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How To Install Asterisk PBX 18 LTS on CentOS 7

How To Install Asterisk PBX 18 LTS on CentOS 7

How To Install Asterisk PBX 18 LTS on CentOS 7. 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.

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:

  • Caller ID
  • Blacklisting (Block callers by Caller ID)
  • Call Waiting
  • Call Transfer
  • Call Conferencing
  • Conference Center/Bridging
  • Do‐Not‐Disturb
  • Call Forwarding
  • Call Parking
  • Call Detail Reporting
  • Dial by Name Directory
  • Interactive Voice Response (Auto Attendant)
  • Time Condition Call Routing
  • Call Queuing
  • Call Back
  • Hold Music/Recordings (MP3)
  • Application Integration
  • Extended Call Reporting
  • DISA (Direct Inward System Access)
  • Dictation
  • Follow Me
  • Paging/Intercom
  • Ring Groups
  • Graphical Call Manager
  • 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

install-asterisk-ubuntu-18.04-04-min.png

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

install-asterisk-ubuntu-18.04-03-min


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

install-asterisk-ubuntu-18.04-01-min

On Extra Sound Packages select as shown below:

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.

Disable SELinux

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

Setup Asterisk Database

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

[root@asterisk-cloud ~]# 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

That’s it.

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