice over IP).
However, this book will also be useful for the more experienced Asterisk administrator. We ourselves use the book as a reference for features that we haven’t used for a while.
Organization
The book is organized into these chapters:
- Chapter 1, A Telephony Revolution
This is where we chop up the kindling and light the fire. Welcome to Asterisk!
- Chapter 2, Asterisk Architecture
- Chapter 3, Installing Asterisk
- Chapter 4, Initial Configuration Tasks
Describes some initial configuration tasks for your new Asterisk system. This chapter goes over some of the configuration files required for all Asterisk installations.
- Chapter 5, User Device Configuration
Provides guidance on configuring Asterisk to allow devices such as telephones to connect and make calls.
- Chapter 6, Dialplan Basics
- Chapter 7, Outside Connectivity
Discusses how to configure Asterisk to connect to other systems, such as other Asterisk servers, Internet telephony service providers, or the plain old telephone network.
- Chapter 8, Voicemail
Covers using one of the most popular applications included with Asterisk, the voicemail system.
- Chapter 9, Internationalization
Focuses on issues that an Asterisk administrator should be aware of when deploying a system outside of North America.
- Chapter 10, Deeper into the Dialplan
- Chapter 11, Parking, Paging, and Conferencing
Describes the usage of popular telephony features included with Asterisk: call parking, paging, and conferencing.
- Chapter 12, Internet Call Routing
Covers techniques for routing calls between different administrative domains on the Internet.
- Chapter 13, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) Queues
- Chapter 14, Device States
Introduces the concept of device states and how they can be used as presence indicators.
- Chapter 15, The Automated Attendant
Covers how to build a menuing system using the Asterisk dialplan.
- Chapter 16, Relational Database Integration
Discusses various ways that Asterisk can be integrated with a database.
- Chapter 17, Interactive Voice Response
Goes over how Asterisk can be used to build applications that act on input provided by a caller.
- Chapter 18, External Services
Provides instructions on how to connect to external services including LDAP, calendars, IMAP for voicemail, XMPP, out-of-band messaging, and text-to-speech.
- Chapter 19, Fax
Discusses the various options for integrating sending and receiving faxes with an Asterisk system.
- Chapter 20, Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI)
Introduces a network API for monitoring and controlling an Asterisk system.
- Chapter 21, Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI)
Introduces the Asterisk API that allows call control to be implemented in any programming language.
- Chapter 22, Clustering
Discusses a number of approaches for clustering multiple Asterisk servers together once the demands of a deployment exceed the capabilities of a single server.
- Chapter 23, Distributed Universal Number Discovery (DUNDi)
Covers a peer-to-peer protocol native to Asterisk that can be used for call routing.
- Chapter 24, System Monitoring and Logging
Introduces some of the interfaces available for logging and monitoring an Asterisk system.
- Chapter 25, Web Interfaces
A survey of some of the web interfaces that complement an Asterisk installation.
- Chapter 26, Security
Discusses some common security issues that Asterisk administrators should be aware of.
- Chapter 27, Asterisk: A Future for Telephony
In conclusion, we discuss some of the things we expect to see from open source telephony in the near future.
- Appendix A
Explores the technologies in use in traditional telecom networks.
- Appendix B
- Appendix C
Contains information you should be aware of and take into consideration when planning an Asterisk deployment.
Software
This book is focused on documenting Asterisk version 11; however, many of the conventions and much of the information in this book is version-agnostic. Linux is the operating system we have run and tested Asterisk on, and we have documented installation instructions for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Ubuntu (Debian-based) where they differ from each other.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
- Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, directories, and package names, as well as Unix utilities, commands, modules, parameters, and arguments.
Constant widthUsed to display code samples, file contents, command-line interactions, database commands, library names, and options.
Constant width boldIndicates commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user. Also used for emphasis in code.
Constant width italicShows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values.
[ Keywords and other stuff ]{ choice-1 | choice-2 }
Using Code Examples
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if this book includes code examples, you may use the code in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition, by Russell Bryant, Leif Madsen, and Jim Van Meggelen (O’Reilly). Copyright 2013 Russell Bryant, Leif Madsen, and Jim Van Meggelen, 978-1-449-332342-6.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at permissions@oreilly.com.
Safari® Books Online
Note
Safari Books Online (www.safaribooksonline.com) is an on-demand digital library that delivers expert content in both book and video form from the world’s leading authors in technology and business.
