Page 321 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

CHAPTER 13

Managing Your Asterisk System

It won’t be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something,
after all.
—Larry Wall

While there is a cornucopia of creative things that you are going to want to do with
your spanking-new Asterisk system, there are also some basic, unglamorous, dare we
say, boring things that need to be discussed.

Call Detail Recording

Without even being told, Asterisk assumes that you want to store CDR information. *

By default, Asterisk will create a CSV file and place it in the fold-
†
er /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/. To the naked eye, this file looks like a bit of a mess. If,
however, you separate each line according to the commas, you will find that each line
contains information about a particular call, and that the commas separate the follow-
ing values:
accountcode
Assigned if configured for the channel in the channel configuration file (i.e.,
sip.conf). The account code is assigned on a per-channel basis. You can also change
this value from the dialplan by setting CDR(accountcode).
src
Received Caller ID (string, 80 characters).

* If you are wondering why such an obviously simple thing seems to be such an achievement, the reason is
simply that many traditional PBXes do not have this capability built in. With those systems, you have to
purchase some sort of third-party appliance even just to capture the raw call data. Asterisk simply stores it.
No drama. No cost. No kidding.
† A Comma Separated Values (CSV) file is a common method of formatting database-type information in a
text file. You can open CSV files with a text editor, but most spreadsheet and database programs will also
read them and properly parse them into rows and columns.

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