[K12OSN] asterisk PBX

[k12osn at collinsoft.com]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, Mark Orenstein wrote:
> Does anyone have experience using asterisk within a K12 school.  I'm
> investigating using it as a voice mail system for a small elementary school
> having 12 teachers.  The teachers would listen to their voice mail using
> their classroom PC; there are no phones within the classrooms.  It would
> supplement the existing 1989 vintage Merlin Plus system in the school which
> has only one phone available to the teachers.

We are experimenting with this right now. The Asterisk server is our old 
mail server, Pentium III 800MHz with 1GB of RAM. It seems to be overkill 
for this though. 

I bought some of the Grandstream Budgetone phones from and a FXO card from 
atacomm.com. The phones were $75 and the FXO card (4 port) was around 
$380. The individual phone lines plug into the FXO card.

We just put it in place, so I can't really tell you how well it's going. 
It seems to work ok over our 2mbs half-duplex wireless connection though.

Some things to be aware of (trying to go cheap):
-If the power is out, the phones are out. Be sure to keep a landline 
available for emergencies.
-If the server or connection to the server dies, the phones die.

And to keep this on topic, when I first tried this out, I grabbed the most 
availabe distribution to me, K12LTSP! My current server is running Debian 
Woody though.

-- 
Ryan Collins
Technology Coordinator - Kenton City Schools
http://www.kentoncityschools.org/