have a friend who is a penguinista and wants to run a simple soft pbx.
support of soft phones, 7960s, connect to a commercial sip gate, ...
reccos for a packaged solution.
i run a raw asterisk and would not wish it on my worst enemy.
randy
Heh.
I've been fond of FreePBX, myself, though the new version they were
working on seemed like it was going to break all the best bits.
Ward Mundy, @NerdUno, packages it as PBXinaFlash; 1.7.5.5 was decent.
Cheers,
-- jra
Elastix should do the trick.
i can see the ads coming now....
1 weird trick for a good phone system!
rofl
Randy,
Greets from 105/102!
Now that I've said that I have had some luck with Trixbox. His fun will
be getting the Cisco phones talking sip and liking it.
Wayne
have a friend who is a penguinista and wants to run a simple soft pbx.
support of soft phones, 7960s, connect to a commercial sip gate, ...
reccos for a packaged solution.
I'd recommend checking out SipXecs .. It's a really slick open source system supporting all of the above, plus a bit more. And there's a commercial arm as well that offers a commercially supported version with additional bells and whistles.
Wayne Wenthin (wayne.wenthin) writes:
Randy,
Greets from 105/102!
Now that I've said that I have had some luck with Trixbox. His fun will
be getting the Cisco phones talking sip and liking it.
Am running Trixbox (which wraps FreePBX) for 11 users, and using 7940s.
Has been working like a charm for the last 3 years.
Phil
Trixbox is basically stagnated. The last update was in 2010
Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> writes:
have a friend who is a penguinista and wants to run a simple soft pbx.
support of soft phones, 7960s, connect to a commercial sip gate, ...
reccos for a packaged solution.
While Asterisk's configuration files are horrible (and written by
people who didn't understand what a tokenizer is) it's really a case
of the more clueful you are the worse off you'll find it. You just
have to take a megadose of stupid pills in order to be happy with
Asterisk's configuration.
I've been using Astlinux, which allows access to the underlying files
(in fact you edit them through a web interface) successfully with
voip.ms (wholesale voip provider for cheap) for almost three years
now. My experience fooling around with stuff like Trixbox, Askozia,
and FreePBX is that there are plenty of cute GUI wrappers out there
for configuring stuff, but at the end of the day as painful as
handling the files directly is, it's a lot less painful than trying to
work around the GUI's lossage whenever you want to do something that
the designers didn't anticipate, which is pretty much all the time.
Making Cisco 7940/7960 phones with SIP loads talk to Asterisk is
well-documented, and their lossage modes are well-understood.
Back to Astlinux, it's a pre-baked distro with click-here
upgradability that will run nicely from CF on an embedded box like a
PCEngines ALIX 2d3 (~15 simultaneous calls if you're not transcoding).
6 watts of power. Not a bad deal.
i run a raw asterisk and would not wish it on my worst enemy.
Sure you would, you'd encourage your competitors to use it. 
-r
+1 on pbxinaflash
Carlos Alcantar
Race Communications / Race Team Member
101 Haskins Way, So. San Francisco, CA. 94080
Phone: +1 415 376 3314 / carlos@race.com / http://www.race.com
so, I've also been running asterisk in various iterations. It's much better than it was in the past, but what I've found is once you poke at it enough macros are your friend and make your life easier.
I'm not sure how many of you have programmed some other type of PBX while on a modem or terminal, but asterisk clearly makes it easier to diagnose what is going on and integrate a number of other solutions. It's also really meant to be run in a Linux environment vs *BSD. Much pain can be explained by trying to deal with OS port variances.
The biggest problem I've seen is that for mass-users, the diverse network environments pose challenges to VoIP. Many international hotels block 5060 or have broken NAT/ALG issues.
You usually need to VPN to the PBX or "internet" to work around these issues in my experience.
- Jared (A mostly happy asterisk user)
Using FreeSwitch to provide trunk services for nearly a year. Very happy with it. Just does what it says on the tin.
Currently installing a CudaTel as our office PBX before recommending it or not to customer (eating your own dog food) so far so good 
Thomas
I know FreeSWITCH and Asterisk from the inside out because we ported both of them to IPv6.
Verdict:
- Asterisk started ugly but is getting much better very quickly. They actually have paid professional coders working on it, and it shows. They started participating in the IETF. They recently implemented ICE. They're on the right track.
- FreeSWITCH started much prettier by reusing third-party libraries. But the glue code around these libs is absolutely horrendous. That glue code keeps growing and getting uglier. Their level of clue is dropping.
Right now, I'd pick Asterisk over FreeSWITCH.
Simon
Thanks Simon, I was about to say something. Users that have a hard
time with Asterisk do not understand it.
Users that have a hard time with Asterisk do not understand it.
been running it since pre 1. have large complex configs with confs,
follow-me (my original need), extensions and sip/iax peering with
strange things all over the developing world.
i still think config sucks. and changing syntax regulary may look like
improvement to those with the copious spare time to track it. but for
someone trying to run a stable install yet get the security patch of the
week, it sucks bigtime.
randy
yate hasnt been mentioned, which i am using successfully in multiple roles.
they have a distro similar to freepbx at http://www.freesentral.com/
however, we are currently evaluating sip:provider CE, which may be more than
you need, but definitively worth a look.
http://www.sipwise.com/products/spce/
its an open source softswitch implementation, which has made tremendous
progress in recent releases.
kind regards
Thilo