Author: Joe Barr
I installed Asterisk on OpenWrt White Russian RC4 on a Linksys WRT54GS wireless router. It’s my first Asterisk installation. I admit that I scraped the knuckles on both hands getting Asterisk correctly configured, but now that I’ve done it, I would say it was worth all the frustrations it caused me. Not only do I now have a functional personal PBX, I’ve also learned a little about the black art of telephony along the way.
Installation was a snap. All I had to do was point my browser at the WRT54GS’s IP address, log in at the OpenWRT Admin Console, and then click the install button next to the Asterisk and Asterisk-sounds packages. The install was finished, but I still had a long way to go.
But first, a word or two about what I had already done prior to installing Asterisk. I first had to find a telephone I could use with Asterisk. I chose a Budge Tone Grandstream BT-101, based on its relatively low cost. You have to configure the phone’s user name, password, network parameters, and method of sending dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) to get it to work with your Asterisk installation.
Next, I had to find a suitable VoIP provider. I found 11 zillion Internet phone companies, but not all of them are Asterisk-friendly, nor do they all allow customers to BYOD (bring your own device). When I found one — NuFone — that did both, and seemed reasonably priced, I signed up for an account.
Configure this way
You must walk many paths, grasshopper, to Asterisk on OpenWRT configuration enlightenment. Sometimes those paths cross, double back, or wander deep into the land of Notworkski, but you must hack them until they work. I’ll provide key portions of my configuration files in this story, but while they may work for me and my particular hardware and provider environment, they may not work for you. Use them as a guide rather than simply copying them into your /etc/asterisk directory.
| Resources |
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The best documentation I’ve come across on Asterisk is a book from O’Reilly called Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, by Jared Smith, Jim Van Meggelen, and Leif Madsen.
Because the book is published under the Creative Commons license, it is available from both regular retail channels and by free download on the Internet. In addition, the Asterisk Documentation Project provides a lot of valuable documentation. |
As you do the configuration, it may help to think of Asterisk as a PBX, the old-fashioned kind where an operator would physically connect an incoming call to the correct extension by plugging the correct patch-cord into the right socket. The Asterisk software does basically the same thing: it is all about patching local extensions to incoming or outgoing calls.
In my simple home office environment, my local extension — the SIP BT-101 Internet phone — needs to be able to talk to an Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX) network, NuFone. When we’re done, Asterisk will speak the IAX protocol to NuFone and SIP to the phone.
If you look in /etc/asterisk after the install you’ll see about 20 configuration files. Don’t despair; you probably need to worry about only three of them: iax.conf, sip.conf, and extensions.conf.
All Asterisk configuration files are plain text files. The ground rules for hacking them are simple. Each conf file — or at least each of the three covered in this article — is divided into sections. Section names, sometimes referred to as contexts, are given within brackets, like this: [section-name]. Anything on a line following a semicolon is a comment and is ignored by the software. Some configuration statements take the form item=whatever. Others look like item => something.
Let’s start with the iax.conf file. The IAX protocol thinks of its relationships as being between peers, users, or friends. The relationship between my Asterisk installation and Nufone is defined twice: one as peer, once as user. The settings in iax.conf allow Asterisk to register and handle outgoing calls from and incoming calls to the NuFone.
