Krishna Distributed Universal Number Discovery (DUNDi) Distributed Universal Number Discovery, or DUNDi, is a service discovery protocol that can be used for locating resources at remote locations. The original intention of DUNDi was to permit decentralized routing among many peers using a General Peering Agreement (GPA). The GPA is intended to take on the role of … Read more
Clustering The word “clustering” can mean different things to different people. Some people would say clustering is simply having a replicated system on standby available to be turned on when the primary system fails. To others, clustering is having several systems working in concert with one another, with replicated data, fully redundant, and infinitely expandable. … Read more
Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) The Asterisk dialplan has evolved into a simple yet powerful programming interface for call handling. However, many people, especially those with a prior programming background, still prefer implementing their custom call handling in a different programming language. Using another programming language may also allow you to utilize existing code for integration … Read more
Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) The Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) is a system monitoring and management interface provided by Asterisk. It allows live monitoring of events that occur in the system,as well as enabling requests for Asterisk to perform some action. The available actions are wide-ranging and include things such as returning status information and originating … Read more
Fax What Is a Fax? A fax machine allows a facsimile (copy) of a document to be transmitted across a telephone line. In the Internet age, this sort of functionality seems useless; however, prior to ubiquitous Internet access, this was a very useful thing indeed. Fax machines scan a document into a digital format, transmit … Read more
Text-to-Speech Utilities Text-to-speech utilities are used to convert strings of words into audio that can be played to your callers. Text-to-speech has been around for many years, and has been continually improving. While we can’t recommend text-to-speech utilities to take the place of professionally recorded prompts, they do offer some degree of usefulness in applications … Read more
LDAP Integration Asterisk supports the ability to connect to an existing Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server to load information into your Asterisk server using the Asterisk Realtime Architecture (ARA). The advantage of integrating Asterisk and LDAP will become immediately obvious when you start centralizing your authentication mechanisms to the LDAP server and using it … Read more
Out-of-Band Messaging (Messaging Infrastructure) Starting in Asterisk 10, the ability to accept messages out of band (e.g., receive a message without an existing channel) was added in order to allow the triggering of the dialplan based on a received message. Being able to accept a message means that you could potentially trigger a call simply … Read more
Using XMPP (Jabber) with Asterisk The eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly called Jabber) is used for instant messaging and communicating presence information across networks in near real time. Within Asterisk, it is also used for call setup (signaling). We can do various cool things with XMPP integration once it’s enabled, such as getting … Read more
Voicemail IMAP Integration “Unified messaging” has been a buzzword in the telecommunications industry for ages. It’s all about integrating services so users can access the same types of data in multiple locations, using different methods. One of the most touted applications is the integration of email and voicemail. Asterisk has been doing this for years, … Read more