text stringlengths 0 152 |
|---|
Matt Fredrickson (Director of Asterisk Engineering, |
Sangoma/Digium) |
I have had the opportunity to work with Asterisk for the last 18 years, and have seen |
it grow from a small project with one or two people into something that has a life of |
its own with hundreds of contributors. It’s amazing to see the number of different |
places it has disrupted traditional telecom—at home, in the office, and in the enter‐ |
prise. As traditional communication patterns shift, the Asterisk project continues to |
be in the place where it does best—bridging old forms of communication with the |
new, and pushing the boundaries of what can be done with the new. This book will |
help you see the most modern face of Asterisk and how to better utilize it in your |
telecommunications infrastructure. Huge thanks goes to Jim Van Meggelen for all the |
hard work on putting this most current edition together. |
xvi |
| |
Foreword |
Preface |
This is a book for anyone who uses Asterisk. |
Asterisk is an open source, converged telephony platform, which is designed primar‐ |
ily to run on Linux. Asterisk combines more than 100 years of telephony knowledge |
into a robust suite of tightly integrated telecommunications applications. The power |
of Asterisk lies in its customizable nature, complemented by unmatched standards |
compliance. No other private branch exchange (PBX) can be deployed in so many |
creative ways. |
Applications such as voicemail, hosted conferencing, call queuing and agents, music |
on hold, and call parking are all standard features built right into the software. More‐ |
over, Asterisk can integrate with other business technologies in ways that closed, pro‐ |
prietary PBXs can scarcely dream of. |
Asterisk can appear quite daunting and complex to a new user, which is why docu‐ |
mentation is so important to its growth. Documentation lowers the barrier to entry |
and helps people contemplate the possibilities. |
Produced with the generous support of O’Reilly Media, Asterisk: The Definitive Guide |
is the fifth edition of what was formerly called Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. |
This book was written for, and by, members of the Asterisk community. |
Audience |
This book is intended to be gentle toward those new to Asterisk, but we assume that |
you’re familiar with basic Linux administration, networking, and other IT disciplines. |
If not, we encourage you to explore the vast and wonderful library of books that |
O’Reilly publishes on these subjects. We also assume you’re fairly new to telecommu‐ |
nications (both traditional switched telephony and the new world of Voice over IP). |
xvii |
However, this book will also be useful for the more experienced Asterisk administra‐ |
tor. We ourselves use the book as a reference for features that we haven’t used for a |
while. |
Software |
This book is focused on documenting Asterisk version 16; however, many of the con‐ |
ventions and much of the information in this book is version-agnostic. Linux is the |
operating system we have run and tested Asterisk on, and we have documented |
installation instructions for CentOS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL). |
Conventions Used in This Book |
The following typographical conventions are used in this book: |
Italic |
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, file extensions, path‐ |
names, directories, and package names, as well as Unix utilities, commands, |
modules, parameters, and arguments. |
Constant width |
Used to display code samples, file contents, command-line interactions, database |
commands, library names, and options. |
Constant width bold |
Indicates commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user. Also |
used for emphasis in code. |
Constant width italic |
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values. |
[ Keywords and other stuff ] |
Indicates optional keywords and arguments. |
{ choice-1 | choice-2 } |
Signifies either choice-1 or choice-2. |
This element signifies a tip or suggestion. |
xviii |
| Preface |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.