Stuff that caught my eye
Trixbox 1.1 Asterisk PBX
Filed Under (VoIP) by serge on June-29-2006

Trixbox Asterisk-based PBX virtual machine

It has a host of interesting features:

  • Web Interface to controll most of the features of Asterisk PBX.
  • SIP and IAX protocol stack (H.323 can be added). POTS FXS/FXO and T1/E1 are not available on VMware due to timing issues.
  • Digital Receptionist automaticaly answers incoming calls and gives caller a choice of actions through IVR)
  • Timers allow to set up different time patterns for call handling. It allows to direct weekend calls differently than weekday calls for example.
  • Conference Bridge to set up conference calls
  • Direct Inward Dial (DISA) to connect to the PBX from remote site as if you were connected localy
  • Star Numbers to access star features. (like *70 to enable call waiting and *71 to desable it)
  • Follow me to ring a desk phone and a cell phone when a call comes in
  • Inbound Routes to direct calls depending on caller ID and interface by which a call arrives
  • Outbound Routes to direct calls to different providers for Least Cost Routing for example.
  • Paging and Intercom for some phones (Grandstream and Snome)
  • Queues to queue-up incoming callers like in a call center
  • Ring Groups to ring multiple phones upon call arival
  • Call Log with various reporting capabilities to see who called whome and when
  • Voice Mail system with ability to send voice mail by email as an attachments.
  • Web Interface to Voice Mail
  • Fax Receiving with PDF conversion. Received faxes can be sent to you by email as a PDF file
  • Call Recordings to record all or some calls or fragments of calls
  • Control Panel to see what is going on at a glance and controll calls with drag-and-drop
  • Dynamic Configuration to add or remove functionality on the fly
  • VoicePulse integration to simplyfy setup for use with a VoicePulse account if you have one.

To run this image you will need a VMware Player (or Workstation). Un-rar downloaded file and then .vmx file in VMware player. After boot loging with root password “password”. If your network has a DHCP server, image should pick-up IP address automaticaly. To check your current IP address, login to root and do

# ifconfig eth0

You should see image IP addres in the first line of the output.

However for real use of this image it is better to set up image IP staticaly with

# system-config-network

to allow SIP and IAX calls to go public network you need to set up your have to open firewall ports and DNAT them to the IP of this image.

All configuration is done through web intereface. To use it, open your browser on the IP address of the virtual machine.

Here is the torrent for download

Files:

Trixbox-1.1.rar.torrent 26K

11 Comments posted on "Trixbox 1.1 Asterisk PBX"

bigfrog on July 21st, 2006 at 9:43 pm #

Hi,
Any chance you can give us the default user and password for the web interface.
Thanks.

I cant wait to play with this more.

BigFrog
:-)

serge on July 22nd, 2006 at 3:15 am #

For “System Administration” use user name “maint” and password “password”

For Sugar CRM use user name “admin” and password “password”

For Voice Mail & Recordings use extension number and password that you set up for your mailbox

nckhwks on August 19th, 2006 at 6:14 pm #

Would you happen to know the best way to configure the network for VMWARE to run this PBX effeciently? currently i have it set up Briged with a static address, but i am not getting verry good sound, the phone calls sound good but any recording the PBX plays for you, such as the caller \”\” is unavailable sounds really bad. I dont know if this is a problem with how i have the network set up or not, the only reason i think so is because it is using the same NIC as a windows machine. I have another NIC available but i cant seem to figure out how to get VMWARE to just give the VM the other NIC.

By the way this is a awsome setup, i am really enjoying playing with it! =)

serge on August 20th, 2006 at 3:18 pm #

Hi nkhwks
Choppy sound usually is a result of not enough computing resource. It happens on real machines as well as on the virtual. Try to run when there is nothing going on the host machine, it might help. Or try to run on a more powerful CPU…

This is a general problem for all VoIP systems and it is even more for those running off general purpose hardware. For them there is one panacea - more resource…

Cheers
Serge

jasonmciver on August 24th, 2006 at 2:20 am #

I just downloaded this from the torrent you supplied and could’nt find a .vmx file.
All that was in ‘Trixbox-1.1.rar’ was ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-s001.vmdk’

Am I missing something? or just dont know how to generate the .vmx file.