In the [general] section of iax.conf, I added the following line to register my account at NuFone:
register => username:password@nufone.net
In addition, I added two new sections to the file, both named NuFone. The first defines a peer relationship for outbound calls. The next defines a user relationship for inbound calls. My iax.conf looks like this:
[general] bandwidth=high allow=all disallow=g723.1 jitterbuffer=no forcejitterbuffer=no
register => user-name:password@providerIPaddress
tos=lowdelay autokill=yes
[NuFone] type=peer user=username host=providerIPaddress secret=password disallow=all allow=ulaw allow=gsm
[NuFone] type=user secret=password context=inbound
Now let’s take a look at sip.conf. Remember, Asterisk is talking IAX to NuFone, and SIP to our phone, the BT-101, so sip.conf is where we tell Asterisk about the phone. My sip.conf looks like this, and should be a good starting point:
[general] context=default ; Default context for incoming calls bindport=5060 ; UDP Port to bind to (SIP standard port is 5060) bindaddr=0.0.0.0 ; IP address to bind to (0.0.0.0 binds to all) srvlookup=yes ; Enable DNS SRV lookups on outbound calls
[authenticate] auth=username:password@192.168.1.1
[bt101] type=friend context=internal ; Where to start in the dialplan when this phone calls callerid=name ; Full caller ID, to override the phones config host=dynamic user=username secret=password nat=no ; there is not NAT between phone and Asterisk canreinvite=no ; allow RTP voice traffic to bypass Asterisk dtmfmode=rfc2833 ; either RFC2833 or INFO for the BudgeTone call-limit=1 ; permit only 1 outgoing call and 1 incoming call at a time
Asterisk looks to a configuration called a dialplan to see how you want a call to be handled. You define dialplans in extensions.conf, which tells Asterisk how to handle phone calls. Before you craft a dialplan in extensions.conf, I recommend you have a copy of the book Asterisk: The Future of Telephony available for guidance.
Next: The dialplan
Creating a dialplan is a little bit like programming. You may remember that in iax.conf and sip.conf, we made entries identifying the context of whatever device or channel was being defined. That entry tells Asterisk where to look in extensions.conf for guidance on the connection being requested.
Here is my simple extensions.conf.
;
[general]
;
static=yes
writeprotect=no
autofallthrough=yes
clearglobalvars=no
priorityjumping=no
[globals]
TRUNKMSD=1 ; MSD digits to strip (usually 1 or 0)
OUTBOUNDTRUNK=IAX2/warthawg@NuFone
NUFONENUMBER=8005551212 ; phony number
[internal]
include => inbound
include => outbound
exten => 101,1,Dial(SIP/bt101,15)
exten => _9NXXNXXXXXX,1,Goto(outbound|BYEXTENSION|1)
[inbound]
exten => 8005551212,1,Answer
exten => 8005551212,2,Background(enter-ext-of-person)
exten => 101,1,Dial(SIP/bt101,15)
exten => 101,102,Playback(ext-is-busy)
exten => 101,103,Hangup
exten => i,1,Playback(invalid)
exten => i,2,Goto(inbound,8004288951,2)
exten => t,1,Hangup
[outbound]
exten => _91NXXNXXXXXX,1,Dial(${OUTBOUNDTRUNK}/${EXTEN:1})
exten => _91NXXNXXXXXX,2,Congestion
exten => _91NXXNXXXXXX,102,Congestion
[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(SIP/bt101,15)
Let’s go over the [inbound] context shown above, which contains the rules for Asterisk to apply to incoming calls from my DID number from NuFone.
| Asterisk-speak: A basic primer |
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Dialplan – the instructions that control the execution of your PBX: making connections for incoming, outgoing, and internal calls. DID – Direct Inward Dialing. A method of overloading physical phone lines so that you can have a greater number of extensions than actual lines. In a small business, for example, there may only be four phone lines, but — thanks to the magic of DID — six or eight extensions can share them, each reachable by its own distinct phone number. The phone company passes the number dialed to the PBX, and the PBX patches the call to the correct extension. So even though you have only four lines, you can pretend to have twice that many. The only caveat is that you are always limited by the fact that you can’t have more concurrent calls than you have real lines. If you’ve ever tried to make a call from an extension in a business but have gotten a message saying all lines are busy, DID is the culprit. IAX – Inter-Asterisk eXchange protocol, Asterisk’s protocol for data transport. These days, IAX actually refers to IAX2, the second generation of IAX. IAX can handle a number of different codecs and types of data, from voice to video. Jitter – An abrupt stop/start/change in the rate of incoming traffic which causes the audio signal to break up and perhaps to garble words. Similar to pixelation on a video stream, except it’s in your ear. PBX – Private Branch eXchange. The equipment that routes incoming and outgoing calls at a location to the phones on the desks at that location. Basically, a switchboard. Asterisk is an open source software PBX. POTS – Plain Old Telephone Service. What you get from Ma Bell or one of her children or competitors. PSTN – Public Switched Telephone Network. RTP – Real-time Transport Protocol. An Internet protocol (per RFC 1889) for the transport of audio and video. SIP – Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is an IETF standard for managing interactive sessions requiring multimedia, and is widely used for VOIP. SIP does not pass data; it only manages the sessions. RTP is used to pass the data after SIP sets up the session. |
When a call is received on the inbound IAX connection defined in iax.conf, it is identified by the number the caller dialed when calling me. Any line that begins exten => applies only to the extension or group of extensions following the =>. I say extension or group of extensions because it can either be a discrete phone number, like 8005551212, or a pattern for an extension that may include a number of different extensions. The general format for the exten => directive is extension, priority, command. The priority determines the order of execution, not the order in which they appear in the file.
