[ Thanks to Michael
Hall for this link. ]
“Like any complex piece of software, you’ll have some
work to do coming to grips with what it can do and how to set it
up. One ideal way to get up to speed fast is by going on a three
day Asterisk Fast Start training course offered by Digium, the
company that sponsors the Asterisk open source project.“The Fast Start course assumes no previous knowledge of Linux –
the platform on which Asterisk runs – or any knowledge of corporate
telephony. Having said that, the course is designed for people who
are responsible for corporate telephony, who understand IP
networking and who would be familiar with the network topology in
their organization. A rudimentary knowledge of some basic Linux
commands and tools like ls, cp, and gedit or nano is also pretty
much essential. The course takes place in a training room equipped
with a PC freshly installed with CentOS (a Red Hat derivative) for
each student, all connected to a server which simulates various
external lines, exchanges and situations. It consists of a
combination of lectures and roll-up-the-sleeves practical lab
sessions.“The first part of the course deals with how phones work and the
different types of analog and digital trunks that are available,
outlines the concept of a codec and introduces various types, and
explains what open source software is. Pretty basic stuff, which
anyone attending thinking of installing Asterisk should probably
know already. Then it’s on to downloading the source code for the
various components needed to run asterisk, and compiling and
installing the software onto the CentOS PCs.”