I’ve tried starting a new machine (on free vm server) and directing it to the ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-s001.vmdk’ disk but I get the error ‘Failed to retreive disk information, the file specified is not a virtual disk’.
Please help, cant wait to get this thing going.

Jason.

serge on August 24th, 2006 at 2:28 am #

Hi Jason
I think there is something wrong wiith the file that you have downloaded. It looks like it is corrupted. Try to download it again.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux” naming should not alarm you. This is correct. Trixbox is based on CentOS which is an free version of REHL distribution

Please let me know if this problem persists.

Cheers
Serge

jasonmciver on August 25th, 2006 at 2:20 am #

Hi Serge, Im sorry after downloading it again, only the same file exists ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-s001.vmdk’ and Win Explorer reports Trixbox-1.1.rar as 315,315 KB.
the .vmdk file inside the rar file is reported to be 1,166,409,728 KB.
Does this sound right? I will try it at a different location (different PC and ISP) tonight.
I was wondering if you could email me the .vmx file if it was less than 3MB.
Thanks,

Jason

serge on August 25th, 2006 at 2:35 am #

Hi Jason
It sounds right. rar file is 315MB and s0001.vmdk is a bit more than 1 GB. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.vmx file should be 1K in size.

I can post the content of it here in the blog, but I ma afraid the root of your problem is somewhere else. Tell me, do you use a torrent to downolad it?
Please do the following

  1. Using Explorer place archive on drive C:
  2. Right-click on the file and choose \”Extract Here\”
  3. Open Command Prompt on C:
  4. In Command Prompt type  dir trixbox-1.1 >trixbox.txt
  5. Open trixbox.txt in Notepad
  6. Copy and paste trixbox.txt content in a reply to this message
jasonmciver on August 26th, 2006 at 11:12 am #

Serge,
I downloaded it again from home this time, and its all there!

3 .vmdk files and 1 .vmx file.

Not sure what went wrong, its certainly a mystery.
Thanks for your help though. Cant wait to try it!

Jason.

alanhmiller on September 1st, 2006 at 2:46 pm #

Hi nckhwks,

Speech quality quality problems under VMware definitely is a resouce issue but it is not so obvious which resource is your problem or how to fix it. We have had a lot experience with VMware Workstation, VMware ESX and VMware Player and VMware Server. Our applications support SIP endpoints, play .wav files and do sophisticated speech recognition, all under VMware (at least for demo center use). We have Windows Server 2003 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition guest machines running on the same host. We have used as many as 7 guest vm’s on a single dual CPU Xeon host with 8GB host RAM.

Here are some tVMware uning hints:
1) configure VMware to keep guest in preallocated host RAM.
2) configure VMware to not do “page trimming”.
3) ** This one is important ** Use preallocated virtual hd files instead of growable. Poor sound quality is often due to packet latency exceeding 70ms. This is where you get dropped packets. Disk I/O problems on virtual disks will result in dropped RTP packets.
4) Have plenty of RAM available to the guest machine. I don’t know if VMplayer supports all the tuning options available on VMware Workstation and VMware Server. VMware Server 1.0.1 is GA now and runs on either Windows Server 2003 or Linux and is free as well.
5) If you’re running multiple vm’s on the same host, try isolating your disk i/o sensitve vm to it’s own spindle.

Good luck.

serge on September 14th, 2006 at 1:08 am #

It is possible that the reason for choppy sound is in the Linux kernel. It should be gone in kernel 2.6.17 Menawhile you can fall back on Asterisk@Home 2.8 image

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