Telephony

Tobias already mentioned how Caktus uses Asterisk as our PBX. He also mentioned how we tested various frontends both for managing the asterisk configuration and interacting with asterisk to, for example, check our voicemail. We were inticed by some of the client management solutions that we could plumb up with asterisk. Caktus has a loose administration structure, which allows us to be flexible and not have levels of managers between clients and coders. But, this flexiblility can leave loose ends unchecked when the person in charge of a project is distracted for a day or two. We saw this as an opportunity where Caktus could add a level of group accountability and use some neat technology. We also wanted a tool that would integrate well with our current homegrown DjangoERP/CRM as well as Trac, our prefered tool for project management. So, we decided to write some sweet code.

At Caktus, we use the Asterisk open source telephony platform. While setting up Asterisk, we tested a number of different system environments and configurations to help determine what would best fit our telephone needs. This involved running Asterisk on both real and virtual machines and testing several configuration front ends, including FreePBX and DeStar. This article discusses a fairly technical problem we confronted while installing a basic Asterisk setup on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system (on real hardware); namely, when the ztdummy Linux kernel module was loaded, Asterisk was unable to play back any recordings (even its own). When we unloaded the ztdummy module, however, recordings would play back fine. The catch, of course, was that we needed ztdummy loaded for conference room support.