Page 135 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Configuring the Channel Configuration File (iax.conf)
Like the rest of this chapter, we’re attempting to get you up and running quickly with
the smallest configuration file set possible in order to minimize the problems you may
have in configuring your devices. Just like the sip.conf file, iax.conf requires only a few
simple lines to get our IAX phone registered to Asterisk. Let’s take a look:
[general]
autokill=yes
[idefisk]
type=friend
host=dynamic
context=phones
Yes, really, that’s all you need to get your softphone up and running. It’s not the most
secure or feature-rich configuration (we’re not even using a password), but this will
work.

In the [general] section of our iax.conf file, we have a single option: autokill= yes. We
use this option to avoid things from stalling when a peer does not ACK (reply) to our
NEW packet (new call setup request) within 2000 milliseconds. Instead of the reply to
value yes, you can set this to the number of milliseconds to wait for the ACK to our
NEW packet. You can control the autokill option for each individual peer by defining
qualify for those peers that you know may be on poor network connections.
The rest of the file contains the definition for our softphone. We define the type as
friend, which tells Asterisk we will send calls to this device and also accept calls from
this device. A friend is a shortcut for defining a separate peer (send calls to the soft-
phone), and user (accept calls from the softphone). We could also have defined
individual definitions for the peer and user like so:
[idefisk]
type=user
context=phones

[idefisk]
type=peer
host=dynamic
Once you’ve configured your iax.conf file, save the file and reload the IAX2 channel
module from your Asterisk console with module reload chan_iax2.so. Confirm your
new peer exists by running iax2 show peers.
localhost*CLI> iax2 show peers
Name/Username Host Mask Port Status
idefisk (Unspecified) (D) 255.255.255.255 0 Unmonitored
1 iax2 peers [0 online, 0 offline, 1 unmonitored]

Configuring an IAX Softphone | 107