As you may have guessed from yesterday's post, I've just finished a complete reinstall of our PBX system. The old system was running on Mandrake (yeah, Mandrake NOT Mandriva) and had done a great job. Unfortunately we were having a phone port lock up periodically that would require rebooting the server.

Since another "event" left me with a spare motherboard and rack mounted case I went ahead and ordered a Digium PCI-Express analog card to handle our four phone lines.

I've configured four Asterisk servers before and expected things to go smoothly. My first problem was that my last server was a version 1.2 and the newer version of Asterisk made several config file changes, causing very strange problems in my dialplan.

The next problem was that no matter what, caller-id service almost never reported the incoming number. After banging my head against the wall over and over trying to get the Ubuntu Hardy Asterisk packages to work with various configs, I finally took a stab in the dark and downloaded the latest zaptel sources from Digium and compiled them. A quick reboot and all the incoming caller-id worked beautifully.

While I was at it I threw a few lines of code into our workflow server that would allow us to assign phone configurations to individual users on the network. When that data changes, it pings the Asterisk server causing a program on it to reach across the network and grab new configuration files from our REST interface on the workflow server for the SIP, Voicemail and Dialplan configurations. It will also use that data to pre-configure SNOM Vo/IP phones automatically based on the phone's MAC address. It was amazing how easy it was to integrate our phones into our workflow management system. Now the office manager can actually dish out phones and manage the phone server configuration safely without having to run to one of the IT staff everytime a new employee is hired.