5 thoughts on - Asterisk As “Proxy” And More Device For A Number

• No, German law says that there is a right to have a phone line, but that is not valid for an internet connection. Keep your BRI connections as long as possible. A B2BUA (back-to-back user agent) like Asterisk can be very helpful, regardless of whether you add ISDN or not. Better install it on a dedicated server. At home, a Raspberry box might suffice. You might as well integrate it into your router, or parts of it (e.g. when using pfSense). By learning. It’s fun. Start with something simple, e.g. with http://asteriskdocs.org/ . You main problem will be your NAT-Router, but you’ll find out soon….

  jg

• If you want to go the Asterisk from scratch route, you would do well to pick up a book on the subject. Since you seem comfortable with English,
  “Asterisk: The Definitive Guide” is a good place to start. This will teach you how to build an Asterisk system from the ground up. Depending on what you want to do, this may also be overkill.

  There are Asterisk distributions that already come with a GUI front end that could make this all a lot easier to set up. AsteriskNow (includes Asterisk and FreePBX Gui) is a good choice as would be Elastix (Asterisk +
  FreePBX GUI + the Elastix GUI). These are often much easier to set up for the Asterisk newbie. Either of those should be able to easily handle what you want to do.

  Even if you do go the route of a pre-made distribution with a GUI, the Asterisk book is still useful to have. It really gives great insight into the software and will help if you ever have to troubleshoot from the command line.

• Kevin Larsen schrieb:

  Hi Kevin,

  Maybe I got it… I installed an asterisk on a VM with Ubuntu 10.04 and I got it connecting to another Test-VM with AsteriskNOW and with an italian VoIP-provider. The very difficult was to understand, that my phone just can manage ONE
  profile at time, so I had to configure Asterisk to receive all calls from the different providers an send them ONE profile (on my phone).

  Next step is to configure Asterisk for the other phone (for my wife) and having all calls of her number forwarded to my phone and her phone.

  Next step again is to manage outgoing calls going to the right provider.

  Then it would be nice if I can forward calls from a phone to the other.

  Last but not least, I need to use HylaFAX on an account on Asterisk. I had many problems with T38Modem, so I’ll try with IAXModem, maybe I’ll got it…

  Regards Luca Bertoncello
  (lucabert@lucabert.de)

• connecting to from the got

  Glad you have it working. You should only need one Asterisk server to do what you want unless you just want to have one with the GUI and one for testing purposes. I would recommend starting with something newer than Ubuntu 10.04 as it is pretty much at its end of life. 14.04 would be a better choice at this point.

  Regardless of how you end up directing your incoming calls, that KE1020A
  phone is pretty old and it might be worthwhile to see about upgrading it to something newer. The Thomson ST2022 you have does seem to have the capability to have two lines on it. Haven’t used one before, so hard to say how good it handles that. Whatever you do, though, having two identical phones will be helpful to you (and your wife) as you won’t have to try to remember how each phone works and troubleshooting problems is easier if you can look at a phone that is working of the same model.

  There are a couple of ways you can approach directing your calls to the right outgoing provider. One would be to have two separate lines on your phone and just pick which one you want to use that will direct all calls to the right provider. If your calls follow a pattern (i.e. calls to this country go to this provider and calls to that country to to the other provider), you can have Asterisk recognize the pattern and automatically direct the calls for you. This is nice as others won’t have to remember which line to use.

  Asterisk has built in forwarding capabilities by dialing the right feature code during a call to initiate a forward to another extension. Many phones also have this feature built in. I use Polycom phones and can transfer calls just by hitting the transfer button and dialing who I want to transfer to.

  I have used the HylaFax/IAXModem solution with a client and it worked fairly well. I will warn you that faxes over VoIP connections are inherently worse than over a regular phone line. They can be made to be almost as good or they can just be horrible, but either way, faxing is no fun, especially considering that the problems can be caused before the fax ever reaches your system. Hopefully your provider supports T.38 properly, in which case faxing will be much nicer.

• Kevin Larsen schrieb:

  Hi Kevin!

  Please NOT! I’ve seen the 14.04 and I DON’T want to have this distribution on my PC… Too many problems… Maybe the 10.04 is old, but it works… 🙂

  Maybe the phones are old, but I don’t want to pay more money for a change I
  didn’t want (changing to VoIP with no ISDN anymore). If I get them working with Asterisk on my OpenWRT-Switch, it’s enough..

  What I really need is that the phones make call using the “right” account by Deutsche Telekom, so that my phone works using my account and the phone of my wife (another number) using her account.

  I’ll see if it is possible by me…

  I know, but since I don’t had a choice, I must try… Hopefully, it works…

  Regards Luca Bertoncello
  (lucabert@lucabert.de)