I’m currently sat on the first floor of an old manor house in Surrey, England having a lunch break on the second day of training in Asterisk setup and configuration. Much has been learned but the course could have been organised better from the start with numerous hiccups and poor preperation from the course tutor.

Asterisk is an open source software PBX for use (mainly) on Linux operating systems. You can use it to manage your VoIP telephone network and connect it to the outside world enabling many nice features such as call recording, voicemail, dialling plans, IVR, etc.

We had to use Fedora Core 4 instead of 5 due to an issue getting Asterisk running on FC5. I’ve also discovered Cisco phones are worse than naff and South Africans are all friendly Communists.