QuickStart Guide for AsteriskNOW 1.7.0

Installation

Burn the AsteriskNOW image to disc. If you are unfamiliar with burning disc images, the Ubuntu community has a great Burning ISO Howto available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto. Then boot from CD to begin the installation process. If you are unfamiliar with booting to CD, the Ubuntu community has a wonderful Boot From CD Howto available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromCD. After booting from the AsteriskNOW CD, you will be immediately presented with text options for a more advanced install. Most users can simply press <ENTER> here, which will start the (mostly) automated graphical installation environment.

During the installation, you will be presented with 3 option screens.

1) Hard disk layout. It is recommended to select "Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout." and move to the next screen. This will *ERASE ALL DATA* on the system. Anything that is important should first be backed up to a different system.

2) Timezone settings. Select the location that is nearest to you and move to the next screen.

3) Root password. The 'root' user is the administrative account for Linux systems. Most system configuration requires 'root' access. If this password is lost, it is impossible to recover. It is recommended that your password contain a mix of lowercase and UPPERCASE letters, numbers, and/or symbols.

After the final option, installation will begin. This will take approximately 15-30 minutes. Once installation has completed, the system will reboot into your installation.

Configuration

(Note: Before making any system configuration changes, you must log in as the 'root' user.) By default, AsteriskNOW will attempt to use DHCP to setup networking. If you would like to change networking settings, you can run the command `system-config-network`. You can view the current IP address of the system by using `ifconfig`.

FreePBX (the default configuration interface for Asterisk)

To connect to FreePBX, point a web browser to http://<IP address>/admin/. The default username/password is freepbx/fpbx. After logging in for the first time it is a good idea to click the reload button if it appears. It is also a good idea to regularly update the modules via the "Module Administration" page.

Updating, Querying, Removing Packages

After completing installation of AsteriskNOW, all of the packages for running Asterisk are installed. However system updates are often available.

AsteriskNOW contains several yum repositories in addition to the ones provided by CentOS. These are asterisk-current/asterisk-tested and digium-current/digium-tested. The asterisk- repositories contain packages for Digium-provided Open Source software (such as Asterisk, libpri, and DAHDI). The digium- repositories contain non-free or commercial software (such as codec_g729a, Fax For Asterisk, and the HPEC echo cancellation module). This allows you to install additional software and to stay up to date with the latest changes.

Packages can be installed or removed by using `yum install <package>` or `yum remove <package>`. Updates should be regularly installed by using `yum update`. For a very full list of available and installed packages, you can use `yum list | less`. For more information about Yum, visit http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumCommands or type `man yum`.