Hello guys, we’re going to do Asterisk 18 LTS installation in this guide. This will be a complete easy to follow tutorial.  For recent release of Asterisk, check out How to Install Asterisk 16 PBX on CentOS 7. So let’s start by defining what a PBX and Asterisk is?

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asterisk pstn

What Is a PBX?

Asterisk, first and foremost, is a Private Branch Exchange. A PBX is a piece of equipment that handles telephone switching owned by a private business, rather than a telephone company. A PBX can be thought of as a private phone switchboard, connecting to one or more telephones on one side and usually connecting to one or more telephone lines on the other.

What is Asterisk?

Asterisk is a complete PBX. It implements all the major features of most commercially available PBXes. It also implements, for free, features that often cost a lot in a commercial installation: Conference calling, Direct Inward System Access, Call Parking, and Call Queues, just to name a few.

The basic features provided by Asterisk are:

  1. Caller ID
  2. Blacklisting (Block callers by Caller ID)
  3. Call Waiting
  4. Call Transfer
  5. Call Conferencing
  6. Conference Center/Bridging
  7. Do‐Not‐Disturb
  8. Call Forwarding
  9. Call Parking
  10. Call Detail Reporting
  11. Dial by Name Directory
  12. Interactive Voice Response (Auto Attendant)
  13. Time Condition Call Routing
  14. Call Queuing
  15. Call Back
  16. Hold Music/Recordings (MP3)
  17. Application Integration
  18. Extended Call Reporting
  19. DISA (Direct Inward System Access)
  20. Dictation
  21. Follow Me
  22. Paging/Intercom
  23. Ring Groups
  24. Graphical Call Manager
  25. Day/Night Controls

Among others. So let’s get started.

Step 1 – Set Server Hostname

You can set hostname and timezone before doing any installation. Use below commands.

sudo timedatectl  list-timezones
sudo timedatectl  set-timezone Africa/Nairobi

To set hostname type:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname pbx-01.example.com

In case your CentOS server has wrong keymaps. You can fix them.

$ localectl 
   System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
       VC Keymap: us
      X11 Layout: us
$ localectl list-keymaps

To set keymap to us:

sudo localectl set-keymap us

You can set the system language to English by typing following commands on your terminal as root.

sudo localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Step 2 – Update System and Install dependencies

First, do a system update

sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install "@Development Tools"

Reboot after system upgrade

sudo reboot

Install other dependencies required to build and run Asterisk 18 LTS on CentOS 7:

sudo yum -y install lynx mariadb-server mariadb php php-mysql \
  php-mbstring tftp-server httpd ncurses-devel sendmail sendmail-cf \
  sox newt-devel libxml2-devel libtiff-devel audiofile-devel gtk2-devel \
  subversion kernel-devel git php-process crontabs cronie cronie-anacron \
  wget vim php-xml uuid-devel sqlite-devel net-tools gnutls-devel php-pear \
  autoconf bzip2 libedit-devel

Install other missing dependencies, not in the previous step.

sudo yum -y install gcc gcc-c++ php-xml php php-mysql php-pear php-mbstring mariadb-devel mariadb-server mariadb sqlite-devel lynx bison psmisc tftp-server httpd make ncurses-devel libtermcap-devel sendmail sendmail-cf caching-nameserver sox newt-devel libxml2-devel libtiff-devel audiofile-devel gtk2-devel uuid-devel libtool libuuid-devel subversion kernel-devel kernel-devel-$(uname -r) git subversion kernel-devel php-process crontabs cronie cronie-anacron wget vim

Setup and configure mariadb database, setting the password as well.

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

Now set the password by running the command below.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Just press enter if you don’t already have a password set for mysql. Agree to remove the test database and disallow remote login.

