Configuring a PSTN Gateway

A wide variety of gateways is offered by a wide variety of manufacturers including Lucent, Nortel Networks, Sonus, and Cisco Systems. If you don’t have access to a gateway, you can skip this section and go straight to the later section "Installing VOCAL onto a Multihost System.”

Setting Up a Cisco 5300 Gateway

In our lab, we use a Cisco 5300 gateway for its capacity: it can connect to four T1 lines. Other Cisco IOS[4] gateways, such as the 26xx, 36xx, 5350, 5400, and 7200, have similar instructions. For official hardware and software configuration instructions, we suggest that you contact the manufacturer of whatever gateway you choose to install into your system. What we provide next is a description of how we configured the software on a Cisco 5300 gateway to match our requirements. At press time, Cisco recommended using IOS Version 12.2(2)XB.

We expect you to use the manufacturer’s guides to help you set up your gateway and to make it available on your network. In this section, we will show you how we specifically configured a Cisco 5300 to work with VOCAL. Most of that work involved configuring dial peers. Dial peers make more sense with some background information about dial plans.

Dial plans

A dial plan is a tool used by phone systems to make routing decisions. In its simplest form, a dial plan tells the routing software where to send calls that are not addressed to local subscribers. In VOCAL, dial plans consist of two parts, the key and the ...

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