Acknowledgments
Firstly, we have to thank our fantastic editor
Michael Loukides, who offered invaluable feedback and found
incredibly tactful ways to tell us to re-write a section (or
chapter) when it was needed, and have us think it was our idea.
Mike built us up when we were down, and brought us back to earth
when we got uppity. You are a master, Mike, and seeing how many
books have received your editorial oversight contributes to an
understanding of why O'Reilly Media is the success it is.
Thanks also to Rachel Wheeler, our copy editor,
Colleen Gorman, our production editor, and the rest of the unsung
heroes in O'Reilly's production department. These are the folks
that take our book and make it an O'Reilly book.
Everyone in the Asterisk community needs to
thank Jim Dixon for creating the first open-source telephony
hardware interfaces, starting the revolution, and giving his
creations to the community at large.
Thanks to Tim O'Reilly, for giving us a chance
to write this book.
To our most generous and merciless review
team:
-
Rich Adamson, President of Network Partners
Inc., for your encyclopedic knowledge of the PSTN, and your
tireless willingness to share your experience. Your generosity,
even in the face of daunting challenge, is inspiring to us all.
-
Dr. Edward Guy, Chief Scientist, Pulver
Innovations, for your comprehensive and razor-sharp evaluation of
each and every chapter, and for your championing of Asterisk.
-
Kristian Kielhofner, President, KrisCompanies
and creator of AstLinux, for the most excellent AstLinux
distribution.
-
Joel Sisko, Systems Integrator, for braving the
fire.
-
Travis Smith, for your valuable and timely
feedback.
-
Ted Wallingford, for leading the way with
O'Reilly's: Switching to VoIP.
-
Brian K. West, for your commitment to the
community, Asterisk, our book, and open-source telephony.
-
Joshua Colp, for putting up with, and answering,
the numerous questions posed by Leif.
-
Robert M. Zigweid, not only for your thorough
evaluation of our book (especially for slogging through the
appendices), but also for having the coolest name in the
universe.
Anthony Minessale (a.k.a. anthm) is one of the
unsung heroes of Asterisk development. The number of people who
have contributed to Asterisk development are many; the number who
can claim to have matched Anthony's efforts are few.
Finally, and most importantly, thanks go to Mark
Spencer for GAIM, Asterisk and DUNDi, and for contributing his
creations to the open source community.
Leif Madsen
The road to this book is a long onenearly three
years in the making. Back when I started using Asterisk, possibly
much like you, I didn't know anything about Asterisk, very little
about traditional telephony and even less about voice over IP. I
delved right into this new and very exciting world and took in all
I could. For two months during a co-op term, for which I couldn't
immediately find work, I absorbed as much as I could, asking
questions, trying things and seeing what the system could do.
Unfortunately very little to no documentation existed for Asterisk
aside from some dialplan examples I was able to find by John Todd
and having questions answered by Brian K. West on IRC. Of course,
this method wasn't going to scale.
Not being much of a coder, I wanted to
contribute something back to the community, and what do coders hate
doing more than anything? Documentation! So I started The Asterisk
Documentation Assignment (TADA), a basic outline with some
information for the beginnings of a book.
Shortly after releasing it on my website, an
intelligent fellow calling himself Jared Smith introduced himself.
He had similar aspirations for creating a "dead-tree" format book
for the community, and we humbly started the Asterisk Documentation
Project. Jared setup a simple web site at http://www.asteriskdocs.org, a
CVS server and the very first DocBook formatted version of a book
for Asterisk. From there we started filling in information, and
soon had information submitted by a number of members of the
community.
In June of 2004, an animated chap by the name of
Jim Van Meggelen started showing up on the mailing lists, and
contributing lots of information and documentation - this was
definitely a guy we wanted on our team! Jim had the vision and the
drive to really get Jared and my butts in gear and to work on
something grander. Jim brought us years of experience and a writing
flair which we could hardly have imagined.
With the core documentation team established, we
embarked on a plan for the creation of volumes of Asterisk
knowledge, eventually to lead to a complete library and wealth of
information. This book is essentially the beginning of that
dream.
