Calling Asterisk IP PBX

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, humans used to make calls, and that’s why several Open Source IP PBX projects were started.

The project I’m going to share with you is Asterisk IP PBX, which has been around for a while, and was the one that got me started in VoIP.

Asterisk is not just an IP PBX, but it’s a tool that can be used for various purposes, as it offers a set of services such as:

• VoiceGateway
• SIP proxy
• Voicemail
• IVR (interactive voice response)

And many features used in Call Centers, among others.

This post will actually be a tutorial and I will sign it as “Tutoriais da Dona Joaquina” as a tribute to the brilliant Portuguese TV show “Tutoriais da Dona Margarida”, yes, I’m like that, I like these things .

Alright, let’s get down to business!

This tutorial is for installing Asterisk on Ubuntu. In other words, the first step is to install the operating system itself. I won’t cover installing Ubuntu here, but feel free to ask if you need help!

Okay, after installing Ubuntu:

• Open a terminal window. You can do this by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T on your keyboard.
• Navigate to the /usr/src directory. Type the following command in the terminal and press Enter:

    src cd /usr/src/

• Install nano and subversion, and yes so what?😃 Just copy and paste the command:

    apt install subversion nano

• Download Asterisk (this link may be updated)

curl -O https://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-16.30.1.tar.gz

• Extract the tar file using the command

    tar xvf asterisk-16.30.1.tar.gz

• Navigate to the asterisk-16.30.1 directory.

    cd asterisk-16.30.1

• Run the Script script _get_mp3source.sh

    script _get_mp3source.sh contrib/scripts/get_mp3_source.sh

• Update the repos

    apt update

• Install the prerequisites with the command

    contrib/scripts/install_prereq install

• Start the configuration

    ./configure

• Configure menuselect

    make menuselect

• Compile Asterisk

    make

• Install Asterisk

    make install

• Configure examples

    make samples

• Configure

    make config

• Update the OS shared library

    ldconfig

Ok last steps, permissions

• Add new group called asterisk

    groupadd asterisk

• Add new user called asterisk

    useradd -r -d /var/lib/asterisk -g asterisk asterisk

• Add user asterisk to audio and dialout groups

    usermod -aG audio,dialout asterisk

• Change directory owner to asterisk group and asterisk user

    chown -R asterisk.asterisk /etc/asterisk

• Change the owner of the directories for the asterisk group and asterisk user

chown -R asterisk.asterisk /var/{lib,log,spool}/asterisk

• Edit the asterisk file

    nano /etc/default/asterisk

• Find these two lines and remove the comment

    AST_USER="asterisk"
    AST_GROUP="asterisk"

Now you have your Asterisk PBX installed on your Ubuntu, it’s time to play 😃

Some more settings

• Enable automatic

    start systemctl enable asterisk

• Start Asterisk

    systemctl start asterisk

• Log into the asterisk console

    asterisk -rvvvvvvcfg