"robert" <> wrote in message
news: ups.com...
> i'm very new about Asterisk, but i hope with your help to learn a
> lot.
>
> Some friends just invited me to use my SPA2002ER with asterisk:
> something is not very clear to me: is Asterisk an online PBX? Do i
> have to install it on my pc? DO i have to leave my pc turned on 24h/
> 7 ?
>
> thanks
>
Asterisk (or Trixbox) generally runs on a dedicated machine,
think of it as like an office telephone system, a box on the wall
costing hundreds or thousands of GBP. Your Asterisk box
will cost you next to nothing because you can use a low
spec machine that people discard,and, it is likely to have more
features than the office phone system.
At our, (well my) level, the outside lines will
be virtual; voip accounts via the internet.
What most of us want is real telephones as the extentions,
You can get PCI cards that connect direct to telephones but
they are expensive, so what most of us do is use one or more
ATAs. So typically your Asterisk box and your ATA both
connect to your router via Ethernet Asterisk looks out towards
the router's gateway and the ATA looks towards the Asterisk
box.
If you have an old Pentium 2 with 250meg of RAM and a NIC
doing nothing, download from here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/asteriskathome/
burn the ISO to a cd-r, stick it in the drive, and an
hour or so later you will have Linux and Asterisk installed
(practically no user intervention required)
Then there are plenty of us here who can help you
program it.
--
Graham.
%Profound_observation%