SIP Providers and DIDs

In this lesson we will look at SIP providers. Using a SIP provider, the Asterisk server can connect to a company that can provide a phone number and handle outside phone calls. There are many companies that server as SIP providers. Using the SIP protocol the Asterisk server can register to the provider, similar to […]

Emailing voicemail notifications

In this lesson we will take a look at sending out the voicemail notifications via email to the users created. Postfix The software package postfix is by far the most common software used in Linux to send emails. When installing the software, it will ask for what type of email server is being setup. The […]

Busy calls to voicemail

In the previous lesson we added the VoiceMail() application. In this lesson we will modify the dialplan to send busy calls to voicemail. There is a variable named DIALSTATUS that is set after the Dial() application to determine the last status of it. We can use this to determine whether or not it was busy […]

Configuring voicemail in the dialplan

We should have two extensions already set for our sip accounts. In this lesson we will modify the 100 and 101 extension, to connect them to the the voicemail accounts in the voicemail.conf file. To get started, open up the dialplan using the command: sudo nano /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf The VoiceMail() application is what we will need […]

Setting up the voicemail configuration file

In this lesson we will create a new voicemail.conf file and move the sample one to use for reference. The new voicemail.conf file will setup the voicemail configuration for the two sip accounts. Creating the voicemail.conf file To move the voicemail.conf file use the following command: sudo mv /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf.sample Now to create a new […]

Voicemail Configuration File

The /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf file is sectioned into contexts, similar to how the extensions.conf file is setup. The first context of the voicemail.conf file is the [general] section. This section is used to configure the operation of the voicemail system. The second context is the [zonemessages] section.   This context is used to defines time zones and time […]

Recording Your Own Sounds

There are basically two common ways to record your own sounds for asterisk. One is to use professional recording equipment and software to record, edit, and convert the sound files. Although this will give you the best possible sound files, it can be cumbersome to setup. The next option is to use your own Asterisk […]

Extra Sounds

If you would like to download extra sound files for Asterisk, there is an archive of sounds on the Web located at http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/sounds/. If you are not familiar with a command line Linux operating system, downloading files and extracting the data may be changing. In this lesson we will walk through the process of downloading […]

The Playback Application

The Playback() application can be used in the dial plan to play a sound or video file. The default sound files are stored in the /usr/share/asterisk/sounds directory. In the sounds directory there should be folders for the language package used by Asterisk. For example, English sounds will be located in the en or en_US directories. […]

Call logs

Asterisk keeps track of call data records (cdr) in the /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/ directory. Inside the folder there will be a comma seperated file (csv) file named Master.csv. This file contains a lot of useful details of calls. Within the Master.csv file, each log of the call will record various fields. The fields are listed in the […]