Hello Marcelo!

Thank you for the suggestion. I was in fact working on it and yes it proves to be a great piece of software. Thank you very much for the suggestion..

hi Cerebo,
if you still don't find your way out you can download for free AsteriskNOW from http://www.astersik.org
You don't need any technical experience to install it, and more, once its installed you can go ahead and start creating extensions via the GUI so as to make calls. Once your extensions created, you may wish to use softphones or physical IP phones and configure it using the parameters from the extension you created.
Example of such parameters you will need are;
IP address of you Astersik pbx will be put as your proxy
username is same as extension username
password is same too
etc..

NB: you may use an ATA if you are not good at dealing with complicated IP phones. Please don't use virtual machinesfor implementing real phone systems, I don't recommend it, but rather use some old Pentium2 or 3 you may surely have at home.
i wish this will help you build your phone system.

Yes I do understand. As long as ClearOs is free I think it is reasonable. Because the users could then decide for them-selves.

Cerebro wrote:

Hi Marcel,

Thank you for your reply. I think flexshares is a major feature. And yes I love it! Market place? Does that mean that ClearOS will not be free anymore?

See this positive! With this Clearfoundation want to attract third parity developer and i'll hope we see all kind of new modules for SBS and home use. Like you i also prefer free software but i understand if the developer wants a fee for his module. I willing to pay as long it's reasonable. I think you don't have to be afraid that Clearfoundation is going to ask money for all modules.

Unfortunately no. But I think that might be the best way to go. Thank you for your suggestion though!

Do you have a processor that supports VT because you could always install virtual box headless and install trixbox or asterisk based pbx.

Hi Alex,

I tried setting the proxy server to transparent and it did not work. Also tried setting it to non-transparent mode and it still did not work. Any suggestions?

Hi Marcel,

Thank you for your reply. I think flexshares is a major feature. And yes I love it! Market place? Does that mean that ClearOS will not be free anymore?

Cerebro wrote:

Hello Marcel!

Well to give you a little background, I am a huge Ubuntu fan and have been using it for a few years. I was looking for a SBS solution via Linux and stumbled upon Zentyal. I did install it and try it out and Zentyal was quite fine. However when I spotted ClearOS I was simply impressed with it's capabilities. Hence I went ahead and gave it a trial and it met with my satisfaction! So here I am battling with ClearOS.

By the way will the next release incorporate VOIP in to the core installation? Do you have a clue about it? :blush:

Hi Cerebro,

Thanks for explaining. I'm always curious why people switch from distro. I'm glad you like ClearOS Enterprise. Do you like the Flexshares? Zentyal misses this feature.

About the VOIP solution. With the release of ClearOS Enterprise 6.1 we will get a marketplace so third party developers can make modules for ClearOS. If i'm correct in the Clarkconnect days there was a third party VOIP module for Clarkconnect (the old ClearOS SBS). Lets hope these developers create a module for ClearOS Enterprise 6.1.

Make sure you set transparent mode in the proxy module to enabled when enabling the content filter.

When the content filter is enabled, firewall rules are automatically created that block web traffic (http/https) and force users to configure their web browsers to point to port 8080. Transparent mode needs to be enabled in order to allow web traffic to pass without the need to configure the browsers.

Woohoo!!! Congratulations!!

Hello everyone!

SIP is working fine. But now I have another problem. When SIP is running and content filtering is turned on I cannot browse the internet from the internal network. But the moment I turn off content filtering browsing starts working. Any suggestions?

Thank you for any fixes, suggestions and all the research.

Hello everyone!

It's working!!!! :woohoo: :laugh:

Big thank you to everyone who helped in. And thank you very much for the great tutorial Alex! Keep up the good work.

In the end the re-installation fixed it. I think I may have mucked up the system's DNS just a bit too much. Anyway it was a great learning experience and gave me a good dive in to ClearOS.

Thank you once again for helping this newbie...

Hello Marcel!

Well to give you a little background, I am a huge Ubuntu fan and have been using it for a few years. I was looking for a SBS solution via Linux and stumbled upon Zentyal. I did install it and try it out and Zentyal was quite fine. However when I spotted ClearOS I was simply impressed with it's capabilities. Hence I went ahead and gave it a trial and it met with my satisfaction! So here I am battling with ClearOS.

By the way will the next release incorporate VOIP in to the core installation? Do you have a clue about it? :blush:

Cerebro wrote:

I' m a newbie to ClearOS and I'm kind of transitioning from Zentyal. I love ClearOS so far and would like to know how to provide VOIP via ClearOS. I have tried to install Asterisks so far with no joy. I would greatly appreciate any help provided.

Thank you.

Hi Cerebro,

Out of interest but a bit offtopic what's the reason you switching from Zentyal to ClearOS?

I think the problem is tied to sipx setting the IP address as "IP address".

The line "grep -rl 192.168.24.119 /etc/sipxpbx/ | xargs sed -i ’s/"192.168.24.119"/192.168.24.119/g'" is hard to see in the howto so I edited out the quotation marks using the web interface. It was probably not enough but running the setup program again must have cleared everything up.

I just installed sipXecs according to my howto on a fresh install of ClearOS and everything is working. Hopefully you've had success as well.

I updated the howto to reflect the change in the sipxecs repo file and I removed the line that told the user to install the java-1.6.0-sun-fonts

Just the thought that I may have mucked up things a bit too much.... :unsure:

Hence just started reinstalling the system... Actually the server is almost done!

Shall keep you posted.

You can just try re-running the sipXecs setup program. Run the following command via the command-line:

sipxecs-setup

That will clear out the database and all of the settings.

