Playing with *@H

A friend of mine commented over lunch the other day that he has fully embraced VOIP. He even said that he had setup an Asterisk PBX for use in his home. In the ensuing conversation, I mentioned that I tried playing with it once, but that my lack of linux skills and 'hacker time' prevented me from getting it going. Then he pointed me to Aterisk@Home, which was essentially someone's cool idea of packaging Asterisk into a single ISO for installation.

I downloaded and installed it at work, with the intent of setting up a means for people to dial into our IT helpdesk, and have a voicemail message routed immediately into our ticketing system.

But I have some other plans for personal use too, and as time, money (read: my wife and kids) and passion allow, here are some of the things that I would like to accomplish:

- Set it up as PBX in my home so that all phones in the house will be able to pick up either my pots or voip lines, and that I have one unified answering system for both.

- Build an outward dial script and then offer it to local community groups for a phone tree system. (i.e. say, offer it to my kids school for snow closings, etc).

- Set it up so that I can dial-out and/or answer all of my phones from the road - i.e. log into my home phone as a SIP client from any internet connection.

Of course, I have said things like this in the past, but we'll see where this one goes.