This website is about sharing my experience and knowledge on VoIP with those who can benefit from it. My tools for VoIP have been Asterisk and Linux.
I am working with Asterisk since 2004, since its version 1.0.9, and have gained very strong knowledge of its use, thanks to numerous Asterisk based VoIP projects which I have worked on over these years. They range from simple Asterisk@Home implementations, to creating customized multi-tenant PBX solutions for cloud computing environment, to integrating VoIP into defense and military communication systems, to using VoIP into air traffic control (ATC) solutions.
By no means I claim myself a guru, as there is always so much more to learn, but I have a good and proven track record on completing complex Asterisk based VoIP projects.
A lot of my guidance in Asterisk has been through the Internet, thanks to those who have been graciously sharing their knowledge and experience through websites, mailing lists, forums, blogs and other Internet sources. Although I have also been participating in Asterisk related mailing lists and forums, but wanted to better organize and present my knowledge, and by creating this blog I am trying to accomplish this task. Nature of many of the projects I have worked on required me to well document my work, and I hope I’ll be able to reflect the same in these blogs.
Like many other Asterisk professionals, playing with Linux and Asterisk started for me as a hobby, which very quickly turned into passion, and then turned into profession. “Choose a job that you love and you’ll never have to work a day of your life” Confucious. My first introduction to Linux was also due to Asterisk IP-PBX, after which very soon I realized what I had missed all these years by not switching to Linux much earlier and staying with Windows. In these days, there were only two useful Asterisk tutorials on the Internet. From www.voipdepot.ca I got my first ATA which was Sipura SPA-1001, and a non-branded single port FXO card. My Linux was Fedora Core 4 on a Penitum-III computer with some parts put into from another Pentium II computer. None of these computers were functional on their own, but mixing and matching the working components of the two resulted in one working P-III computer. I was supposed to take these computers to the dumpster, but now I had found a better use for them. Installation of Asterisk and Zaptel was quiet a pain. Probably some version of Asterisk@Home was also out there at its infancy, but I found out about that a little later, when it was version 0.9. So on plain Fedora Core and Asterisk it took me a few weeks before I could successfully configure my hardware and create correct dialplan for two extensions to talk to each other. I still remember the excitement of that moment when my extension 200 was finally ringing. And the world was never the same again.
I hope you’ll find information on this website useful.
Zeeshan A Zakaria
Ottawa, Canada
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