Hello Alex,

Thank you for all the suggestions. I will reinstall the entire system and retry. Shall keep you posted.

I do know that the SIP_REALM needs to be the same as the SIP_DOMAIN_NAME. I'm not sure why that's different on your machine. I'll have to re-run the setup to see if something has changed, as Duncan noted.

After you change SIP_REALM to match SIP_DOMAIN_NAME, please restart sipxecs:

service sipxecs restart

Also, what is listed as the domain in /etc/dnsmasq.conf?

domain=?

I was able to reproduce the problem by changing the domain parameter in /etc/dnsmasq.conf to a domain name that didn't match proper domain name of the server or by changing the srv-host parameters to a hostname that didn't match the name of the ClearOS server.

Lastly, please click on the System - Domain menu in the sipXconfig GUI and tell me the domain name listed on that page.

This is my /etc/sipxpbx/domain-config

IP_DOMAIN_NAME : testnet.local
SIP_DOMAIN_ALIASES : 10.0.0.1 server.testnet.local
SIP_REALM : testcave.local
SHARED_SECRET : 6pftuos85p6JSvyoDZdB1Tnd
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE : en
SUPERVISOR_PORT : 8092
CONFIG_HOSTS : server.testnet.local

Hope the above information is useful and thank you very much for following up.

There's a mismatch somewhere regarding the domain name.

What is listed as the domain name in /etc/sipxpbx/domain-config?

Thank you Duncan,

I will re-run the setup today. Hopefully it should work!!! Thanks for your time anyway.

I had the same issue (and I followed the howto faithfully) so I expect something might have changed since the howto. In the end I re ran the setup program and shortly after it started working. It may be that the DNS side of things needs to be up and running correctly prior to running the setup program.

I can't actually be sure if this was the reason everything started working but it does seem likely.

Hi Alex,

Just a quickie...

I also did run the ping tests and digs and all returns an answer to the correct IP (10.0.0.1)

Thank you again

Hi Alex,

Thank you for your quick reply.

Well let me explain my setup.

Internal interface eth1
10.0.0.1/24

WAN interface eth0
DHCP

My domain = testnet.local
Server name = server
FQDN of the server = server.testnet.local

Entries in my dnsmasq.conf

srv-host=_sip._udp,server.testnet.local,5060,100,1
srv-host=_sip._tcp,server.testnet.local,5060,200,1


I have 10.0.0.1 mapped to server.testnet.local in the DNS server module as well.

Rebooted the server after doing the changes. Still it is the same error. Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you once again.

Hi Cerebro,

You're very welcome.

Do you have DNS entries in the /etc/dnsmasq.conf file that point your domain name to your IP address as shown below?

srv-host=_sip._udp,my_domain_name,5060,100,1
srv-host=_sip._tcp,my_domain_name,5060,200,1

If so, you should actually have the SRV Host records pointing to the fully qualified domain name of your ClearOS server:

srv-host=_sip._udp,clearos-host-name.my_domain_name,5060,100,1
srv-host=_sip._tcp,clearos-host-name.my_domain_name,5060,200,1

If you do have that, did you restart the DNS server after making the changes to the dnsmasq.conf file?

You should also have a DNS record in the Local DNS Server module (or in /etc/hosts) that points your domain name to the IP address of your ClearOS server.


Here are some tests to run to check for the proper DNS configuration:

ping clearos-host-name
ping clearos-host-name.my_domain_name

dig -t A clearos-host-name.my_domain_name
dig -t SRV _sip._tcp.my_domain_name
dig -t SRV _sip._udp.my_domain_name

Please let me know if that helps.

Hi Alex,


Thank you very much for your detailed guide. I did follow it and it did get the installation done for me. However when check the services under the mail SIP proxy I have the following error...

SIP route to SIPXCHANGE_DOMAIN_NAME <my_domain_name> is not to my IP address: <my_IP_address>

I have added the DNS records in dnsmasq.conf as well. Have you got any idea about this?

Thank you for your support once again.

You can view a list of recommended phones to use with sipXecs here:

http://wiki.sipfoundry.org/display/sipXecs/What+Phones+to+Choose

SipXecs is really good at auto-configuring lots of different phones. The management interface is excellent.

The kind of hardware needed is dependent on the number of users. You can use a box with specs similar to the following and easily support 100 users:

Intel Atom D525 Processor
4 GB RAM
Dual Gigabit LAN

A ClearBOX 110 with 2 GB RAM would easily support 50-60 users.

I hope that helps.

When you install the PBX you are given a list of supported phones in the devices section. Alot of Cisco's, Grandstreams, lynksys and Polycoms.

I am configuring one at the moment and trialling it with Gigaset cordless and Yealink hardwired phones.

Hi All

Slight derailment, but what kind of hardware are we looking at?

What sort of VoIP phones will work with a ClearOS/virtual PABX configuration as outlined above?

Regards

Ook

Hello Alex,

Thank you very much for your reply. I will try it today and let you know of the outcome.

Thank you once again.

Hi Cerebro,

You have a couple of options but these are my preferred choices:

1. You can take a look at the howto I created that will show you how to install sipXecs on ClearOS. It can be found at http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/howtos/freeswitch_with_sipxecs. SipXecs is awesome.

2. You can install the one of the preconfigured Asterisk-based solutions like PBX in a Flash or Elastix in a virtual machine running on ClearOS. You would, of course, have to install VirtualBox or VMWare Server on your ClearOS installation first. I've used PBX in a Flash for several years and it too is great.

I hope that helps.