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Page 1 of 4 SolutionBase: Configure Asterisk to support a T1 PRI connection by Brian Smith. Setting up an Asterisk PBX server won't do you much good if you don't connect it to the outside world. In this article, B
Asterisk provides an open source solution for those who want to deploy VoIP in an organization, but don't want to invest a lot of money in a proprietary solution. After you get the software installed on a server, you have some more work to do. You have to connect your server to an outside voice line. In this article, I'm going to show you how to set up the Asterisk Soft PBX system interface with a T1 PRI connection. Afterwards, you should be able to install a Zaptel-compatible PRI card, configure it for your needs, and modify your Asterisk dial plan to begin making outgoing phone calls from your internal SIP phones, as well as receive phone calls over your PRI line to your SIP clients. Author's note There are many different options for configuring your outgoing trunk, and it's impossible to cover all of the options in the scope of this article. What will be covered is the most common configuration in the United States, which is for a T1 PRI. I recommend that you become friendly with your sales/support representative and tech support, as you should ask questions about what the channel stepping method is, encodings, and D-Channel. Zaptel device preparation Before you can worry about making a connection, you should have Asterisk installed on your server, as well as have inserted and installed your PRI card into your server. To start the install process, you'll need libpri and the Zaptel package of drivers; you can download the sources to these packages from the Asterisk Web site. Since we are using the Gentoo distribution for our examples, you&'ll need to log in as root to install these (or su over the command shell). From here, you need to run emerge -pv libpri zaptel, as shown in Figure A. If you've installed Asterisk with all the USE flags, then you can probably skip this step, as these packages are already installed. When installing these packages using emerge, you can view the available options with the -pv argument if you're using a BRI connection or require any additional settings for the Zaptel package. You can also add the appropriate USE flag in the /etc/portage/package.use file. For example, if you were using a BRI line, your package.use file may have these following entries. net-libs/libpri bri net-misc/zaptel bri
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