We started out with 1 employee back in 2001. Now, we have 11. We started out with a Siemens PBX, and one ISDN-2 line. That Siemens has 8 digital ports, and 1 expansion slot. That slot has been taken for a second ISDN-2 port, since customers where getting a busy signal.
Now, people share a phone. Not something we want. The Siemens PBX is also as extensible and flexible as solid concrete. We had 2 options :
Buy a new PBX from Siemens (Siemens phones only work on a Siemens PBX)
Throw everything out, and start from scratch with a VOIP based solution.
After receiving the offer for the Siemens PBX, recovering from falling of my chair, and being resuscitated by one of my collegues, I decided to start from scratch with a VOIP solution. We soon ended up with :
Asterisk as the software platform
A Digium B41oP 4 port Euro ISDN card
Aastra 6757i SIP phones
Hardware was quickly ordered. I've upgraded our old fileserver with extra memory, a new storage array (which needed replacement anyway), and the Digium card. The OS has been manually upgraded from CentOS5 to CentOS6, since installer totally screwed up the upgrade.
The're no packages for CentOS 6, only for CentOS 5. I needed a shole bunch of non-standard libs :
libss7
libopenr2
libpri
dahdi
Downloaded, and packaged them. Asterisk was next : Version 10 wasn't an option, since OpenPBX refuses to work with that. I ended up with 1.8.13.0, since that's an LTS release. Welcome if you don't want to restart you PBX every day or so.
I'm going to publish the SRPMS and i386 binaries in my RPM repo, no x86_64, sorry. If you want modifications to those RPM's, contact be, and we'll work something out.