[geeks] Asterisk help

[james]

On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 13:59, james wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 13:51, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > So, I hear that I can use a PCI winmodem as a single-line FXO
> > interface.. anybody have pointers?
> > 
> > I'm looking at building up another mini-ITX box to run asterisk
> > at the new place in Houston..

OH, at a corp site.

wait. stop and think about the career implosion possibilities.
* itself is nice but integration with things like ISDN/T1 
interfaces and VoIP providers can make it ugly. It works,
but you have to spend time figuring it out. I also recommend
a background in traditional phone systems first, so you
understand the vast assortment of features they have and 
how to get * to do them too.

There are many things that any
phone system will do that doesn't work well in *. More specifically,
IP-PBX's leave most of the feature integration up to the phone itself,
it's not part of the PBX per se. Things like terminal paging, 
conferencing, trunk-trunk bridging and stuff requires an expensive phone.

You might want to look at Cisco's IP PBX, otherwise consider using their
phones.

But, for experimenting, there are some cheap ~$80 phones by Grandstream
and some ~$100 phones by others. There is also the Firefly softphone
that is free. You can use netmeeting too.