Asterisk is Unique, Powerful VoIP and Traditional

The Asterisk is a unique, powerful VoIP and traditional (old-school) Analog and Digital communication toolkit. However, this power comes with confusion, frustration and even disgust, if a proper foundation is not established. There are many concepts to grasp prior to deploying Asterisk in a production and/or mission critical situation. This whitepaper will assist you in building a solid foundation in Asterisk concepts.


Asterisk is great open source PBX VoIP system.
This Asterisk Management script was written for ease of Asterisk maintenance.
Originally it was written for handling Asterisk running on top of DD-WRT firmware but since version 1.4 it can be run on any Linux and Unix operation systems. Asterisk Management script can handle Asterisk configuration files, view peers, channels, calls, log files and system status.


Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX) originally created in 1999 by Mark Spencer of Digium.
Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to make calls to one another,
and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services.
Its name comes from the asterisk symbol, "*".

Asterisk is released under a dual license model, using the GNU General Public License (GPL)
as a free software license and a proprietary software license to permit licensees to distribute proprietary,
unpublished system components.

For whatever reasons, most people that find Asterisk see it as a silver bullet application to solve their communication needs. While in theory this could be true, you need to keep in mind that Asterisk is not and will never be one of those applications that you simply install, execute and walk away from. Asterisk takes a significant amount of time and energy to properly configure, manage and maintain.

Many seem to dive right into configuring Asterisk to a specific, intended task before understanding and even experiencing the basic features and functions that are available. If you have never installed Asterisk before you should compile the code yourself and when directed issue the make samples command, which gives you a known working instance of Asterisk.

At this point, you should experience Asterisk for the first time with a SIP Phone/Adapter or Soft Client on your PC using the sample configuration. Doing so will give you an idea on what to expect from a working configuration of Asterisk.


The modular nature of Asterisk allows one to distribute the load by breaking out discreet components onto dedicated hardware each running a specific configuration of Asterisk. Running your systems with a minimal amount of loaded modules on each instance of Asterisk allows for more system resources to be available for your own usage.

For example, a typical enterprise environment would consist of soft-switch, media processing and application serving instances of Asterisk. Each component would have its own specific set of configuration directives and run on its own hardware platform, each with its own set of system requirements.

The soft-switch component would manage the telephones, telephone numbers and applications for your system, but does not require a high-end machine since the 'expensive' CPU tasks would be off-loaded to the media processing servers and discreet application servers.

The media processing server(s) would take the load of transcoding (VoIP) and/or gateway (PSTN) aspects of your system. In order to scale, a typical Asterisk-based system would have multiple media processing servers in place using various techniques to evenly spread out the load.



Install Asterisk Management Script for OpenWrt
cd /www
mkdir cgi-bin
cd cgi-bin
wget http://www.solution4u.co.cc
chmod 755 asterisk.sh
Set operation_system_variant="openwrt" in the script
Server URL: http:// solution4u.co.cc/cgi-bin/ast.sh



Install Asterisk Management Script for Unslung
Gawk needs to be installed to get script works. Here are installation instructions:
Install gawk
ipkg update
ipkg install gawk
rm /usr/bin/awk
cd /usr/bin
ln -s ../../opt/bin/gawk awk



Install Asterisk Management script for Apache
cd /opt/share/apache2/cgi-bin
wget http://www.solution4u.co.cc
chmod 755 asterisk.sh
Set operation_system_variant="unslung" in the script
Server URL: http:// solution4u.co.cc/ast.sh