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hands dirty, and do the work, you will find a community more than willing to share
their hard-won knowledge with you.
The following are some of the places the Asterisk community hangs out.
Asterisk’s Discourse-Based Community Site
Asterisk moved its official forums to https://community.asterisk.org/ in 2015. This
appears to be the most active community right now, and the signal-to-noise ratio is
Asterisk: The Professional’s PBX
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excellent. The Digium folks do a good job of moderating this, and several of their
senior and experienced people are actively involved.
Bear in mind that this is not like paid support. You are expected to do the work your‐
self, but you can expect to get some good quality advice here, which can help to steer
you in the right direction.
The Asterisk Mailing Lists
The activity on these lists has been reduced to a trickle (down from hundreds of mes‐
sages per day to maybe a dozen threads per month). They are probably most useful as
an historical archive, but may be worth searching through when you’re working on
an intractable problem. Of the mailing lists you will find at lists.digium.com, these
two are likely to be the most useful:
Asterisk-Users
This list is a shadow of its former self. Whereas it used to generate several hun‐
dred messages per day, most of this traffic has moved to Digium’s Asterisk Com‐
munity site (above).
Asterisk-Dev
The Asterisk developers hang out here. The purpose and focus of this list is the
discussion of developing the software that is Asterisk, and participants vigorously
defend that purpose. Expect a lot of heat if you post anything to this list not
specifically relating to the programming or development of the Asterisk code
base. General coding questions (such as queries on interfacing with AGI or AMI)
should be directed to the Asterisk-Users list.
The Asterisk-Dev list is not second-level support! If you scroll
through the mailing list archives, you’ll see this is a strict rule.
The Asterisk-Dev mailing list is about discussion of core
Asterisk development, and questions about interfacing your
external programs via AGI or AMI should be posted on the
Asterisk-Users list.
Asterisk Wiki Sites
This isn’t really a community hangout, but it deserves a mention. Digium maintains a
wiki for Asterisk at wiki.asterisk.org. This site is constantly kept up to date by the Dig‐
ium team, and automated scripts export the XML-based documentation from the
Asterisk source into the wiki itself, all of which helps to ensure that the data you’re
reading is an accurate representation of the world.
An older wiki exists at www.voip-info.org, which is these days somewhat of an histori‐
cal curiosity, and a source of much enlightenment and confusion. While there is a
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Chapter 1: A Telephony Revolution
massive amount of information contained here, much of it is out of date. We include
reference to it here simply because you’re likely to land on it one day and think you’ve
hit the mother lode, but what you’ve actually found is more akin to a museum of his‐
torical oddities: fascinating, but not necessarily relevant.
The IRC Channels
The Asterisk community maintains Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels on
irc.freenode.net. The two most active channels are #asterisk and #asterisk-dev.4 To cut
down on spambot intrusions, both of these channels require registration to join. To
register, run /msg nickserv help when you connect to the service via your favorite
IRC client.
Conclusion
So where to begin? Well, when it comes to Asterisk, there is far more to talk about
than we can fit into one book. This book can only lay down the basics, but from this
foundation you will be able to come to an understanding of the concept of Asterisk—
and from that, who knows what you will build?
4 The #asterisk-dev channel is for the discussion of changes to the underlying code base of Asterisk and is also
not second-tier support. Discussions related to programming external applications that interface with Aster‐
isk via AGI or AMI are meant to be in #asterisk.
Conclusion
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CHAPTER 2
Asterisk Architecture
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.