SIP Trunks with trixbox (FreePBX)

Tripp Black  June 30 2010 11:08:08 PM

One of my "side projects" that has consumed a couple evenings the last couple days is putting back together our old phone system.

Why? We had unhooked it to participate in a Beta of another phone system that had some really awesome Lotus Notes and UC integration out-of-the-box, but it hit a snag about a month ago. Unfortunately, we've have had issues with this new product and have been mostly without a working phone system since. So, with our clients complaining when we did try to use it, I was finally mandated to get something done this past weekend.  (The times we "up" were really just our main number forwarded to my cell phone - not good.)

So I decided not to turn back on my old 5 year old server that served us nicely as it's second life as a phone server over the last couple years. Instead, I decided to download and check out the new trixbox and start clean.

So Sunday night:
1.  Installed Asterisk / trixbox in a new VM. (0.5 hours)
(Yes, I know, bad, bad, but we only have 6 phones and I've dedicated 500Mhz of processor to the VM which seems to be more than trixbox needs. I also just love having all that hardware abstracted. What I lose I gain in other ways.)
2. Set up the Extensions and Ring Groups and IVR (except actually recording it). (1 hour)

Monday evening:
3. Did the Extension Manager part and issued the setup command for our phone types. (0.25 hours)
4. Pulled our old SIP phones from their boxes, dusted them, and populated the TFTP site with the firmware files from our CD backup (0.50 hours)
5. As I was missing a few files, wasted a bunch of time searching our CD archives for them, and subsequently renewing a support/access contract we let expire on the Phones. (We haven't got that yet.) (4+ hours wasted on nothing productive.)
6. Just ran with the existing old phone firmware. (They work great except our Bluetooth headsets don't work even though they're enabled in the Device configuration.) (0 hours, which is what I should have done #5 above)

This evening (Tuesday):
7. Set up the SIP trunk with the same company that was doing it with the Beta product we were helping test and evaluate. This was a 2 step process:
a. Give external IP for their SIP service, get their information for us to access, and set up the firewall forwards for our end and testing. (0.5 hours)
b. Setup the trunk in trixbox. This was an ordeal, as it was evidently "very simple". However, I've never done a SIP trunk before. So what should have taken about a half hour to an hour at most, took almost 5 in two chunks. (4.75 hours)
As we tend to document these kinds of things, I'd like to give other folks the ability to do step 7b in only 30 minutes or less  . . .

So for anyone else who wish it was Google'd here you go: How to Setup your SIP Trunk with trixbox / FreePBX / Asterisk with EtherSpeak.

I've sacrificed my cool Notes Client sidebar apps that can listen/manage voice-mails and calls, and the aforementioned wireless headset. But...
No headaches with the new old phone system.
No telling clients sorry that our phone system sucks.
And shortly, no main phone number forwarded to my cell.

Time for bed....

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