How to setup VoIP calls in your Cybercafé with Xorcom Rapid, Asterisk PBX and *starShop-OSS

Version 1.0
Author: Abdoulaye Ba <abdoul [at] gmail [dot] com>
Last edited 10/09/2006

In this howto i will guide you step-by-step on how to successfully setup long distance calls service in your Cybercafé, using open source software. The main element is *starShop-OSS, an open source application designed to monitor and bill, in real time, calls made via Asterisk PBX. This service is commonly called : callshop , taxiphone or calling center.

Please note that the equipment chosen for this howto is purely based on experience gained by using it and nothing to do with any eventual interest with third party companies listed in this howto.

If you find this howto helpful, please kindly digg this story:

If this is too complicated, you can buy the VMWare appliance with the latest *starShop-OSS release along with Trixbox 2.0

1. Setup network adequately for 4 phone booths

Ideal setup would be to have two different networks and 2 DSL providers; one for your computers and the second line for the phones. Typically you don't want your Internet users degrade the voice calls quality for the new users you've been attracting for your call shop service.

An alternative would be to create VLANs and logically separate your data network from the voice network. Make sure, that for 4 booths you dedicate at least 1Mbps of bandwidth.

2. Telephony Management Server

Once the network is sorted out, the phone booths installed, your voice gateway configured and connected to the router - you may use Mediatrix 1104 - 4 FXS, robust, reliable, never been down in many years and been used by several call shops - it's now time to setup your telephony management server.

Make sure to configure your voice gateway ( e.g. Mediatrix) with 4 SIP accounts : 1001, 1002, 1003 and 1004 - respective passwords : 1001, 1002, 1003 and 1004 - the SIP proxy IP must point to your Xorcom server, realm should be : asterisk.

Now, login into your Asterisk server - the first thing to do is to update your server - the distribution of choice is Xorcom Rapid release 1.1 [Distromania].

2.1 Update your apt repository:

apt-get update

then update your Xorcom Rapid

apt-get dist-upgrade

You will have some configuration screens to go through, not a big deal, but choose your locale - e.g. "en_GB.ISO-8859-1", but feel free to choose the one that suits you the best - for the rest of the configuration just choose default settings as the rest is beyond the scope of this howto.

Follow on with:

base-config

Choose "Configure timezone" > GMT > Europe > London , if you are in London off course ;-) Exit the screen, by choosing "Cancel".

Now update the system time and date :

ntpdate pool.ntp.org

if you're having trouble with NTP, you can also enter date and time manually:

date 091010412006

which will set the date and time to : Sun Sep 10 10:41:04 BST 2006

In order to install all the packages we need for the rest of this setup, edit your apt sources.list:

pico /etc/apt/sources.list

add the following lines:

deb http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main
deb-src http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main
deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main

Update your apt repository:

apt-get update

How to setup VoIP calls in your Cybercafé with Xorcom Rapid, Asterisk PBX and *starShop-OSS - Page 2
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