Chapter 3

We restart Asterisk thus:

CLI> restart <choice>

For instance, if we wanted to restart now, we would type:

CLI> restart now

Now is a good time to play around with the console interface. Get comfortable with it. Experiment with the Tab key to auto-complete commands, and try different verbosity levels to see what information is displayed for each.

I cannot stress enough that now is the time to play with the server. If it is going to be broken by a mistake, it is better that the mistake be made before calls are going through it. If Asterisk stops working, we can go back to the beginning of this chapter and reinstall with minimal time.

Summary

In this chapter, we installed Asterisk and two packages that it requires, Zaptel and libpri. The configuration files that we use to set up various aspects of our PBX system have been introduced, as has the Asterisk console. Before our system is ready for use, we need to configure Asterisk for our hardware and other operational requirements, which we'll do in the next chapter.

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4

Configuring Asterisk

So far, we have decided to use Asterisk to meet our needs, created a plan, prepared a server, and installed Asterisk and its supporting libraries. Now we have come to the more artistic part of any open-source solution: configuration. We get to choose how to use Asterisk's power and flexibility to meet our real-world needs.

While the order in which we proceed makes sense, it is not necessary that we follow it precisely. We can configure the pieces in any order we want. The only issue we may encounter is that if we have not completely configured one part of Asterisk, the PBX may not start, or may start without full capabilities. This is not a real problem, as we are still configuring and will be testing our PBX later.

Thus, if we become unsure about how to proceed in one section, it may be best to move on, and configure the next part. Then, we can go back to where we left off. Often we need a little bit of time to digest some information.

What we will now do is step through the different technologies we're going to use, and the configuration files that we need to modify to follow the plan that we laid out in Chapter 2. Be sure to have the planning worksheets handy so that we are sure what we need to do.

Before modifying the configuration files, we should make a backup copy of each.

We can create a backup copy of the stock configuration files by changing to the /etc/asterisk directory and making a copy of the files. For instance, if we wanted to make a copy of the zapata.conf file and call the copy default-zapata.conf, we would type:

$ cp zapata.conf default-zapata.conf