You are here

Asterisk phone book

7 posts / 0 new
Last post
kg9dw
kg9dw's picture
Asterisk phone book
Hi folks...just loaded raspbx last night on a new Pi 3. Wow...pretty cool! For now I'm using linphone as a soft client. 

I'm not seeing how to setup a directory or phone book that can be downloaded to the client. Any hints on where to head with this?
al0y
al0y's picture
any update?
Have you ever managed to get this sorted out?
I am running a FreePBX instance on my RPi as well, and would like to provide my clients with a sort-of white pages directory.

I would prefer to have the list with all known numbers and not just the local extensions on the PBX, but even just the local extensions is a good start for now.

Aly B.
KG6JEI
This is going to be phone
This is going to be phone model dependent.
Every phone has  a different method of loading address books.
​You will need to consult your phone provisioning manual.

There is no SIP standard for this.

​Some phones will do an LDAP lookup, others will require you provide an XML file that is read at phone startup, etc.
al0y
al0y's picture
back to basics
i think I am gonna opt in to using just a printed out white pages. 

This makes it just simple and it's compatible with EVERY phone make on the mesh network. running different types of servers to serve different types of directories based on each phone make is just unnecessary complication. 
AA7AU
AA7AU's picture
Use a web served directory on the mesh?

Seeing as how the OP is running a PI3 for the PBX on the mesh, why not just install a light-weight web-server, setup a mesh "service" link, and then keep your phone "directory" in a wiki or some other sort of web-page arrangement? That PI3 is most likely just sitting there idling most of the time, put it to use. Obviously that does not "push" it to the phone, but it will be easier to keep more up-to-date than hard-copy.

- Don - AA7AU
 

N2MH
N2MH's picture
Various Options

There's several ways to accomplish this, mostly dependent on your user's hardware and how they want to view the directory listings. I'll relate some of my experiences. As you point out, there is nothing built into FreePBX to do this. You have to roll your own.

1. You mention that you are running Linphone, but not the hardware it is running on. In Android, Linphone can have hooks into the phone's contacts book. For every user on your pbx you will need a person in your contacts and configure a separate phone number for that person which is his pbx extension. Call it "Mesh" as opposed to "home", "mobile", "office", or whatever. Linphone (and others) can use this to place calls to this person. Unfortunately, I don't know how this can be accomplished on a pc running Linphone.

2. Most hard phones support the LDAP protocol (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), as mentioned in a post below. You will need to set up an LDAP server on your system somewhere. This approach is probably overkill for most ham use.

3. Most hard phones support the import of some prepared file. Depending on the vendor, this file can be a spreadsheet, plain ascii file, XML file, or some other format. This file gets imported into the phone and becomes the telephone directory for that phone.

4. Since you are already running FreePBX, you already have a LAMP server running on your raspberry pi. LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP. That is, you have a web server running already. In fact, this is what runs the GUI front end for FreePBX. This gives you two options, both of which can be accessed with an ordinary web browser.

a) Put together a static web page with the directory listings

b) With some proficiency in PHP and MySql, you can put together a web app that your users can access and get the information they need. This can also be made into a self-service application where your users can enter and keep their information updated.

On the PBX network that I am part of, there are probably 5 or 6 of these running out there. Some of them have just local information, some have information about every one on the network.

Hope this helps.

73, Mark

KI6RIV
white pages

unable to access mesh white pages, 
"server ip address cannot be found"    n2mh-meshphone2.local.mesh

Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer