09 October 2004 - Asterisk and VoIP
Topics
Asterisk and VoIP (by Dave Roper)
Attendance
17
Presentation Resources
Meeting Announcement (txt)
Flyer (html)
The VOIP Wiki - a reference guide to all things VOIP
Meeting Notes
This was our second meeting at Generation Next PCs. We met there again because the Asterisk presentations hinge on having a plain old phone line. As it turned out, that part of the demonstration didn't work. It was also distracting to hear the door alarm go off every time someone entered or exited the front door (which was practically every other minute). We should look into getting access to a plain old phone line in our regular meeting place (Stautzenberger College).
A total of 17 people were at the meeting including a couple of new faces (always good to see).
Our presenter (Dave Roper) was already there and ready to go when I arrived at 2:45. I waited for more people to arrive and for the typical 15 minutes of the meeting to elapse for actually beginning. We plugged in the wireless router at Loren's request, but I couldn't use it with my laptop for some reason... hmmm. I started the meeting and announced that the November meeting would be at the Murchison Center (1616 Lawrence) and what's going on there and why we want to meet there. After the meeting, a couple of the attendees offered some networking equipment and old hardware. If Murchison can't use it, I'll pass it on to CATNeT. Thanks! I also mentioned the discussion on upcoming changes to establish a more defined "membership" and to encourage donations (not just monetary) by rewarding members somehow. More to come on that topic...
Dave then went right into his presentation. Again, with no projector all we had was a monitor and with 17 people, we couldn't really see it. However, the presentation seemed to be a basic outline of his talk and he seemed to cover everything, so I think it wasn't a big deal. I will post his presentation on the website when he sends it to me. Also, Dave said that most of the presentation came directly from a couple of websites, to which I will place links above in the "Resources".
Covered were at least two of the more advanced topics that we wanted to see after the initial Asterisk presentation:
- voicemail
- interactive voice response (IVR)
He did also show a lot of neat little features, such as conferencing, transferring calls, message waiting features, call progression, etc. The sheer flexibility of Asterisk is awesome. Finally, he showed us a PCI card for connecting in analog (hardware) phones and told us why they suck (IRQ requirements). Throughout the presentation, Dave fielded a lot of high-level questions. At times the questions contained more acronyms than English words! Dave was a trooper, though. He answered each question honestly as best he could and admitted to unfamiliarity and said he would look things up afterward. That is one of the hardest things about presenting: admitting that you don't know *everything* about the topic. VoIP and Asterisk are definitely an enormous topic and Dave did a good job of covering a lot of material in 90 minutes.
There were also a lot of practical use questions from people who are considering using Asterisk in a production environment. It certainly seems like a logical thing to do! Asterisk is a free and extremely powerful IP telephony solution for PCs running Linux that is available TODAY. Anyone want to guess how much a Cisco IP phone switch costs???
We did use the entire alotted time (through 5:00pm). We recently had a little discussion on the list about meeting structure. This is something that will probably have to be addressed again...
I gave out a strange collection of odd distributions that I downloaded yesterday on a whim... feather, Ubuntu, SmoothWall, DamnSmallLinux (aka DSL), DeMuDi, SimplyMEPIS, and Vector Linux. Oh, and I also gave a copy of Fedora Core 2 to someone who had requested it. Again, if you want a particular distribution, check out our list of free CDs and let me know what you want in advance. It takes a while to burn some of these multi-disc distributions and I need to be able to plan ahead a bit. Thanks.
Thanks to the guys at Generation Next PCs for hosting us in their LAN gaming room again and letting us use their fax line. You guys are great!
