Last night's CentraLUG meeting, 4 December 2006

[Bill Sconce]

Almost a new record for CentraLUG attendance last night!
Eleven hardy souls gathered at the NHTI Library in Concord,
drawn by MonadLUG's Tim Lind and his promised presentation
on TrixBox, the Free voice-over-IP project.

I took down names around the table as fast as I could:
Tim Lind Ted Roche, Alex Hewitt, Andrew Gillis, Brad
(from Burlington VT!), Mark, Bill (not me), Rick, Bob,
Dave, Bill (me).

Ted reviewed recent and upcoming events, Bill (me) reported
on the growth of Linux at the McAuliffe conference just
past, someone reported that Vista was just released but
evidently no one cares.   :)

Tim Lind introduced himself: he's been using Linux since
1997, has been a member of MonadLUG about 7 years, and is
the founder and "Geek in Chief" of Computerborough, an
IT service company in Peterborough.

He gave us a detailed and fascinating presentation of how
Asterisk and TrixBox may be used in a small business.  A
little Free software, a modest Intel box, and PCI cards
and/or IP phones and/or plain old wired phones, plus the
Internet, and you can have a PBX setup with extensions
in several locations, automated call direction, elevator
music, and more -- and all of it configurable by a PHP-
based Web interface.

TrixBox is another of the "best-of-breed" distributions,
meaning a project which collects everything needed to get
a cold box up and running with a particular application
set (like CentOS, for instance) -- in this case, the Free
Asterisk PBX software, plus all the "glue" stuff you would
need to either type in by hand or find somewhere on
SourceForge, all packeaged as an ISO.  Formerly known as
Asterisk at Home, the project changed its name to TrixBox
earlier this year, because of possible trademark confusion
(Asterisk at Home had gotten up to 1500 downloads/day, passing
those of Asterisk itself) and because it had become evident
that it was not just an "@Home" package any more but a
fully-capable PBX.

[BTW, I was curious about the licensing of the new TrixBox,
i.e., whether it was Free (as e.g., Ubuntu claims to be)
or subtly encumbered (as SuSE has proven to be under Novell).
The consensus was, Free, but we weren't sure.  This morning
I did some checking, and the answer seems to be "Free". [1]]

Selected notes from Tim's talk:
  o For a new business a Staples answering maching was
    OK -- for a while.
  o He uses "IP Cop" (another best-of-breed distro) for
    his firewalls, home and office;  they handle VPN so
    as to pass his VOIP traffic
  o Installation is now very easy
  o Based on CentOS
  o Includes Festival speech synthesis, SugarCRM
  o Recommended resources:
      VOIP Hacks, O'Reilly, ISBN 0-596-10133-3
      Asterisk, the Future of Telephony, O'Reilly, ISBN 0-596-00962-3
      TrixBox Made Easy, ISBN 1-904811-93-0
    And above all ("YOU NEED THIS!"),
      http://nerdvittles.com
  o Development has picked up since Fonalit acquired the project
  
Tim walked us through the high points of the Web-based management
interface.  It's remarkably rich, and graphically clever.  (I was
particularly struck, however, by the attention to maintenance:
there is a yum-like interface [perhaps actually based on yum, from
what I could tell] to automate the business of keeping your Asterisk
system patched and up to date.

Watching Tim's "switchboard" via a browser at NHTI one of placed
and "emergency" call to his PBX, watched and listened on speakerphone
as Asterisk answered, routed the call to a recording on disk, and
beeped Tim's pager to alert him that a "customer" needed his help.

As we wrapped up we got a special surprise.  One of our first-time
attendees was...   Andrew Gillis, the founder of the TrixBox
project!  Turns out he lives in New Hampshire...   Andy remarked
that he's given Asterisk at Home/TrixBox presentation dozens of
times -- this is the first time he's been able to listen to one.
(Tim said, "I'm glad I said that I liked it"...  :)

Thanks, Tim!

-Bill

_______________________________________________________________________
[1] RE: "Free"

    Tom Keating interviewing Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality:

    Tom: So by working within the community you hope to build brand
    awareness for your commercial-based Fonality PBXtra?

    Chris: Yes, we want to build some brand awareness in the Asterisk
    community to let them know we are a serious player that has a 100%
    supported, 100% service model.

    Chris: The trixbox forums has over 20,000 posts in the last 3
    months. It has become the defacto place to get questions answered
    about Asterisk. Questions answered about rolling an open-source
    small business environment. And that's really the value we saw
    is - there are a lot of smart open-source people in that community.

    Tom: What are the download numbers?

    Chris: 1,500 people download trixbox every day, which is more
    than Digium. Mark was quoted in a Forbes article as saying 1,000
    downloads per day and we were surprised since we averaged 50% 
    more than that.

    Tom: Any issues with people knowing about the trixbox brand and
    knowing that is the latest and greatest version of Asterisk?

    Chris: I would say given our download numbers and given the fact
    that we get more downloads of Asterisk every day more than the rest
    of the world combined, I would say no, there is no brand problem.

    Tom: So how is Fonality going to contribute to trixbox with this
    investment?

    Chris: There's two things that are really really important for us
    to let the world and the community know. Number one is, trixbox
    was free, is free, and will always be free. And when I say, I mean
    pure GPL. It won't have a double license, you won't have to sign
    a waiver releasing your rights to Fonality, and we're not going
    to get into any of those complicated licensing schemes that you
    see with some other open source companies. It will be pure GPL. 
    Number two, we're contributing broad financial support to the 
    trixbox platform to continue to improve that application. This
    is not just a community of that site that we're going to pay the
    bandwidth on. We actually have a host of engineers internally 
    working on improving trixbox.
    
From:
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/asterisk/fonality-acquires-trixbox.asp