Technology professionals, software developers, web designers, and business and creative professionals use Safari Books Online as their primary resource for research, problem solving, learning, and certification training.
Safari Books Online offers a range of product mixes and pricing programs for organizations, government agencies, and individuals. Subscribers have access to thousands of books, training videos, and prepublication manuscripts in one fully searchable database from publishers like O’Reilly Media, Prentice Hall Professional, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, Focal Press, Cisco Press, John Wiley & Sons, Syngress, Morgan Kaufmann, IBM Redbooks, Packt, Adobe Press, FT Press, Apress, Manning, New Riders, McGraw-Hill, Jones & Bartlett, Course Technology, and dozens more. For more information about Safari Books Online, please visit us online.
How to Contact Us
Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher:
| O’Reilly Media, Inc. |
| 1005 Gravenstein Highway North |
| Sebastopol, CA 95472 |
| 800-998-9938 (in the United States or Canada) |
| 707-829-0515 (international or local) |
| 707-829-0104 (fax) |
We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, and any additional information. You can access this page at http://bit.ly/asterisk_tdg_4E.
To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to bookquestions@oreilly.com.
For more information about our books, courses, conferences, and news, see our website at http://www.oreilly.com.
Find us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/oreilly
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oreillymedia
Watch us on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/oreillymedia
Acknowledgments
To David Duffett, thanks for the excellent chapter on internationalization, which would not have been served well by being written by us North Americans.
Next, we want to thank our fantastic editor, Michael Loukides, for your patience with the first, second, and third editions of this book, which took too long to get off the ground, and many long months to finally get written. Mike offered invaluable feedback and found incredibly tactful ways to tell us to rewrite a section (or chapter) when it was needed, and make us think it was our idea. Mike built us up when we were down, and brought us back to earth when we got uppity. You are a master, Mike, and seeing how many books have received your editorial oversight contributes to an understanding of why O’Reilly Media is the success that it is.
Also thanks to the rest of the unsung heroes in O’Reilly’s production department. These are the folks that take our book and make it an O’Reilly book.
During the course of writing this book, we had
the pleasure of being able to consult with many people with specific
experience in various areas. Their generous contributions of time and
expertise were instrumental in our research. Thanks to Randy Resnick,
organizer of the VoIP User Group; Kevin Fleming; Lee Howard, author of
iaxmodem and hylafax; Joshua Colp of Digium; Phillip Mullis of the Toronto
Asterisk Users Group; Allison Smith, the Voice of Asterisk; Flavio E.
Goncalves, author of books on Asterisk, OpenSER, and OpenSIPS; J. Oquendo,
Security Guru; Tzafrir Cohen, font of knowledge about security and lots of
other stuff; Jeff Gehlbach, for SNMP; Ovidiu Sas, for your encyclopedic
knowlege of SIP; Tomo Takebe, for some SMDI help; Michael S. White and e4
Strategies for Polycom hardware; Steve Underwood, for help with fax and
spandsp; and Richard Genthner and John
Covert, for helping with LDAP; Kinsey Moore for reviewing the Python AMI
example; Lisa Ulevich, who helped Alex Balashov with his foreword
contribution; and to Kevin McAllister, for letting the authors play on his
Minecraft server.
Additionally, we’d like to thank Tilghman Lesher for helping to update the chapter on that which will not die, fax, and for providing solid review of other sections of the book.
A special thanks should also go to John Todd for being one of the first to write comprehensive Asterisk how-tos, all those years ago, and for all the many other things you do (and have done) for the Asterisk community.
Thanks to Sean Bright, Ed Guy, Simon Ditner, and Paul Belanger for assisting us with clarifying best practices for user and group policies for Asterisk installation. In the past it was common to just install Asterisk with root permissions, but we have elected to describe an installation process that is more in keeping with Linux best practices (without starting a holy war!), and these fine gents contributed to our discussions on that.
Kudos to all the folks working on the FreeSWITCH, YATE, SER, Kamailio, OpenSIPS, SER, sipXecs, Woomera, and any other open source telecom projects, for stimulating new thoughts, and for pushing the envelope.
Everyone in the Asterisk community also needs to thank Jim Dixon for creating the first open source telephony hardware interfaces, starting the revolution, and giving his creations to the community at large.
