Thread: Interface (ARI)

Cisco had to search the Internet and download PIAF and its user guides since they were not provided in the CD-ROM. The installation is quite straightforward; insert the CD-ROM into the drive and set the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM first, and then the hard disk.

When the CD-ROM boots-up, you are offered Asterisk 1.4 or Asterisk 1.6 Beta for installation, along with various options. We decided to install Asterisk 1.4 since it was recommended for production set-ups. Cisco chose a normal install with LVM.
After the operating system was installed and the system rebooted, Cisco was offered the option to download the latest, or install the 'payload' file from the CD-ROM. He chose to download the latest version from the Internet, as recommended.
With the installation complete, he next had to log in as the root to carry out a few more recommended steps to start using PIAF:

1. Update the scripts by running update-scripts. Do a help-pbx after the update finishes and you will see all of the new programs that you can use.

2. Run update-jixes to update PBX in a Flash with any patches that did not make it into the current release of PIAF.

3. Run passwd-master to set most passwords in PIAP.

Please note: null passwords are not allowed.

4. Run netconjig to configure the network interface to use a static IP address.

5. Reboot the system.

6. Edit 'zaptel' in/etc/sysconjig, and comment-out the unused hardware with # marks.

7. Rungenzaptelconjig -d -v -s -z to correctly configure zap tel for our hardware (FXO card).

8. Run ztt90l to confirm hardware installation of FXO card.

9. Reboot the system.

Once Cisco was done configuring the operating system, Asterisk and hardware set-ups, FreePBX could be accessed and further configured from the Web interface, which was found at http://(IP conjigured in step 4 above).



Once at the Web interface, we completed just a few steps to get the FreePBX system running:

1. Enable the conjigedit module in module admin.

2. In tools-- >conjigedit, edit the file Zapata. corif and add the line puledialyes.

3. Configure the extensions. (SIP soft-phones.)

4. Configure options on the general page of FreePBX administration.

5. Configure the out-bound route (PSTN provider, in our case) on the out-bound
routes page, including dialling pattern.

6. Configure the trunk on the trunk page.

7. Configure incoming calls to go to a specific soft phone or extension.

8. Reboot the system.

All that remained to be done was to download a soft phone of choice, and then install and configure it on the required clients. And then we were ready to go!
Overall, Cisco says he found PIAF to be easy to install. The installation was quite quick with a broadband connection. Configuration was relatively simple.

Unfortunately, most of the time was wasted on trying to figure out how to get pulse-dialling to work, since at first we would get "all lines in this route are busy" messages whenever we tried to dial-out to PSTN. We did not use a FXS card because we did not use any analogue phones to connect to the PBX; only soft-phones were used.

Configuring a supported FXS card should be easy anyway. Using this set-up we were able to call any other soft phone in the office and vice-versa. We were also able to call mobile phone numbers as well as PSTN landlines from our soft phones.

For our example, we used the free soft phone from Counter Path called x-lite. This was installed on the desired Windows XP clients. You have to dial ***7469 (SEND) to bring up the x-lite advanced configuration window. Now, filter for 'honor', and double click the 'honor' entry to change the value to 'I'.

Cisco says he found the PIAP Asterisk 1.4 to be quite stable and decent enough for production use. "The Voxzone XI00P used in this test is a single port internal PCI FXO card that uses the zap tel driver. This card was detected and easily configured using the genzaptelconjig command described earlier," he said.

For this test, a 32-bit processor was used, but 64-bit is also supported. There are reports of significant performance improvements on 64-bit processors using the 64-bit version ofthe software.