Washtenaw LUG: Asterisk VOIP PBX, Greg Boehnlein

running notes.

free for the asking: Fedora Core, Knoppix CDs.
nothing in the news?
copyright bill to regulate CD-R?
illegal to skip DVD commercials?
wireless user group forming.
tivo is going to sell banner ads on your fast forward button.
tivo is uploading data on what you are watching (and skipping).
mythtv: free version of tivo. mythtv how to. hard to build from source.

then, to the asterisk talk.

I ended up not having time to grab URLs and transcribe here, so I linked what I could on delicious - see http://del.icio.us/tag/from:lugwash

The asterisk talk was interesting, and I suppose if I spent more time in front of a desk with a phone on it that would be super. But when I am off at a cafe or somewhere with just a cell phone I really want to be connected too. asterisk is a superduper powerful software PBX for Linux, programmable, etc. I'll have to explore Mac OS X softphones, so far I've found X-Lite (SIP only) and some funky ugly IAX2 softphone. There's a $99 Digium ATA, probably less if you shop, that should also work too.

If I get this right, I can *probably* port the second phone line in the house to be VOIP only, save some money every month. The hard part of justifying that is the equipment expense, especially since I can get $0.02/min calls outbound through Skype already anyway.

Comments

[George Hotelling]

If you're looking at MythTV you might want to check out KnopMyth, which is pretty much what it sounds like. (http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html )

Also, I don't know if this was covered at the LUG but LiveJournal uses Asterisk for their phone phone posting system, which was the first I'd heard of it. (http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_backend/1059.html )

[Edward Vielmetti]

There's a Knoppix build that includes Asterisk - the wiki http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+Bootable+CDROM has the details, one package is called Knopsterisk. Haven't tried it myself.