Firstly and mostly, I have to thank my parents,
Rick and Carol for always supporting my efforts, allowing me to
realize my dreams, and always putting my needs ahead of theirs.
Without their vision, understanding and insight into the future, it
would have been impossible to have accomplished what I have. I love
you both very much!
I'd like to thank Felix Carapaica and Bill
Farkas of the Sheridan Institute of Technology for their dedication
to the advancement of knowledge. Their teaching has complemented my
prior learning, and has allowed me to expand my understanding of
routing and telecommunications exponentially.
There are far too many people to thank
individually, but of particular importance, the following people
were, and are, the most influential to my understanding of
Asterisk:, Olle Johansson, Steven Sokol, Joshua Colp, Brian K.
West, John Toddand William Suffill for my very first VoIP phone.
And for those who I said I'd mention in the book, thanks!
And of course, I must thank Jared Smith and Jim
Van Meggelen for having the vision and understanding of how
important documentation really isall of this would have been
impossible with you.
Jared Smith
I first started working with Asterisk in the
spring of 2002. I had recently started a new job with a market
research company, and ended up taking a long road trip to a remote
call center with the CIO. On the long drive home we talked about
innovation in telephony, and he mentioned a little open-source
telephony project he had heard of called Asterisk. Over the next
few months, I was able to talk the company into buying a developers
kit from Digium and start playing with Asterisk on company
time.
Over the next few months, I became more and more
involved with the Asterisk community. I read the mailing lists. I
scoured the archives. I hung out in the IRC channel, just hoping to
find nuggets of Asterisk knowledge. As time went on, I was finally
able to figure out enough to get Asterisk up and running.
That's when the real fun began.
With the help of the CIO and the approval of the
CEO, we moved forward with plans to move our entire telecom
infrastructure to Asterisk, including our corporate office and all
of our remote call centers. Along the way, we ran into a lot of
uncharted territory, and I began thinking about creating a good
repository of Asterisk knowledge. Over the course of the project,
we were able to do some really innovative things, such as invent
IAX trunking!
When all was said and done, we ended up with
around forty Asterisk servers spread across many different
geographical locations, all communicating with each other to
provide a cohesive enterprise-class VoIP phone system. It currently
handles approximately one million minutes of calls per month,
serves several hundred employees, connects to 27 voice T1s, and
saves the company around $20,000 (USD) per month on their telecom
costs. In short, our Asterisk project was a resounding success!
While in the middle of implementing this
project, I met Leif in one of the Asterisk IRC channels. We talked
about ways we could help out new Asterisk users and lower the
barrier to entry, and we decided to push ahead with plans to more
fully document Asterisk. I really wanted some good documentation in
"dead-tree" format basically a book that a new user could pick up
and learn the basics of Asterisk. About that same time, the number
of new users on the Asterisk mailing lists and in the IRC channels
grew tremendously, and we felt that writing an Asterisk book would
greatly improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The Asterisk
Documentation Project was born! The rest, they say, is history.
Since then, we've been writing Asterisk
documentation. I never thought it would be this arduous, yet
rewarding. (I joked with Leif and Jim that it might be easier and
less controversial to write an in-depth tome called "Religion, Gun
Control, and Sushi" than cover everything that Asterisk has to
offer in sufficient detail!) What you see here is a direct result
of a lot of late nights and long weekends spent helping the
Asterisk communityafter all, it's the least we could do,
considering what Asterisk has given to us. We hope it will inspire
other members of the Asterisk community to help document changes
and new features, for the benefit of all involved.
Now to thank some people:
First of all, I'd like to thank my beautiful
wife. She's put up with a lot of lonely nights while I've been
slaving away at the keyboard, and I'd like her to know how much I
appreciate her and her endless support. I'd also like to thank my
kids for doing their best to remind me of the important things in
life. I love you!
To my parents: thanks for everything you've done
to help me stretch and grow and learn over the years. You're the
best parents a person could ask for.
To Dave Carr and Michael Lundberg: thanks for
letting me learn Asterisk on company time. Working with both of you
was truly a pleasure. May God smile upon you and grant you success
and joy in all you do.
