Setting up Asterisk VOIP on a Linode with Debian

Asterisk is an open-source telephone solution that runs over the internet instead of running through copper lines. It offers a variety of features such as voicemail and conference calling, much like a land line telephone can.

For this guide we will install Asterisk from source rather than from Ubuntu's repositories. The newer version offers several additional features, including the ability to integrate a Google Voice account as a trunk. We will use FreePBX as a web interface for our Asterisk configuration.

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I used Debian 7.5 instead of Ubuntu. When I got to the section where it said to:

apt-get install linux-virtual

I actually had to follow the instructions here to get the local kernel matching the dahdi_dummy kernel module.

I also had to install the correct kernel source, from the hint here, before the make commands would work:

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

The php5-suhosin package does not exist in the stable repository, so I had to omit that from the php apt-get line.

By default, Debian has the Apache document root at /var/www; we want to change that to /var/www/html. The VirtualHost directive is in file /etc/apache2/sites-available/default − change the appropriate lines:

…
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/html/>
…

To be able to install the Google Voice module, I had to:

# su - asterisk 
$ cd /var/www/html/admin/modules/
$ mkdir _cache