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
ODBC Voicemail Message Storage Asterisk enables you to store voicemail inside the database using the ODBC connector. This is useful in a clustered environment where you want to abstract the voicemail data from the local system so that multiple Asterisk boxes have access to the same data. Of course, you have to take into consideration … Read more
Storing Call Detail Records (CDR) Call detail records (CDR) contain information about calls that have passed through your Asterisk system. Storing CDR is a popular use of databases in Asterisk, because it makes them easier to manage (for example, you can keep track of many Asterisk systems in a single table). Also, by placing records … Read more
Managing Databases While it isn’t within the scope of this book to teach you about how to manage your databases, it is at least worth noting briefly some of the applications you could use to help with database management. Several exist, some of which are local client applications running from your computer and connecting to … Read more
we are going to explore integrating some Asterisk features and functions into a database. There are several databases available for Linux, but we have chosen to limit our discussion to the two most popular: PostgreSQL and MySQL. We will also explain how to configure Linux to connect to a Microsoft SQL database via ODBC; however, … Read more
In Asterisk, Shared Line Appearances (SLA)—sometimes also referred to in the industry as Bridged Line Appearances (BLA)—can be used. This functionality can be used to satisfy two primary use cases, which include emulating a simple key system and creating shared extensions on a PBX. Building key system emulation is what these applications were primarily designed … Read more
It is often useful to be able to determine the state of the devices that are attached to a telephone system. For example, a receptionist might require the ability to see the statuses of everyone in the office in order to determine whether somebody can take a phone call. Asterisk itself needs this same information. … Read more
ISN, ITAD, and freenum.org The biggest shortcoming of ENUM is that it uses a numbering system that is not under the control of any Internet numbering authorities. The freenum.org project solves this problem by utilizing a numbering scheme that is managed by IANA. This means that a formal, globally valid, nongeographic numbering system for VoIP … Read more