To Leif and Jim: thanks for putting up with my
stupid jokes, my insistence that we do things "the right way," and
my crazy schedule. Thanks for pushing me along, and making me a
better writer. I've really enjoyed working with you two, and hope
to collaborate with you on future projects!
To Mark Spencer: thank you for your continued
support and dedication and friendship. You've been an invaluable
resource to our effort, and I truly believe that you've started a
revolution in the world of telephony. You're always welcome in my
home and at my dinner table!
To the other great people at Digium: thank you
for your help and support. We're especially thankful for you
willingness to give us more insight into the Asterisk code, and for
donating hardware so that we can better document the Asterisk
Developer's Kit.
To Steven Sokol, Steven Critchfield, Olle E.
Johansson, and all the others who have contributed to the Asterisk
Documentation Project and to this book: thank you! We couldn't have
done it without your help and suggestions.
Jim Van Meggelen
For me, it all started in the spring of 2004,
sitting at my desk in the technical support department of the
telecom company I'd worked at for nearly fifteen years. With no
challenges worthy of my skills, I spent my time trying to figure
out what I had achieved in the last fifteen years. I was stuck in
an industry that had squandered far too many opportunities, and had
as a result caused itself a spectacular and embarrassing fall from
being the darling of investors to a joke known to even the most
uneducated. I was supposed to feel fortunate to be one of the few
who still had work, but what thankless, purposeless work it was. We
knew why our industry had collapsed: the products we sold could not
hope to deliver the solutions our customers requiredeven though the
industry promised that they could. They lacked flexibility, and
were priced totally out of step with the functionality they were
delivering (or, more to the point, were failing to deliver).
Nowhere in the industry were there any signs this was going to
change any time soon.
I had been dreaming of an open-source PBX for
many long years, but I really didn't know how such a thing could
ever come to beI'd given up on the idea several years before. I
knew that to be successful, an open source PBX would need to
effectively bridge the worlds of legacy and network-based telecom.
I always failed to find anything that seemed ready.
Then, one fine day in spring, I half-heartedly
seeded a Google search with the phrase "open source telephony," and
discovered a bright new future for telecom: Asterisk, the Open
Source Linux PBX.
There it was: the very thing I'd been dreaming
of for so many years. The clouds parted, the sun shone through;
adventure lay ahead. I had no idea how I was going to contribute,
but I knew this: open-source telephony was going to cause a
necessary and beneficial revolution in the telecom industry; and
one way or another, I was going to be a part of it.
For me, more of a systems integrator than
developer, I needed a way to contribute to the community. There
didn't seem to be a shortage of developers, but there sure was a
shortage of documentation. This sounded like something I could do.
I knew how to write, I knew a thing or two about PBXs, and I
desperately needed to talk about this phenomenon that suddenly made
telecom fun again.
If I contribute only one thing to this book, I
hope you will catch some of my enthusiasm for the subject of
open-source telephony. This is an incredible gift we have been
given, but also an incredible responsibility. What a wonderful
challenge. What a cosmic opportunity. What delicious fun!
First of all, I need to thank Leif and Jared for
inviting me to join the Asterisk Documentation Project. I have
immensely enjoyed working with both of you, and I am constantly
amazed at how well our personalities and skills complement each
other. A truly balanced team, are we.
To my wife Killi, and my children Kaara, Joonas,
and Joosep (who always remember to visit me when I disappear into
my underground lair for too long): you are a source of inspiration
to me. Your love is the fuel that feeds my fire, and I thank
you.
Obviously, I need to thank my parents Jack and
Martiny, for always believing in me, no matter how many rules I
broke. In a few years, I'll have my own teenagers, and it'll be
your turn to laugh!
To Mark Spencer: thanks for all the things that
everybody else thanks you for, but also, personally, thanks for
giving generously of your time to the Asterisk community. The
Toronto Asterisk Users' Group (http://www.taug.ca) made a quantum
leap forward as a result of your taking the time to speak to us,
and that event will forever form a part of our history. Oh yeah,
and thanks for the beers, too. :-)
Finally, thanks to the Asterisk Community. This
book is our gift to you. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as
we've enjoyed writing it. |