Well I have finally finished installing the new phone system at the office. We purchased a 4 port analog phone line card by Dialogic, and are using Asterisk for our phone system.
I went with an analog card so I could use standard old POTS phone lines. We had only 1 line on our main number before, and it was just easiest to get them to add a second line and cascade it from the main number. Probably many of you use BRI or T1 interfaces for your lines, Dialogic (or the others) have cards for your setup. Probably the main reason why I went with a Dialogic card over Sangoma or Digium was because I had an opportunity to purchase one for half price. Like everyone else, I first tried one of those twenty dollar wildcard fxo single port cards, which gave me nothing but major echo problems and headaches. If you are going to put together an Asterisk system, save yourself some trouble and buy a good card for your phone lines.
The Dialogic cards use a CAPI interface (the ISDN standard), even for their POTS analog cards. You need to have libcapi20 installed and the kernel sources to build the dialogic drivers as a kernel module. I installed a somewhat never version of libcapi than they mentioned in their instructions, libcapi20-3.0.5-cm.tar.gz, works fine, grab the latest from melware.org
I first tried a plain install of Asterisk on Ubuntu 8.0.4, created my own extensions.conf and started on my dialplan. Once I realized how much work that was going to be I tried FreePBX. After the 3rd time I was reinstalling the box, getting Apache, MySQL and everything running for FreePBX and Asterisk, I decided to give Trixbox a try. It’s a CentOS distribution with Asterisk and FreePBX already setup and configured. Although I’d never used CentOS before, it is based on Red Hat and is pretty easy to find your way around. Actually I haven’t used Red Hat since around version 7.2. I’m using Trixbox 2.6.2, which has Asterisk 1.4 integrated.
I used “yum” to install a few extra thing needed to get the Dialogic drivers to compile and install. Use “yum install [packagename]”. I needed to install kernel-devel, gcc, gcc-c++, ncurses-devel and asterisk-devel.
Once installed FreePBX is pretty easy to add extensions and configure your phone system. We have a couple of Linksys SPA-942 telephones, but I hate them and would not recommend them. I am using a cheap $9 GE telephone and grandstream ATA (analog telephone adapter) on my desk and get better sound quality.
To get my Dialogic card to work in FreePBX all I had to do was add a custom trunk with the text DIALOGICDIVA/contr1/$OUTNUM$/b. contr1 is the first controller in my system, $OUTNUM$ is a variable FreePBX will replace in the dial plans, and the lower case B is for early B3 connects. See dialogic instructions for options. To receive calls from the Dialogic adapter, the most important thing to set is the call context in the dialogicdiva.conf file for your installation. I used the context “from-trunk” which will get FreePBX to route it correctly when it comes in.
For now, rather than when you dial instead of having an IVR (… if you know your party’s extension …), we created a ring/pickup group and set everybody’s phone to ring when a call comes in from the outside. The first person to answer their phone picks up the call and says hi, and then can transfer the call to another desk if needed. And with caller id, we usually know who the call is for anyway.
Dialogic Diva Analog 4P Card
Trixbox CE (Community Edition) Download Page
