Asterisk is an Open Source PBX which provides almost everything anyone could need from a PBX in hardware, so it's more than enough for my needs.

Everything started in the Wireless Meeting I assisted the week before, someone was talking about this fantastic piece of software and how they've managed to get interconnected between some towns over Internet using IAX. That made some people start to discuss some points on how Asterisk and WLANs could work together to help zones, rooms, shops, etc where the phone line is not available.

Then pof started to work on it, looking for services using IAX to call land lines, mobiles, other IAX users, etc. from your PC or even from a SIP phone which could be plugged into your LAN. Also Asterisk allows you to work with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk's sponsors, Digium. So everything seems possible!

Finally last Friday, I was in pof's home, like I use to..., then he started to show me how Asterisk was working and how it helps to save money using VoIP providers like VoipJet with very nice prices, look what they've got.

With all this fun...you know what's coming, don't you? I had to start playing with it, but where? all my parent's home is under a chaos of builders, painters and a long etc., so my laptop seemed a good place at least just for starters. I followed pof's step-by-step guide so I got it working quickly and Saturday night I was talking with Asterisk's echo service :P.

On Sunday morning I wanted to flash my Linksys WRT54GSv2 with OpenWRT because it has lots of features I'd like to check, also I wanna give a try to Wi-Viz a very nice application which is able to provide a map, drawing your wireless network without interfering in the normal operation of the router. There I was...putting away HyperWRT and flashing the new image to the router, learning how to configure it without the web interface, updating packages, etc. Then I realized someone had built Asterisk packages for this firmware and installed them without losing a moment.

The package system adopted by OpenWRT is ipkg (very common on such devices), it seems to have some problems tracking dependencies (I don't even know if it should do so...) cause I had some shared object not found problems, solved by installing libpthread and libncurses both were available to be installed from OpenWRT's repositories.

And there I was again talking with Asterisk's echo service...:PP but now running it on low-end hardware designed not to do PBX tasks! I'd like to thank from here all the people is working on hacking all those little thingies that are running around these days with Linux inside :)

Finally, after playing for awhile with OpenWRT I got problems, I installed DropBear I set the root password, rebooted the box and ... I can no longer login into the router. Telnet service has been disabled auto-magically (:P) after setting up the password and my SSH client is not allowed to login. I still don't know why...but I hope re-flashing it will solve the problem. I will try to use pof's instructions to upload the new image via TFTP.