Installing AsteriskNOW 1.5 Beta guide

Here I am with another guide, this time we are installing the new AsteriskNOW 1.5 Beta! I did this in a Virtual PC to get good screen shots for all. Let’s start with the basics: What you need to run it:

I run this on a 501Mhz Celeron box with 256MB of RAM (8MB of that is shared with graphics) and it runs fine. The more you want to do with it the higher the system requirements will be. If you want a more detailed system spec list try asking on the forums.

1. Download the ISO. This is available at: http://www.asterisknow.org/downloads
   
2. After the ISO is downloaded, it needs to be “burnt” to a CD. I’ll assume you know what your doing there. If you don’t this may not be the thing for you. But here is a guide anyway. Alternatively you can mount the ISO in a virtual drive or mount the ISO directly to a virtual system.
    
3. Boot from the AsteriskNOW 1.5 Beta disk.
   
   
4. I was prompted to erase the hard drive as shown below. If this happens, ensure you are using a drive that you want to dedicate to AsteriskNOW and that doesn’t have any data on it that you want to keep. Click Yes to continue.
   
   
5. Partition the drive. Unless you want to do something fancy, just hit Next.
   
   
6. Select the time zone most appropriate for you. This is a rather cool time zone selector so I took some extra pictures
   
    
7. Choose your root password. This is the mother of all passwords on Linux so choose something secure. I recommend something at least 250 characters long, alphanumeric, consisting of upper case and lower case characters as well as symbols. But I might just be paranoid..
   
   
8. Sit there and do nothing while it installs. Fun.
   
   
9. Remove the CD / Dismount the ISO and hit reboot. This would be a good time to make sure that its labelled and in a nice case too.
   
   
10. Watch it startup for the first time, I hope this is a proud moment for many.
    
    
11. This part was confusing for me. Onetime I was prompted to login as root, and the other I was asked to go through a final configuration of the base system (Authentication, Firewall, Network, Services). It appears that it times out after a few seconds of inactivity and forwards to the console login. I just hit reset and it went back to this:
    
    
12. Skip the Authentication part unless you want to do something fancy and complicated, go down to Firewall and press Tab then Enter. Remember that in the upcoming steps you use Tab to move between items, the arrow keys to select items and the Enter key to move on.
    
13. Be secure. Set the firewall to enable and choose Permissive. Move down to Customize and press enter.
     
     
    I only used one Network Card so I’m not sure what it looks like with more. I’m sure you can figure it out. I set eth0 (my network interface) to Trusted since this was only going to run on my home network. I then set SSH, WWW (HTTP), Secure WWW (HTTPS), Samba and FTP to allow incoming connections and hit ok.
     
    Select Ok from the box at the bottom of the previous page when you leave the customize page as well.
    
14. Go down to Network Configuration. If your happy with DHCP then you can skip this step, in saying that if you want your PBX to get an IP through DHCP you don’t really want a PBX [unless you have a decent DHCP setup with static leases and the like ]
    Choose your network adapter:
    
    Here is how I had mine setup:
    
    I disabled DHCP and set AsteriskNOW to use the IP 192.168.1.1, Subnet Mask of 255.255.255.0 and the gateway of 192.168.1.254. Your IP addressing will probably vary. If you need help there’s lots on Google or you can leave a comment.
    
15. The wizard will close and AsteriskNOW will finish booting. You’ll see a screen like this when it’s done:
    
    This is where I unplugged the keyboard, mouse and screen from my PBX and went onto my laptop. To get to the web GUI to configure you box the easy way:

    Load the browser you normally use, browse to: http://<PBX_IP_Address>/” [for example: http://192.168.1.1/] and you should see a page like this:
    
    

16. Log into FreePBX Administration! The default username is freepbx and the default password is fpbx.
     
    Have fun!