Step 3 – Install Jasson C Library

Installing Jansson which is a C library for encoding, decoding and manipulating JSON data. Let’s download, unpack and compile it using the below command.

sudo su -
cd /usr/src
mkdir asterisk-18 && cd asterisk-18
git clone https://github.com/akheron/jansson.git
cd jansson
autoreconf  -i
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make && make install

Install Legacy Pear requirements

pear install Console_Getopt

Step 4 – Install Asterisk 18 LTS on CentOS 7

Navigate to /usr/src/asterisk-18 directory and install download Asterisk 18 LTS on CentOS 7

cd  /usr/src/asterisk-18
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux-complete/dahdi-linux-complete-current.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/libpri/libpri-current.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-18-current.tar.gz
git clone https://github.com/pjsip/pjproject.git

Compile and install DAHDI if you are connecting to PSTN. This is OPTIONAL, install if you’ll connect to PSTN.

cd  /usr/src/asterisk-18
tar xvfz dahdi-linux-complete-current.tar.gz
tar xvfz libpri-current.tar.gz
rm -f dahdi-linux-complete-current.tar.gz libpri-current.tar.gz
cd dahdi-linux-complete-*/
make all
make install
make config
cd ..
cd libpri-*/
make
make install

Compile and install pjproject

cd  /usr/src/asterisk-18
cd pjproject
CFLAGS='-DPJ_HAS_IPV6=1' ./configure --prefix=/usr \
  --enable-shared --disable-sound \
  --disable-resample --disable-video \
  --disable-opencore-amr --libdir=/usr/lib64
make dep
make all
make install

Compile and install Asterisk

cd /usr/src/asterisk-18
tar xvfz asterisk-18-current.tar.gz
cd asterisk-*
./configure --libdir=/usr/lib64

Setup menu options by running the following command

make menuselect

On Add-ons select chan_ooh323 and format_mp3  as shown below

asterisk1

On Core Sound Packages, select the formats of Audio packets like below


On  Music On Hold, option select the following modules as shown in the picture below

asterisk2

On Extra Sound Packages select as shown below:

asterisk4

Now run the following command to download the mp3 decoder library into the source tree.

cd /usr/src/asterisk-18/asterisk-*
contrib/scripts/get_mp3_source.sh

Do installation of selected modules

cd /usr/src/asterisk-18/asterisk-*/
make
make install
make samples
make config

Step 5 – Configure Asterisk 18 LTS on CentOS 7

Create separate user and group to run asterisk services

useradd -m asterisk
chown asterisk.asterisk /var/run/asterisk
chown -R asterisk.asterisk /etc/asterisk
chown -R asterisk.asterisk /var/{lib,log,spool}/asterisk 
chown -R asterisk.asterisk /usr/lib64/asterisk

Make systemctl start asterisk by copying init script to init.d dir.

cd /usr/src/asterisk-18/asterisk-*
cp contrib/init.d/rc.redhat.asterisk  /etc/init.d/asterisk
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/asterisk

Locate asterisk by

$ which asterisk

Then open the file /etc/init.d/asterisk by

sudo vim /etc/init.d/asterisk

Replace AST_SBIN=, with your location of asterisk binary, for my case it’s /sbin/. See below image.

asterisk6

Disable SELinux

sed -i 's/(^SELINUX=).*/SELINUX=disabled/' /etc/selinux/config
sestatus

Setup Asterisk Database

[[email protected] ~]# mysql -u root -p
create user 'asterisk'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
create database cdrdb;
create database asterisk;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON asterisk.* TO [email protected] IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cdrdb.* TO [email protected] IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
flush privileges; 
exit

Make all asterisk PBX ports accessible by adding the following rules

firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=5060/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=5060/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=5061/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=5061/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=4569/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=5038/tcp --permanent 
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=10000-20000/udp --permanent

Commit changes

firewall-cmd --reload

Confirm that the rules are added.

[[email protected] ~]# firewall-cmd --zone=public --list-all 
public (default, active)
  interfaces: eth0
  sources: 
  services: dhcpv6-client ssh
  ports: 5061/tcp 4569/udp 5060/tcp 10000-20000/udp 5061/udp 5060/udp 5038/tcp
  masquerade: no
  forward-ports: 
  icmp-blocks: 
  rich rules:

Restart asterisk server

systemctl restart asterisk

Check if running

sudo systemctl status asterisk

Further reading: How to secure Asterisk and FreePBX from VoIP Fraud and Brute force attacks

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Founder of Computingforgeeks. Expertise in Virtualization, Cloud, Linux/UNIX Administration, Automation,Storage Systems, Containers, Server Clustering e.t.c.

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