The first three lines of the [inbound] context are only executed when the extension is that of the DID number provided by NuFone. Regardless of the order those three lines appear in, they are executed by priority, with the lowest number being the highest priority.
Therefore, the Answer command is executed first, the Background second. The Background command plays a recording asking the caller to enter the extension he desires.
You could use Playback on this line instead of Background, but if you use Background, Asterisk will listen for the extension being entered while the message is being played. If you use Playback, Asterisk won’t start listening for the extension until the message has been played, which could be annoying for callers who already know what the message says.
Note that the extension changes in the third line. If and only if the caller enters extension 101 does Asterisk dial the BT101 extension. If the caller dials 101 and someone answers, the connection is complete and we are done.
If the extension dialed is busy, Asterisk bumps the priority by adding 101 to the priority that dialed the call, so that any following commands with a priority of less than 102 are not executed. In my dialplan, a busy extension plays a message saying I’m busy and asks the caller to call back later, then hangs up.
Asterisk provides two special codes for the extension for easy handling of both invalid and busy extensions. Notice the first two lines following the Hangup command. Both use the special i code, meaning an invalid — unhandled — extension was entered. Those two lines play a message to the caller, then route the call back to the Background command, asking the caller to enter the extension desired.
The last command in the [incoming] context uses the special t extension code, which catches calls where no extension is entered within 10 seconds. It simply hangs up the phone.
Starting Asterisk for the first time
To start Asterisk running on OpenWrt, enter asterisk -cvvv at the command line. This will open an Asterisk console for you, where you can monitor and control its operation.
While you are tweaking your configuration, it may be wise to enter the following two commands when you first start Asterisk.
set verbose 10 set debug 10
That will make Asterisk as verbose as it is possible for it to be, and when you’re shaking down your configuration, especially the dialplan, that’s a good thing. For other commands available at the Asterisk console, enter help.
When things don’t go as you think they should, turn to the book first, but remember that the version of Asterisk ported to OpenWrt is 1.07, and the current Asterisk version is 1.2.x, so the documentation may not match reality on OpenWrt. The #asterisk and #openwrt IRC channels on Freenode.net are also handy resources.
Having your own PBX is fun. Click Here for a sample of one my unavailable messages callers might be greeted with.
Conclusions about Asterisk on OpenWrt
I have experienced some jitter with Asterisk on OpenWrt, but most of the time the voice quality is fine. An active telephone call will have some impact on your Internet surfing and file downloading, but assuming you have broadband access, it won’t be significant, and vice versa.
I’ve since used bwm-ng — a bandwidth monitor — and measured Asterisk usage at 20KB a second each way during a SIP call. You probably will not notice it at all on your broadband connection, even though a big download or upload might take a little longer.
Memory and storage are the two big constraints on Asterisk on OpenWrt. A voice mail module is available, but with such scarce resources for storage, I opted not to use it. Running a second or third line would also be expensive in terms of memory, and might be more than OpenWrt could handle.
In my opinion, Asterisk on OpenWrt is a fun experiment, a good way to learn about telephony, and an easy way to learn Asterisk. But I wouldn’t want my small business, or even my home office, to depend on it for voice communications.
