Re: pbx recco

[Jared Mauch <jared () puck nether net>]

On May 15, 2012, at 3:33 PM, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:

> Randy Bush <randy () psg com> writes:
>
> > have a friend who is a penguinista and wants to run a simple soft pbx.
> > support of soft phones, 7960s, connect to a commercial sip gate, ...
> > reccos for a packaged solution.
>
> While Asterisk's configuration files are horrible (and written by
> people who didn't understand what a tokenizer is) it's really a case
> of the more clueful you are the worse off you'll find it.  You just
> have to take a megadose of stupid pills in order to be happy with
> Asterisk's configuration.

so, I've also been running asterisk in various iterations.  It's much better than it was in the past, but what I've 
found is once you poke at it enough macros are your friend and make your life easier.

I'm not sure how many of you have programmed some other type of PBX while on a modem or terminal, but asterisk clearly 
makes it easier to diagnose what is going on and integrate a number of other solutions.  It's also really meant to be 
run in a Linux environment vs *BSD.  Much pain can be explained by trying to deal with OS port variances.

The biggest problem I've seen is that for mass-users, the diverse network environments pose challenges to VoIP.  Many 
international hotels block 5060 or have broken NAT/ALG issues.

You usually need to VPN to the PBX or "internet" to work around these issues in my experience.

- Jared (A mostly happy asterisk user)