AstRecipes » Compiling Asterisk 1.4 with TDM400 and H323

As a point of reference, we imagine you're going to build your new Asterisk on a machine preinstalled with TrixBox; this means your machine is very easy to reinstall from scratch if anything goes wrong. This also means that you can start playing with Asterisk 1.4 in a virtual machine, so you have no risk.

The first thing you have to do is to create a working directory for Asterisk (say /src/asterisk14) and use it as a base directory
It will also be necessary to erase the existing Asterisk system - see Removing Asterisk. Make sure neither Asterisk nor its required libs and drivers (eg Zaptel) are running before attempting the installations.

You'll also need a bit more software:
* The C++ developement environment
* The Iksemel library, in order to test the Google Talk integration (we sure want that!)
* The Gnu TLS package, as needed by Iksemel
* Kernel development headers

Prerequisites
Getting all this software is fairly easy to get installed, thanks to the very powerful yum installed that ships with CentOS:

The first command may download and update quite a lot of stuff; don't worry and let it run.

Installing Iksemel
You will then download the Iksemel v1.2 libary (http://code.google.com/p/iksemel/) and compile it like this:

Checking you have the correct version of Make
To make sure that you version of GNU Make is > 3.79, just run

If the version of Make is < 3.80, you should update it or Asterisk won't compile - see http://forums.digium.com/viewtopic.php?t=12707. Most modern systems should not be affected by this, but this was the default version of make for RHEL 3 / CentOS 3; in this case, you should update it, either by using a RPM version or by compiling the new version of make right on your box. This should be very easy to do:

If now you're running Make 3.81, you're just fine.

Download and install OpenH323 libraries
We have to download and install the correct version of OpenH323. Even if there is version 1.19 available as well, it does not seem to compile correctly, so we will use version 1.18. We will install manually just the shared library we need, so compilation is very easy.

We copy the shared library manually into the system folder.

It is very important that you set the PWLIBDIR to your path, othewise OpenH323 will not find it.

In the configure lines, check that it says something like: PWLib prefix set to.... /src/ast14/pwlib_v1_10_3

Again we must set the OPENH323DIR variable, so Asterisk can know here to look for OpenH323. We copy the library manually to the system directory, as we do not care about the rest of OpenH323 features.

Installing Asterisk 1.4.0
First we have to download the latest version of Asterisk and Zaptel, as follows.

We start by building Zaptel, as follows:

At this point use the menuselect utility to select which Zaptel hardware - if any - you have on board. Please remeber that if you want to exit keeping the changes you made, you must press x, while q will quit without saving and the left arrow will get you back to the previous menu. Even if you do not have Zaptel hardware, you should compile the ztdummy driver.

If you get an error that says Error: syntax error before "zone_lock" then you have a small problem with you kernel sources; comment a single line in spinlock.h as suggested in http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=6425 and it will be solved.

Now we build libpri - no configure or menuselect for it yet:

Now we build Asterisk itself:

At this point, you should go to the Channels menu and see that H323 and chan_google are enabled. If it's not, vey likely you did not set OPENH323DIR or PWLIBDIR, so configure cannot enable H.323 by default.

When compiling with H.323 support, the first time you run make it will end with an error telling you to run make again. This is okay, just do it as it says.

Asterisk is now ready.

Starting the TDM400
We have a TDM 400 with 1 FXS channel on port 1 and 1 FXO channel on port 4, so we create the following files:

/etc/zaptel.conf

We start up the drivers by typing

And we expect no error messages save the correct output on /var/log/messages, something on the lines of:

Starting it all together
To run Asterisk now, type:

Asterisk should load and start.

The ztcfg command is needed to apply the configuration information in /etc/zaptel.conf to the zaptel driver. Your fresh copy of Asterisk should be ready to run. If it crashes on startup complaining of missing dynamic library modules, just copy them to /usr/lib.

Enabling H.323
In order to enable H.323, you simply edit /etc/asterisk/h323.conf as follows:

This will tell it to find the gatekeeper automatically and to route incoming calls to context h323.
To place an outbound call fron Asterisk, you just dial:

This will find the terminal 21 through the Gatekeeper and will call it as needed.

See also:
* Installing the Asterisk GUI for 1.4
* Checking library dependencies
* Removing Asterisk

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