Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> writes:
have a friend who is a penguinista and wants to run a simple soft pbx. support of soft phones, 7960s, connect to a commercial sip gate, ... reccos for a packaged solution.
While Asterisk's configuration files are horrible (and written by people who didn't understand what a tokenizer is) it's really a case of the more clueful you are the worse off you'll find it. You just have to take a megadose of stupid pills in order to be happy with Asterisk's configuration. I've been using Astlinux, which allows access to the underlying files (in fact you edit them through a web interface) successfully with voip.ms (wholesale voip provider for cheap) for almost three years now. My experience fooling around with stuff like Trixbox, Askozia, and FreePBX is that there are plenty of cute GUI wrappers out there for configuring stuff, but at the end of the day as painful as handling the files directly is, it's a lot less painful than trying to work around the GUI's lossage whenever you want to do something that the designers didn't anticipate, which is pretty much all the time. Making Cisco 7940/7960 phones with SIP loads talk to Asterisk is well-documented, and their lossage modes are well-understood. Back to Astlinux, it's a pre-baked distro with click-here upgradability that will run nicely from CF on an embedded box like a PCEngines ALIX 2d3 (~15 simultaneous calls if you're not transcoding). 6 watts of power. Not a bad deal.
i run a raw asterisk and would not wish it on my worst enemy.
Sure you would, you'd encourage your competitors to use it. :) -r