Finally, and most importantly, thanks go to Mark Spencer, the original author of Asterisk and founder of Digium, for Asterisk, for Pidgin, and for contributing his creations to the open source community. Asterisk is your legacy!
Leif Madsen
It sort of amazes me where I started with
Asterisk, and where I’ve gone with it. In 2002, while attending school,
a bunch of friends and myself were experimenting with voice over the
Internet using Microsoft’s MSN product. It worked quite well, and
allowed us to play video games while conversing with each other—at
least, until we wanted to add a third participant. So, I went out
searching for some software that could handle multiple voices (the word
was conferencing, but I didn’t even know that at the time, having had
little exposure to PBX platforms). I searched the Internet but didn’t
find anything in particular I liked (or that was free).[2] I turned to IRC and explained what I was looking for.
Someone (I wish I knew who) mentioned that I should check out some
software called Asterisk (he presumably must have thought I was looking
for MeetMe(), which I was).
Having the name, I grabbed the software and started looking at what it could do. Incredibly, the functionality I was looking for, which I thought would be the entirety of the software, was only one component in a sea of functionality. And having run a BBS for years prior to going to college, the fact that I could install a PCI card and connect it to the phone network was not lost on me. After a couple of hours of looking at the software and getting it compiled, I started telling one of my teachers about the PCI cards and how maybe we could get some for the classroom for labs and such (our classroom had 30 computers at 10 tables of 3). He liked the idea and started talking to the program coordinator, and within about 30 minutes an order had been placed for 20 cards. Pretty amazing considering they were TDM400Ps decked out with four daughtercards, and they had only heard about them an hour prior to that.
Then the obsession began. I spent every extra moment of that semester with a couple of computers dedicated to Asterisk use. In those two months, I learned a lot. Then we had a co-op break. I didn’t find any work immediately, so I moved home and continued working on Asterisk, spending time on IRC, reading through examples posted by John Todd, and just trying to wrap my head around how the software worked. Luckily, I had a lot of help on IRC (for these were the days prior to any documentation on Asterisk), and I learned a lot more during that semester.
Seeing that the people who took a great interest in Asterisk at the time had a strong sense of community, it caused me to also want to contribute back. Having no practical level of coding knowledge, I decided documentation would be something useful to start doing. Besides, I had been writing a lot of papers at school, so I was getting better at it. One night I put up a website called The Asterisk Documentation Assignment (TADA) and started writing down any documentation I could. A couple of weeks later Jared Smith and I started talking, causing the birth of the Asterisk Documentation Project, with the goal of writing an Asterisk book for the community. That project became the basis of the first edition of this book, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony.
Eleven years later, I’m still writing Asterisk
documentation, have become the primary bug marshal and release manager
for the Asterisk project, have spoken at every single AstriCon since 2004 (at which Jared and I
spoke about the Asterisk Documentation Project; I still have the
AsteriskDocs magnet his wife made), and become a consultant specializing
in database integration (thanks Tilghman for func_odbc) and clustering (thanks Mark Spencer
for DUNDi). I really love Asterisk and all that it’s allowed me to do.
I’m now the Lead Unified Communications Systems Engineer at Thinking
Phone Networks, where I get to continue building and enhancing a huge
breadth of telecommunications functionality.
First, thanks to my parents Rick and Carol, for the understanding and support in everything I’ve done in my life. From the first computer they purchased for far too much money when I was in grade 6 (I started taking an interest in computers in grade 2 using a Commodore 64, and they got me a computer after a parent-teacher interview a few years later) to letting me use the home phone line for my BBS endeavors (and eventually getting me my own phone line), and everything else they have ever done for me, I can never thank them enough. I love you both more than you’ll ever imagine.
Thanks to my Grandma T for letting me use her 286 during the years when I didn’t have a computer at home, and for taking me shopping every year on my birthday for 15 years. Love lots!
To my beautiful wife, Danielle, for setting the alarm every morning before she left for work, letting me sleep those extra 10 minutes before starting on this book, and understanding when I had to work late because I went past my 9 A.M. stop-writing time, thank you and I love you so much. (Also to our soon-to-be-born son, who helped me put a firm date on delivery of the draft of this book :))
There are so many people who help me and teach me new things every day, but the most influential on my life in Asterisk are the following: Mark Spencer for writing software that has given me a fantastic career; John Todd for his early examples; Brian K. West for his early help and enthusiasm on IRC; Steve Sokol and Olle Johansson for flying me to my first AstriCon (and subsequent ones!) and letting me be part of the first Asterisk training classes; Jared Smith for helping start the documentation project and doing all the infrastructure that I could never have done; Jim Van Meggelen for joining in early on the project and teaching me new ways to look at life; and Russell Bryant for being a great friend and confidant, for never breaking our FriendDA, and for not holding a grudge about the bush.
