Untangle, Asterisk PBX and File Server; All-in-One. Part 6

If you’ve been following the story so far you’ll now where I am. If you haven’t, please go back to Part 1 and read from there. Alternatively if you do a search for Untangle in the little search box top-left then you should get all of the posts so far.

I have stalled on Untangle due to kernel issues already well documented on here before. The good news is the guys from Untangle are in contact with me and are working on a new kernel for the upcoming 5.1 release. I am hoping to get something to play with in the next few weeks. And it will most likely be based on a 2.6.22 release which is excellent news as that has direct support for my hardware.

So in the meantime I have been installing Samba – which is fairly straightforward – and Asterisk which is a bit more involved.

As you will know, I am using the Linux From Scratch (LFS) project for this server’s operating system. From the same stable, comes the Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) book that contains many (i.e. hundreds) excellent resources and instructions for installing various applications; including Samba. So I will not go into detail about how to build Samba here. The configuration of Samba for my home network is another subject and I will discuss this further once I’m happy with the set up.

Asterisk, the Open Source PBX, is another ballgame entirely. To build asterisk itself from source is not too hard. From an LFS core, there were no dependencies to satisfy first. If you are on a major distro however, you will certainly need to add quite a few -dev packages to your system first. With Ubuntu they have a meta package called build-essentials which will certainly help. Here is a good starting point for information: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk+installation+tips.

To build asterisk for testing purposes, build and install as root*. As I have an x100p analogue FXO card I need to install the zaptel driver first like this (after extracting the source tarball and cd‘ing into it):

./configure --prefix=/usr &&
make menuselect &&
make &&
make install &&
make config

Both this and the Asterisk build expect your kernel source tree (the headers) to be in /usr/src/linux-`uname -r` by default. The make menuselect command will enable you to select which hardware drivers you need and to disable the building of those you do not. make config will install a rc.d script for init so the card is properly initialised during boot-up. Although I had to hack this a bit to work with the LFS/BLFS boot scripts. Even if you do not have any analogue cards, you are recommended to install the zaptel drivers as they can provide timing a source for Inter-Asterisk Trunks (IAX) and conferencing via the ztdummy module.

Once the zaptel modules are installed, repeat a similar process for the Asterisk source:

./configure --prefix=/usr &&
make menuselect &&
make &&
make install

This should build and install the Asterisk server into the /usr hierarchy with the configuration files in /etc/asterisk and the runtime information and sound files under /var. When you run make menuselect pay attention, you can choose whether to install various language files, codecs, add-on sounds (I installed the extra sound files) and other goodies. Here’s a page that should help you get going once again: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk+Compile.

You can elect to install sample configuration files, by typing make samples. This will basically give you a working PBX out of the box for testing purposes. This is sort-of-useful but the files are very complicated and hard to follow, although they are well commented so they make a good reference. I quickly removed the whole /etc/asterisk directory to somewhere else (to keep for reference) and started from scratch with a clean directory.

Learning how to setup asterisk is time consuming. Then comes that moment when, after reading for hours and looking into lots of text files and learning about channels, priorities, applications and contexts, suddenly the penny drops! It will become clear. But don’t rush it and I would strongly recommend NOT going for one of the packaged appliance builds that come with a GUI front end to start with. Why? Because you will never learn what’s under the hood and you will be limited by the GUI designer’s ideas of what you need to configure. Once you ‘get it’, by all means use a GUI, but not before…

For testing you will need a phone 🙂 I know. Obvious but it had to be said. There are plenty of SIP phones on the market that are inexpensive, and there are several “soft phones” that you can run on your PC and use a headset, or mic & speakers. I chose to go the soft phone route for now and tried the following three soft phones for Linux.

  • Ekiga: Formerly Gnome Meeting. Initially I thought this was great but I have had several weird issues with DTMF and sound quality, so this is on the back-burner for now.
  • Wengo Phone: Looks nice, seems to work O.K. but I preferred the User Interface and overall experience of the final one in my list.
  • Twinkle: This just works. Has a simple and easy to use interface and is a cinch to setup. My personal favourite of the three (apart from the name, that is.)

These soft phones I used purely for SIP connectivity on my local LAN to the Asterisk server. There are others that can connect to Asterisk using IAX or H.323 but I didn’t try those, nor see a need to.

Here are a couple of resources I found very helpful along the way:

  • The voip-info.org wiki for Asterisk
  • This excellent short slide presentation (They say a picture paints a thousand words don’t they…)
  • This e-book: The “TFOT” Book (If this site is down, google for it. It’s available from lots of other sources)
  • And google. There is loads of information out there if you are prepared to look for it.

Along with my business partner who has installed Asterisk on his similarly small and low-powered server, we now have fully networked digital PBX functionality (IAX trunking between our servers), Voicemail (with email notification and forwarding), and Dial-in & Dial-out via the PSTN (through the x100p card on my box). Next is to try conferencing and call parking.

Asterisk, Samba Server HardwareWith this little server (shown here with the x100p card installed), I now have Samba, providing a home network file server for all the family, Asterisk running happily and providing advanced digital telephony throughout the house. And all using free and Open Source software. Once I’d bought the hardware, the software costs were zero, and will be zero. How much is Windows Home Server? And more to the point, why do you need it? Oh yes, does it also have a fully fledged enterprise grade digital PBX? And is it secure? (Just like the rest of Windows… lol)

Once I’ve nailed the configuration down and got asterisk running securely*, I’ll post some more on this including configuration details.

* The usual way to install Asterisk from source is by, and as, root. For a test-bed that’s no problem but for a production environment with direct internet connectivity (as this device will have) this is not a good idea. I will spend a little time developing an installation procedure that will install it as a non-root user and with limited privilages. The suggested mechanisms I have found on-line are not quite as I would like them. I try and keep to the FHS where possible and maintain a “tight” ship. This process I will also document once it’s nailed…

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2 Comments

  • Kevin says:

    Alan, Any word from Untangle recently? I have the same board with the same NICs (rtl8110sc).

  • Alan Lord says:

    Hi Kevin,

    Not as yet. They said it would be a couple of weeks or so and I’ve been busy with Asterisk and Samba, and work stuff too…

    The newer kernels seem to support the hardware fine. UT said they are basing their next version on a 2.6.22 IIRC so it should be fine. In fact they are trying to get the appliance to be pretty much what I am looking for in that you should be able to run “other” apps on the same device.

    Once I have any news it will be up here! So keep watching.

    Cheers

    Alan

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