1. GUI or command line?
You can get the best of both worlds!
David Duffett, Digium
Working with the Worldwide Asterisk Community

2. 2Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Agenda
§ Explaining the relationship between Elastix and
Asterisk
§ A brief history of the Asterisk-based distro
§ Elastix: A comprehensive telephony solution, but
with access to the command line
§ Requirement scenarios – which is best?
§ The work that a GUI saves you

3. 3Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Agenda (continued)
§ The mechanics of Elastix
§ Files that you should not edit
§ Files that you can edit
§ GUI advantages
§ GUI disadvantages
§ Some things require that you edit at command line
level

4. 4Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Agenda (continued)
§ Hardware configuration
§ Troubleshooting

5. 5Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
ElastixWorld 2011 - Moustaches

6. 6Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
ElastixWorld 2012 - Glasses
§ Glasses will help you learn

7. 7Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
The relationship between
Elastix and Asterisk
Operating System
Kernel Driver
Channel Driver
Communications
Engine
GUI
Distro/Framework

8. 8Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
A brief history of the Asterisk-based distro
§ Asterisk arrives in 1999
§ Asterisk Management Portal
§ Asterisk at Home is the first distro
§ AMP becomes FreePBX
§ Other distros arrive, not all survive
– Elastix is the best/most popular
– PBX in a Flash

9. 9Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
The Great thing about ELASTIX
§ A world-class Open Source PBX (or completed
Unified Communications solution)…
§ GUI driven…
§ BUT
§ …with access to the Command Line!!!!!!

10. 10Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
There are actually TWO command lines
§ The Linux command line
§ Looks like this…
§ root@localhost ~]#

11. 11Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
There are actually TWO command lines
§ The Asterisk command line
– Accessed by using ‘asterisk –r’
§ Looks like this…
§ localhost*CLI>
§ Common for newbies to get confused between the
two command lines

12. The work that the GUI saves you

13. 13Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Setting up an extension
§ A simple task in Elastix

14. 14Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Setting up an extension
§ To do the same in Asterisk, the following files
must be edited:
§ /etc/asterisk/sip.conf – to configure a profile for the
device to link to
§ /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf – to create a mailbox
for the extension
§ /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf – to create a dialplan
entry so that the extension can be called
§ THREE files, several lines of configuration…

15. 15Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Asterisk configuration files
§ /etc/asterisk/sip.conf
– [david2001]
type=friend
host=dynamic
secret=c0mpl1cat3d
context=from-internal
§ /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf
– [default]
2001 => 9999,david duffett,dduffett@digium.com
§ /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf
[from-internal]
exten => 2001,1,Dial(SIP/david2001,30,tT)

16. 16Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Setting up a trunk
§ Settings are explained…

17. 17Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Elastix System Diagram

18. 18Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Files that you should not edit
§ ALL OF THEM!!!!!
§ Well, nearly all of them

19. 19Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Files that you can edit
§ They all have ‘custom’ in the name – these will not
be changed by the GUI
§ Eg:
– /etc/asterisk/sip_custom.conf
– /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf

20. 20Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
The purpose of the GUI
§ To make life easy
§ Handle the jobs that we need to do regularly
§ Cover the most popular functionality
§ The 80/20 rule
– We spend 80% of our time using 20% of the
functionality of our communications system

21. 21Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
The reality of using a GUI over Asterisk
§ Abstracts the administrator away from the
complexity of manual configuration – and that is a
GOOD thing
§ Restricts the administration in terms of the level of
control they have in configuration – and that can
be a BAD thing

22. 22Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
When only the command line will do…
§ Protocol level debugging
– SIP
– IAX2
– DAHDI (PRI/BRI/FXO/FXS)
§ AGI work
§ Checking whether an e-mail has been sent

23. 23Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Hardware
§ The Hardware Detector in Elastix is a wonderful
thing…
§ It generates two files:
– /etc/dahdi/system.conf
– /etc/asterisk/dahdi-channels.conf**
§ **dahdi-channels.conf is #included in
chan_dahdi.conf

24. 24Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
The Hardware Detector

25. 25Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
The Hardware Detector
§ Actually based on dahdi_genconf – which was
contributed to the Open Source project by Xorcom
in 2006

26. 26Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Digium hardware is a natural choice
Operating System
Kernel Driver
Channel Driver
Communications Engine
GUI
Distro/Framework

27. 27Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Any questions
before I summarise?

28. 28Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
In Summary
§ Elastix gives an amazing GUI-driven
communications system…
§ …But gives you command line access when you
want it!

29. 29Creative Innovation – Customer Satisfaction – Continual Quality Improvement
Thanks!
david.duffett@asterisk.org