Jim Van Meggelen
When we set out to write the very first edition of this book in 2004, we were confident that Asterisk was going to be a huge success. Now, almost a decade later, we’ve written this fourth edition of what the worldwide Asterisk community calls “The Asterisk Book,” and we’ve matured from revolutionaries into Asterisk professionals.
Asterisk has proven that open source telecom is a lasting idea, and the open source telecom landscape is nowadays complemented by more than just Asterisk. Projects like FreeSWITCH, sipXecs (from SIPfoundry), OpenSER/Kamailio/OpenSIPS, and many, many more (and more to come) help to round out the ecosystem.
I want to take this opportunity to thank my very good friend Leif Madsen, who has been with me through all four editions. In our daily lives, we don’t always have many opportunities to work with each other (or even grab a pint, these days!), and it’s always a delight to work with you. I also want to thank Russell Bryant, who joined us for this edition, and whose dedication to this project and the Asterisk project in general is an inspiration to me. You’re a Renaissance man, Russell. To Jared Smith, who helped found the Asterisk Documentation Project and coauthored the first two editions with Leif and me (but has since moved on to the Fedora project), I can only say: Asterisk’s loss is Fedora’s gain.
I would like to thank my business partners at Core Telecom Innovations and iConverged LLC, without whom I could not do all the cool things I get to do in my professional career.
I would like to thank all my friends in the improv community, for helping me to keep laughing at all the challenges that life presents.
Thanks to all my family, who bring love into my life.
Finally, thanks to you, the Asterisk community. This book is our gift to you. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we’ve enjoyed writing it.
Russell Bryant
I started working on Asterisk in 2004. I was a student at Clemson University and was working as a co-op engineer at ADTRAN in Huntsville, Alabama. My first job at ADTRAN was working in the Product Qualification department. I remember working with Keith Morgan to use Asterisk as a VoIP traffic generator for testing QoS across a router test network. Meanwhile, a fellow co-op and friend, Adam Schreiber, introduced me to Mark Spencer. Over the next six months, I immersed myself in Asterisk. I learned as much as I could about Asterisk, telephony, and C programming. When Asterisk 1.0 was released in the fall of 2004, I was named the release maintainer.
At the beginning of 2005, I was hired by Digium to continue my work on Asterisk professionally. I spent seven amazing years working with Digium to improve Asterisk. I worked as a software developer, a software team lead, and as the engineering manager of the Asterisk development team. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to contribute to so many areas of the Asterisk project. There are many people that deserve thanks for the support they have provided along the way.
To my wife, Julie, I cannot thank you enough for all the love and support you have given me. Thank you for keeping my life balanced and happy. You are the best. I love you!
To my parents, thank you for giving me so many great opportunities in my life to explore different things and find what I really enjoy. You taught me to work hard and never give up.
To Leif and Jim, thank you for your invitation to contribute to this book. It has been a fun project, largely due to the pleasure of working with the two of you. Thanks for the laughs and for your dedication to this book as a team effort.
I have learned a lot from many people at Digium. There are three people who stand out the most as my mentors: Mark Spencer, Kevin P. Fleming, and David Deaton. Thank you all for going the extra mile to teach me along the way. I am extremely grateful.
To the Asterisk development community, thank you all for your hard work and dedication. I have learned a lot from you all. It has been a pleasure to work with you over the years.
To Travis Axtell, thank you for your help in my early days of learning about Linux and for being a good friend.
To my dogs, Chloe and Baxter, thanks for keeping me company while I worked on the book every morning.
To all of my friends and family, thank you for your love, support, and fun times.
To the entire Asterisk community, thank you for using, enjoying, and contributing to Asterisk. We hope you enjoy the book!
[1] We tried wherever possible to include the contributors’ names, but in some cases could not, and therefore included their handles instead.
[2] Years later while playing an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), I learned about applications such as TeamSpeak; it’s probably a good thing I didn’t find that first.
Get Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
