Book Image

Asterisk 1.6

Book Image

Asterisk 1.6

Overview of this book

Asterisk is a powerful and flexible open source framework for building feature-rich telephony systems. As a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) which connects one or more telephones, and usually connects to one or more telephone lines, Asterisk offers very advanced features, including extension-to-extension calls, queues, ring groups, line trunking, call distribution, call detail rerecords, and call recording. This book will show you how to build a telephony system for your home or business using this open source application. 'Asterisk 1.6' takes you step-by-step through the process of installing and configuring Asterisk. It covers everything from establishing your deployment plan to creating a fully functional PBX solution. Through this book you will learn how to connect employees from all over the world as well as streamline your callers through Auto Attendants (IVR) and Ring Groups.This book is all you need to understand and use Asterisk to build the telephony system that meets your need. You will learn how to use the many features that Asterisk provides you with. It presents example configurations for using Asterisk in three different scenarios: for small and home offices, small businesses, and Hosted PBX. Over the course of ten chapters, this book introduces you to topics as diverse as Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN), Voice over IP Connections (SIP / IAX), DAHDI, libpri, through to advanced call distribution, automated attendants, FreePBX, and asterCRM. With an engaging style and excellent way of presenting information, this book makes a complicated subject very easy to understand.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Asterisk 1.6
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Monitoring calls


Slightly less friendly than recording the information about a call is enabling the ability to monitor calls in real time. This allows us to listen in to a conversation as it happens, so that we may see how our customers are being treated.

The application to use to monitor a DAHDI channel is called DAHDIBarge. It can only accept one command-line argument, which is the number of the channel to listen in on. If we do not pass DAHDIBarge an argument, it will prompt us to enter one. The channel numbers it requests are the same channel numbers given in system.conf and chan_dahdi.conf.

Suppose we had four outgoing DAHDI channels, numbered 1 through 4. We could have something like this in our extensions.conf file:

exten => 8700,1,DAHDIBarge
exten => 8700,2,Hangup
exten => 8701,1,DAHDIBarge(1)
exten => 8701,2,Hangup
exten => 8702,1,DAHDIBarge(2)
exten => 8702,2,Hangup
exten => 8703,1,DAHDIBarge(3)
exten => 8703,2,Hangup
exten => 8704,1,DAHDIBarge(4)...