Re: [gentoo-user] telephony

[Yahya Mohammad]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:30:52PM -0400, Simon wrote:
> hi there,
>   i'm looking for suggestions and guidance.  I have a vps host with
> gentoo on it, i dont think the vps is stable enough to ensure a good
> quality of service, but it could just need an upgrade, no big deal.  I
> need a phone and the way i decided to go was to get a connection to
> the internet and use voip or similar services.
>

I've set up Asterisk on Gentoo on both Xen and OpenVZ based VPS and it
works great. I use it with the speex codec and voice quality is really
good. It was even usable when those middle east cables were cut some
time ago, and latency was over 1 second for me.

Asterisk in portage hasn't been updated in ages. It's still at version
1.2, while 1.4 and 1.6 have been available since dec 2006 and jan 2008
respectively. There is a VoIP overlay where you can get newer ebuilds.
Actually now that I think about it, it might be better to use an older
version as most documentation online refers to the older ones.

One interesting feature of v1.6 (if your asterisk box is not in a remote
location) is chan_mobile.  It can hook up asterisk via bluetooth to a
cell phone using the handsfree profile, and then use the phone as a PSTN
trunk. It works with my phone, but I don't think anyone uses this in a 
production environment.

I would recommend reading chapters 4,5,6 of "The Future of Telephony"
book [1] at least three times before starting. The new edition of the
book refers to Asterisk ver1.4.

It's not that hard especially if your goal is to learn. Otherwise just
buy an appliance like [2] for a couple of hundred bucks, click around in
its GUI config and be done with it.

[1] http://astbook.asteriskdocs.org/en/2nd_Edition/asterisk-book-html-chunk/index.html
[2] http://atcom.cn/En_products_IP01.htm