Product Description

Implementing, managing, and maintaining an Asterisk-based telephony system

• Install and configure a complete VoIP and telephonic system of your own; even if this is your first time using trixbox
• In-depth troubleshooting and maintenance
• Packed with real-world examples and case studies along with useful screenshots and diagrams
• Best practices and expert tips straight from the Community Director of trixbox, Kerry Garrison

In Detail

The open source telephony platform trixbox CE is designed to implement a PBX system with features typically reserved for large enterprise businesses. trixBox allows an individual or organization to set up a telephone system with traditional telephone networks as well as internet-based telephony or VoIP. The task is time consuming and involves a lot of technical skills.

This book comes to your rescue to set up a VoIP system fast and easily using trixbox CE. It is the successor to the highly successful book; trixbox Made Easy, written by Kerry Garrison, the Community Director for trixbox CE.

If you are already familiar with Asterisk Open Source PBX, trixbox CE provides a comprehensive web-based GUI to make managing an Asterisk-based system much easier than dealing with confusing configuration files.

The book begins by introducing telephony concepts before detailing how to plan a telephone system and moving on to the installation, configuration, and management of a feature-packed PBX. This book is rich with practical examples and tools. It will give you all of the information and skills needed to implement your own trixbox CE PBX system for yourself or even to resell to potential clients.

Kerry's original book, trixbox Made Easy, made it possible for anyone to set up a trixbox-based telephony system. The emphasis of this book is to take an in-depth look at trixbox CE and expose all of the features to the typical user. By making the system easier to understand and use, trixbox CE users will have even more power available to them as they implement their own PBX solutions.

What you will learn from this book?

• Set up a basic system to make and receive phone calls, make calls between extensions, and utilize basic PBX functionality
• Deploy different features of this telephony system with best practices and expert tips
• Create custom features like redirecting calls for 411 to a free provider
• Gain expert insight to avoid common implementation mistakes
• Explore the extensive personalization capabilities in the community edition of trixbox
• Discover the pros and cons of segmented versus combined networks, and network considerations for using VoIP services and supporting remote users
• Connect to other trixbox CE systems using trunk techniques to branch them whether they are on your network or not
• Get both basic and advanced call reports using the trixbox CE dashboard CDR Reports tool
• Provide extra functionality not provided by other tools using the trixbox CE Dashboard
• Perform routine maintenance for smooth running and troubleshoot the system when things are not going right
• Secure your system using essential methods like a good firewall, changing access to the SSH service, and adding login attempt protection to your extensions

Approach

This book is a step-by-step tutorial with clear instructions and screenshots to guide you through the creation of a complete, cost-effective telephony system. With its "follow-along" style, you will start with installation, walk through the different features, see how to manage and maintain the system, and finally see how all the different pieces come together.

Who this book is written for?

If you want to learn how to install and configure either trixbox CE systems or Asterisk-based PBX systems, without struggling with confusing configuration files and cryptic scripts, this is "the" book for you. This book will also benefit readers who use trixbox CE and want to learn all its features, and how best to use them. It is ideal for any user wishing to set up a telephony system for small business usage. No previous knowledge of Trixbox or networking is required, although some basic knowledge of PBX and Linux would be an advantage.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #319078 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

About the Author

Kerry Garrison

Kerry Garrison has been in the IT industry for over 20 years with positions ranging from IT Director of a large multi-site distribution company to developing a large hosted web server platform for a major ISP, to finally running his own IT consulting business in Southern California. Kerry was introduced to the world of Asterisk by a friend and began running his own business on it. After about a year of working with it and writing some articles that became extremely popular on the net, he felt it was time to start putting clients onto Asterisk-based systems. Today, Asterisk PBX systems represent a significant portion of his business revenue. Kerry has spoken at Astricon and does a regular seminar series in California.He is very active with the Asterisk and FreePBX community and has even contributed modules to the FreePBX project.

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Customer Reviews

Looking to install real VOIP in a small business or home? Here is step by step
This is a well written step by step guide to getting Trixbox 2.6 VOIP PBX
up and working for your small business, or home. I used this book to load
and deploy Trixbox 2.6.2 on a small ITX PC with a 40GB Hard drive, 1GB ram, and a 1.4Ghz Mobile processor. The book really does help you avoid the Linux
environment and at the same time explains the inter-relationships of the various modules as you build your pbx, step by step, following the book.

Much, if not all of this information is available on the trixbox wiki,
forums, and articles, but the book not only collects it in one place, but
presents the information in a build as you go manner.

I strongly recommend this book. I eliminated 2 verizon POTS lines and added a VOIP SIP account with 2 inbound and 2 outbound calls possible on the one phone line at a time, can call in the US, most of Europe, Asia, and parts of South America for $36/month flat. The savings for me averages about $127/mo, or $1,524 a year.

Don't waste your money...
I had high expectations for this book, because of the writer's involvement with the development/management of the product. Unfortunately, this book was a complete letdown, as the vast majority of the information provided was nothing more than I could ascertain by "tinkering" with a lab install for a few hours.

What I look for in an application-specific book is the "inside" information - the kind of hints, tweaks, and recommendations that make configuration and management a breeze. Regrettably, Garrison's offering is more of an explanation of what's in front of you, as opposed to what you are not given.

For example, Garrison provides a small section on configuring analog lines; however, he simply states that there is a default ZAP trunk within the program, and he never truly explains the specifics involved with changing/creating ordinal group trunks and cardinal channel assignments.

Another example of where this book falls short is the fact that Garrison never addresses certain types of functionality that would seem to be fairly prevalent. For example, I have installed countless systems where the client did not want the system to answer a specific trunk, but they wanted it available for outbound calls. Trying to accomplish this with a single FXO port on a multiport TDM card would be little more than trial-and-error with the information provided in this book.

Perhaps, the most disappointing aspect of this book is that I have spent more productive time on the Trixbox Wiki than I have actually reading this book. What's worse is that some of the more helpful information contained in the Wiki is from Garrison himself. Why wouldn't he include it in his book?

To be fair, this book might be helpful to a complete novice; but, it will still only get you so far.