Page 26 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

and all of our remote call centers. Along the way, we ran into a lot of uncharted territory,
and I began thinking about creating a good repository of Asterisk knowledge. Over the
course of the project, we were able to do some really innovative things, such as invent
IAX trunking!

When all was said and done, we ended up with around forty Asterisk servers spread
across many different geographical locations, all communicating with each other to
provide a cohesive enterprise-class VoIP phone system. This system currently handles
approximately 1 million minutes of calls per month, serves several hundred employees,
connects to 27 voice T1s, and saves the company around $20,000 (USD) per month
on their telecom costs. In short, our Asterisk project was a resounding success!
While in the middle of implementing this project, I met Leif in one of the Asterisk IRC
channels. We talked about ways we could help out new Asterisk users and lower the
barrier to entry, and we decided to push ahead with plans to more fully document
Asterisk. I really wanted some good documentation in “dead-tree” format —basically
a book that a new user could pick up and learn the basics of Asterisk. About that same
time, the number of new users on the Asterisk mailing lists and in the IRC channels
grew tremendously, and we felt that writing an Asterisk book would greatly improve
the signal-to-noise ratio. The Asterisk Documentation Project was born! The rest, they
say, is history.
Since then, we’ve been writing Asterisk documentation. I never thought it would be
this arduous, yet rewarding. (I joked with Leif and Jim that it might be easier and less
controversial to write an in-depth tome called Religion, Gun Control, and Sushi than
cover everything that Asterisk has to offer in sufficient detail!) What you see here is a
direct result of a lot of late nights and long weekends spent helping the Asterisk com-
munity—after all, it’s the least we could do, considering what Asterisk has given to us.
We hope it will inspire other members of the Asterisk community to help document
changes and new features for the benefit of all involved.

Now to thank some people:
First of all, I’d like to thank my beautiful wife. She’s put up with a lot of lonely nights
while I’ve been slaving away at the keyboard, and I’d like her to know how much I
appreciate her and her endless support. I’d also like to thank my kids for doing their
best to remind me of the important things in life. I love you!

To my parents: thanks for everything you’ve done to help me stretch and grow and
learn over the years. You’re the best parents a person could ask for.
To Dave Carr and Michael Lundberg: thanks for letting me learn Asterisk on company
time. Working with both of you was truly a pleasure. May God smile upon you and
grant you success and joy in all you do.
To Leif and Jim: thanks for putting up with my stupid jokes, my insistence that we do
things “the right way,” and my crazy schedule. Thanks for pushing me along, and

xxiv | Preface