
Asterisk 17 - SimonAC
https://www.mail-archive.com/asterisk-announce@lists.digium.com/msg00745.html
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apotatopot
It's funny to me to see "was cool" and "amazing this is still alive", because
I absolutely love Asterisk. I cut my teeth building Freepbx boxes at a
small/mid business voip provider in college before moving on to a different
field.

To give an idea why I think it is so cool, my podcast offers neat things to
folks who call in to leave a voicemail. You can listen to entire podcast
episodes, explore a crude phone sound "museum", and if you're a subscriber to
the podcast you are given the password to our party line, where you can talk
to our hosts and other subscribers. I'm also building a choose your own
adventure type game on our phone system using IVRs and things for our top tier
subscribers to play.

We're not a phone-centric podcast, but it's super easy supplemental content to
provide folks for cheap. It's also currently running in the raspberrypi
specific release [http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/](http://www.raspberry-
asterisk.org/)

There are other folks who absolutely rely on Asterisk for their shows, some
that have been around forever, like the Phone Losers of America Snow Plow
Show.

~~~
RIMR
I use Asterisk to tie a bunch of my shit together. I even have little burner
phones that can do all sorts of cool things thanks to modern SIMs and VoIP
tech.

What's your podcast? I'll bookmark it for later.

~~~
apotatopot
That's awesome. I've been toying with the idea of setting up things like that.
My next little project is setting up sms support so folks can text in.

My podcast is Accidentally Fasting. Again, not related to tech at all, but I
get to play around with this stuff since it's such an open format. Thanks for
checking us out!

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/accidentally-
fasting/i...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/accidentally-
fasting/id1448616485) [https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/accidentally-
fasting](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/accidentally-fasting)

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stingraycharles
It's amazing this project is still alive and kicking. Back in the day, early
2000s, I was employed by Takeaway.com to automate a large part of their
outbound callcenter work (after faxing an order for a Pizza, sometimes an
error occurred due to paper jam etc and our callcenter had to verify the order
arrived).

As this was way before the day of Twilio, Asterisk allowed us to completely
automate that process, thus reducing the work of our callcenter tremendously.
I can only assume they use a service like Twilio for this nowadays, but they
were fun times, it allowed us to save incredible amounts of money, and is a
good example of how opensource software helps small businesses in their early
phase.

~~~
rstuart4133
> It's amazing this project is still alive and kicking.

It's not really amazing. It's the OpenWRT of phone systems. There are lots of
commercial PABX systems out there that are Asterisk with a skin. VOIP
providers often use if for instance.

It's "dial plan", which I guess was originally a list of phone number patterns
mapping to instructions one how to handle them, grew into a fully fledged but
absolutely horrid language, complete with function calls, variables, and
macros and threads of execution. The addition of IAX, which is effectively a
protocol that lets a dial plan running in one copy of Asterisk invoke
functions in another dial plan running in another copy let you build
distributed PABX's.

From a computer science language design perspective the this conglomerate of
organically added features is truly ghastly. But that doesn't matter. What
matters is it does allow you to build amazingly complex that can deliver any
feature you care to name. I've built systems that with over 20 instances of
Asterisk, most with no external SIP lines of their own, that to the users
functions like a single PABX in the cloud. All the calls are logged to a
central place so the organisation can track who is doing what. None of this
requires stepping outside of Asterisk provides in the box.

When you have a system that powerful and flexible, and yet bloody horrible to
configure, it's not surprising lots of 3rd parties base their own products on
it. I have absolutely no doubt those 3rd parties would not let Asterisk die.
They must know, understand and appreciate the power of the open source model,
so if the current project died some of them would stand up and fork a
replacement.

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dstroot
Like many of the commenters I heavily used asterisk 10 years ago. Seeing
comments like “can’t believe it’s still around” leads me to believe something
better came along. Did something better come along? I’d like to play around
with something new. Ps - still running my home PBX on Asterisk/FreePBX.

~~~
linsomniac
Phones have evolved to the point where we no longer have to make phone calls,
we can instead use them to send tiny letters to each other.

Nobody I know, and maybe this is self-selection, _likes_ making phone calls.
Nobody I know likes receiving phone calls. In fact, at home I never even
though about hooking up a phone when I moved 5 years ago. At work, when we
moved offices 3 years ago, we never even hooked up the PBX.

