Freeswitch Howto

As promised here is my Freeswitch howto.  A few things first.  The reason I’m doing this is to get more documentation out there.  I have to admit I have never been so disappointed with Google.  I had one heck of a time trying to find the information I needed, so I’m writing this in hopes that the next poor sap wont have such a hard time.  I offer no guarantees that any of this will work for you, nor do I guarantee that it wont completely destroy your system if you try it.  A lot of this information can be found on the Internet, some of it I got through the Freeswitch mailing list, the Freeswitch wiki, and the Sangoma wiki.  That being said here goes.

Background

I work at Beartooth Mountain Christian Ranch.  We run 10 weeks of camp in the summer, and a one year Bible college during the off season.  We have buildings spread across our campus, and wanted a phone system that worked in all of them.  Up until now we’ve had a system in the main office, but no way of transferring calls to the other buildings.  When our office phone system broke they told me to look into an actual campus wide PBX, and Freeswitch was what I came up with.  We’ve got five POTS lines that come into camp, 17 phones, one fax, and two soft phones to share them with.   We needed to be able to (obviously) send and receive phone calls and faxes, but we also wanted to be able to transfer phone calls and get every one a voice mail box.

The Hardware

Mother board: Asus M2N68-AM Plus

CPU: AMD Athlon X2 Black Edition 2.8GHz

RAM: 2Gb PC6400 Crucial

HDD: 2 500Gb WD in a software RAID 1 setup

Telephony Card: Sangoma A200 PCI-e with hardware echo cancelation – 1 Remora addon with 3 FXO modules, 1 FXS module, and a back pane connector.

Wired IP Phones: 15 Grandstream GXP280

Wireless IP Phones: 2 Cisco WIP310

The Software

I’m using CentOS as the operating system.  Freeswitch git version c7abfa7 (I downloaded it March 6, 2011).  Wanpipe driver version 3.5.18.

Installation

Configuration