Intro And Question

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I’ve been using Asterisk, including administering and maintaining it, in some aspect since 2003, but this is the first time I have attempted a from-scratch installation and setup on my own. I’m following the instructions in the ePub edition of the book “Asterisk, the Definitive Guide, Fifth Edition,” published by O’Reilly Media, Inc. in 2019, for Asterisk version 16 on a fresh install of Dedbian 11.6 (Bull’s Eye).

Backround:

In Chapter 3, “Installing Asterisk,” in the section “Asterisk Packages,”
the book says, and I quote from the ePub:

There are Asterisk packages  that can be installed using package management systems  such as  yum or  apt-get . You are encouraged to use them once you are familiar with Asterisk.

So, thinking I was familiar enough with the product, I indeed used aptp[get to install.

# apt-get install asterisk

I got lots of dependencies, plus the core, everything went swimmingly, no errors. In a minute or two, I had Asterisk 1:16.28.0~dfsg-0+deb11u2. Great.

A little further along down the book, there’s an “Initial Configuration”
section detailing some changes to modules.conf and logger.conf, and a few ownership change commands to certain files and directories. All went exactly according to the documentation.

Then the weeds started to appear, and I was off into them.

The first was the mention of Alembic. This was not installed as part of the apt-get installation mentioned above, but I expected whatever Alembic could do, I could do manually, it’d just take longer and be more tedious. NO problem. I’d get through it.

Reading on, I found this, regarding an SQL database:

Log into the database now, and review all the tables that have been created:

SQL? Database? Where … what … I got no SQL when I installed from the Debian package management system, nor was there any mention of it in the book with regard to complete package installation. Come to think of it, on some of the old implementations on which I’d worked in the past, I
don’t remember seeing SQL as a part thereof.

Time to put the brakes on, find out what’s going on, or what I did wrong.

So, my question is, what is the correct approach to supplementing or correcting the standard Debian package installation, or if there isn’t one, should I remove what I installed and stqart over, or even deeper, re-generate the Debian system (which I can do in less than fifteen minutes) and build from sources according to the book?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

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7 thoughts on - Intro And Question

  • ……

    Well, my first question would be “are you intending to use Asterisk Realtime features (ie: configurations in database tables instead of text files) in this installation?”

    If you are, then you do need to install a few more packages on your Debian system, but if not, then there is no reason to pay any attention at all to anything to do with Alembic, Realtime, SQL etc.

    Antony.

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  • Anthony,

    No, I had no intention of doing any of those things, for I know not what they are or why I would need or want to be doing them. Maybe I should have just stuck with the original idea of installing from Debian distro. I’m exploring the phreaknet option now. If I come up with a running system, I’m just going to leave it that way and work with it as it is.

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  • If you just want something easy to use out of the box, install the FreePBX distro.

    Cheers,

    j

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  • Given that Steve originally said “I’ve been using Asterisk, including administering and maintaining it, in some aspect since 2003, but this is the first time I have attempted a from-scratch installation and setup on my own.” I
    got the impression that he was not so much looking for something easy to use, but rather looking forward to learning about how to “do Asterisk” for himself.

    Antony.

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    This sentence contains exacly three erors.

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  • It appears I have bigger problems heretofore unknown. I’ve gone through this several times today since I last wrote, and the phreaknet-run build failed every time, but each time at a different point. The failure manifestation was always the same–during either a compile or link of some module, a different one each time, my entire system turned itself off, which to me means there is either a memory fault which is causing the whole thing to dump, or I have a hidden hardware problem I’ll probably never find. I’m just going to have to go back to the original Debian-supplied version 18 installation and live with its limitations until such time as I can get another system to try building on, or something about the machine I have shows itself and can be fixed.

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  • Even I was confused, and the directions in that book seem like a complication of a simple affair, at least for my modest needs.

    Finally, I installed Asterisk with apt and created extensions.conf and pjsip.conf files.

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