Installing my first asterisk box for a company and things i learned...

Today was a fun day. I installed my first asterisk box, got 3 VOIP telephones connected, got voicemails set up for the users, got the inbound calls and outbound calls to route, got the incoming faxes to recieve, set up and auto-attendant.

The purpose of this article is to share with the asterisk community my experience of setting up the system for the first time. First of all, it took forever. I started at about 2:00PM and at 9:00PM i was just about wrapping up. Thats 7 hours for 3 phones, and i had already installed the OS and figured did a testing phase in my shop. Here is a list of things i didn't know i needed untill i got there.

1) All the telephone lines from the phone company need to be run to where the server is going to sit. When I arived on site, this was not done. I needed some 50 ft extension cables to run all the wires around. Sending a cabling guy in ahead of time would have saved me alot of time.

2) I was short a few ethernet cables, and a few ethernet extenders. I spent a while driving around looking for this stuff.

3) Of the telephone lines that i did have, they were set up with the two line per wire configuration. This is not good. The x100P Zaptel cards need to have one phone line per card. We spent considerable time reconfiguring the lines.

4) Of the 3 x100P cards i did have, one of them turned out to be bad. I was not able to deturmine this until i called each number individually, to see the response of the server when i called each card. I figured out that one of the cards would not answer the line. Before this test, i kept getting wierd problems, i could not call out on two lines at the same time, i could not recieve a call when i was on a line. I spent a couple hours trying to figure out why the asterisk server was not behaving like it should when i would have figured it out in 5 minutes had i just tested each card individually. ALWAYS TEST ALL YOUR CHANNELS BEFORE TRYING TO SET UP THE INCOMING AND OUTGOING CALL ROUTING.

5) Getting multiple cards working took a little while to set up. It was not entirely clear how the config files needed to be set up to allow it to use all the hardware. As it turns out, everything was probably working from the start, having a bad card in the system really confused the entire setup. Its just gonna take a few installs before you know what your doing. So hook the first few people up just so you can get the experience i guess.

All in all, i'm happy that the system seems to work well. I had a strange glitch where the box would seem to freeze up every so often it remains to be seen what the customer will think. I'll let you know