The number one voice use I have for my cell phone is the kids' school: 3-4
times a week, one of their computers calls and usually leaves me a voicemail,
which Google (badly, but good enough) translates to text. In short: They are
sending me voice SMSes. :-)

I loved Asterisk 20 years ago. It was insanely cool stuff. But I mostly live
in a different world now.

~~~
tjohns
I think this is definitely a bit of self-selection.

I find phone calls are still better for conducting _complex_ business - not
everything can (or should) be scripted using a form, and a phone call
sometimes is much more efficient than chat or email.

Video chat would be even better in some cases, but there's no standardized
infrastructure for this. And even then, outside a corporate environment that
has dedicated video conferencing rooms on both ends of the call, a phone call
is often simpler.

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throw0101a
If anyone wants to play around with VoIP, FreePBX is a Linux distro that has
packaged things up nicely for this purpose:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreePBX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreePBX)

The guy who runs Crosstalk Solutions has a good YT channel on VoIP (not
affiliated), amongst other tech-y stuff:

* [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVS6ejD9NLZvjsvhcbiDzjw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVS6ejD9NLZvjsvhcbiDzjw)

~~~
SpikedCola
+1 for FreePBX. No affiliation, just a happy user.

Fantastically easy to set up a PBX at home in under an hour, with no prior
Asterisk experience.

~~~
DrPhish
Definitely. FreePBX was an amazing way to get a fully featured PBX with very
little time investment.

When I finally wanted to ditch the GUI and get to a bare-bones Asterisk years
later, the concepts carried over. The hardest part was tuning the very full-
featured default config down to only the features I needed for a simple home
PBX! I probably only retained 5% of the modules and config files that were
default enabled

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xorcist
Asterisk 17 is not an LTS release, which means it won't receive backported
security fixes when 18 is out. The latest LTS release is Asterisk 16.

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dmw_ng
Asterisk was amazing fun, in one place we had it hooked up to a big chunk of
Python -- everything driven by a program connected to the manager API, with
events percolating through to a pre-websocket, pre-AJAX ColdFusion app (we
used long polling, I think) that put up a popup with the customer's info as
your extension rang. The preferred extension to ring was pulled out of the
customer's call history, so they'd always get the same agent if possible.

For another customer it was a similar deal, only this time it was to glue an
old school call center PBX system to Asterisk for reasons I can no longer
remember. The PBX had its own management interface, so again a Python app
connected to both interfaces and figured out call identities on both sides,
which were dumped into a MySQL database for (I think) the web app used by the
call center staff.

I talked to those guys a few years later and it was all still running. He told
me it reliably hung once a week but he never bothered to report it because a
shell script automatically restarted it in that case. Resourceful sysadmins!
Good times

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ivankolev
Brings back memories of debugging by making a phone call to hit my
breakpoints.

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dancemethis
So weird to see these comments, aye. My gig uses Asterisk heavily, and
Astricon just happened in Atlanta (went there).

It's quite alive.

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kimi
AstriCon was last week in Atlanta, and had 300+ attendees. Fred Posner wrote
about it in
[https://www.fredposner.com/2243/astricon-2019-thoughts/](https://www.fredposner.com/2243/astricon-2019-thoughts/)

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yumraj
I never did it, but many years ago had an idea to run an Asterix box with
extensions for everyone in the extended family, spread over cities/countries.

Not sure how easy/practical it is/was, but always thought it'd be a good
experiment.

I wonder if anyone ever did something similar.

~~~
apotatopot
It wouldn't be extremely difficult to configure, but I think security would be
a hassle.

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jtchang
I just brought up a fresh version of Asterisk. There is definitely a lot of
terms to get use to but for someone who has some background it isn't too bad
to pick up.

However I can see how confusing the world of telephony can be with all the
crazy acronyms.

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cbsks
Every few years I hear about Asterisk and think to myself that it would be
neat to set up at home, but I never got around to trying it out.

Is anyone running it at home? What is your setup like?

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sys_64738
I read this as Asterix and got excited about a new book. Alas it’s not.

~~~
jdsnape
There is a new Asterix book too -
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/24/meet-
adrenalin...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/24/meet-adrenaline-
asterix-gets-first-female-hero-in-60-year-history)

~~~
sys_64738
Awesome!

~~~
julienfr112
Be careful, new Astérix are not as good as the old ones. The one with the
Swarzenegger Superman is even awful.

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TomMasz
AllStarLink
([https://www.allstarlink.org/about/about.php](https://www.allstarlink.org/about/about.php))
is software for linking ham radio repeaters that's based on Asterisk.

