hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0538.txt

Episode: 538
Title: HPR0538: asterisk-cast
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0538/hpr0538.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 22:42:44

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Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
I'm Cobra II.
I'll be your host today.
Let's get down to it.
I'm going to talk about asterisks and how asterisks can make your life easier.
Alright, so what you need to do is you need to grab the sources for asterisks.
You need to grab the asterisks source itself, and you need to grab the dotty package as well.
The sources for the dotty package.
Dotty is a module that you can pile for your kernel that will keep the timing for the
conference rooms in asterisks.
Got to have it, whether you've got special hardware or not.
So the compile is pretty simple.
First you build a dotty, just run configure, make, make install, normal easy peasy stuff.
Then for asterisks, run configs.slashconfigure, and after that gets done you want to run make
menu select, and this will dump you into a bunch of options, and you just kind of want
to pick and parse through and grab what you want to get and leave what you don't.
I went and picked and chose a couple different codecs that I wanted and pulled out other codecs
that I didn't want supported, and I also set it up to pull down all the audio files for
the codecs that I had selected.
So after you get done with the menu select stuff, just hit queue to exit, and then hit
ask to save, and then run make, and then make install, and you're also going to want
to run make install samples, and what that's going to do is that's going to dump a bunch
of default configs inside of slash Etsy slash asterisks, and as of right then you can
go ahead and fire up asterisks if you want, but I wouldn't bother starting it up yet.
Alright, so what we're going to do is we're just going to get a conference room up and
running, and first thing you want to do is you want to make a backup of the default
configurations for extensions.coinf, sip.coinf, and meetme.coinf, just in case you screw
something up, and then you're going to want to log in as root and modprobe.daha-underscore-dummy,
and that's going to go ahead and load that dotty module into your kernel.
You've got to have it for a conference calls because they're just not going to work if
you don't.
As you're running through the config files, you should just kind of read all the comments
and the asterisks, the default configs are very well commented, and you can pretty much
figure out everything just from reading the configs, nothing real complicated there.
Read it.
If you don't understand something, that's what Google's for.
So the first file we're going to dig into is the extensions file.
So just open it up and your editor of choice is root, and scroll down to close to the
bottom of the file, and you'll see some examples, or you'll see an example of a meetme
conference room.
And what you're going to do here is just kind of comment it out and use a semicolon to
comment out stuff in the asterisks configs.
And we're going to add in EXTEN equal greater than 8600 comma 1 comma answer with a capital
A, and open close parentheses, and you're going to want to do pretty much follow that same
format of EXTEN equals greater than, and basically that's like extension, is equal to,
and then 8600 is the actual extension number.
And then after the first comma you've got steps of what's what asterisks is supposed
to do when it sees that that extension has been dialed.
And then after the step you've got another comma, and that tells asterisks exactly what
to do.
So for the next line we're going to add EXTEN equals greater than 8600 comma 2 comma
weight, open parentheses number 1, close parentheses, next line, EXTEN equals greater than 8600 comma
3, meet me, open parentheses, 3, 3, 3, 0, close parentheses, and that line right there
is linking 8600, the extension 8600 to the meet me conference room, 3, 3, 3, 0.
Next line will be, you can either go ahead and put in a line here to go ahead and start
recording for your conference, if you want that, there's two ways to do that.
You can either have asterisks mix the incoming and outgoing soundtracks together as it
receives it, or you can have asterisks just dump it out to a wave file.
If you want it to mix it all together, you're going to want to run EXTEN equals greater
than 8600, 4, open parentheses, capital M, I, X, capital M, O, N, I, T, O, R, open parentheses,
your file name, comma, pipe, A, V, open parentheses, 0, close parentheses, capital V, open
parentheses, 0, close parentheses, close parentheses, and that will tell asterisks to mix everything
that it gets for everyone calling in to this conference room to go ahead and take the
inputs and outputs from each of the individual callers and mucks them all into one file.
There's a little bit of extra work, but if you've got somebody that's got really low
audio, you're not going to be able to go in and tweak it and bump it up on the recording.
So it's got its ups and downs.
Now if you want asterisks to just record and dump all the separate input and output files,
you're going to want to use EXTEN equals greater than 8600, 4, capital M, O, N, I, T, O,
R, close parentheses, wave, comma, and the file name, and that's going to tell asterisks
to monitor the call instead of mix monitor, and you're going to use a wave extension, comma,
and then the file name that you want.
The file name is more of like a prefix to the call, the individual callers.
And then finally you're going to want EXTEN equals greater than 8600, 5, hang up with
the capital H, open parentheses, close parentheses, now bright and close, and you're done.
On to the next config, we're going to open up meetme.conf, I'm going to scroll down to
underneath where you'll see brackets that says rooms, and underneath that bracket somewhere
you just want to punch in, c-o-n-f equal greater than 33330.
Now if you want to put a pin on your conference room, so you've given out your asterisks conference
number to a bunch of people, and you just kind of want to, you've posted it up on like
a web page somewhere, and you want to make sure that only the people that you want in
on it are able to call in, you can add a comma to the end of 33330, and then put in your
pin number, like 33330 comma 1, 2, 3, 4, right and close, and you're done with that.
And now for the fun file, now we get to edit c-o-n-f, and you're going to want to change the
bind port from 50, 60 to something else, but that's only if you're going to be running
a sip client on the same machine that the server itself is running on.
If not, I wouldn't bother with it, you'll be just fine.
Unless you're, you want to run a sip client on the same network that the asterisks box
is running on, then you might want to change it, that heck, you might just want to change
it for the heck of it.
You're also going to need to run down to the external ip, it's just ex-t-e-r-n-i-p,
and you want to change that to your external ip if you have a static ip.
If you don't have a static ip, you need to scroll down to ex-t-e-r-n-h-o-s-t, and put
something in there like your dynamic DNS host, or no ip, whatever you use.
You also might have to change the NAT settings, either yes or no, it's just something you'll
have to play with if you've got NAT enabled or not, right and close, and let's go ahead
and fire up asterisks, you want to log in as a root, make sure you've already done the
mod probe dotty underscore dummy, and just run asterisks-vvvc, that's three v's for verbose,
verbose for boasts, and then the c will dump you into the asterisks command line interface.
Instead of doing that, you could just run asterisks-vvv, and put a space in the ampersound, and
then type in asterisks-r to reconnect, and this will give you the option to exit from the
asterisks command line interface, whereas if you ran vvvc, you wouldn't have the option
to exit the CLI interface. Now, you've got asterisks up and running, but you probably aren't
going to be able to test it yet, you need to go into your router and forward the ports to asterisks.
By default asterisks uses UDP ports 10,000 through 12,000, you can dig around and config
files and change that to whatever. You're also going to want to forward UDP on the bind port
that you selected, and that's what your asterisks-subproxy will run off of. Now, from a separate
machine, if possible, not on the same network, fire up a sip client, and 8600 at whatever
your external IP or dynamic DNS host was, colon and your bind port. If you're the only
person in the room, you're all set with a pure sip server. If you didn't, you screwed
up somewhere, or I told you something wrong, it could be either or. But now, you and all
your friends can sit and chat on asterisks.