Jeremy McNamara

I recently came across Better than free? How Digium adds value to open source from Digium’s recently launched blog — Welcome to the Blogosphere, Digium.

While I agree with the points that Roderick makes about adding value to a ‘free’ software package, I believe Digium hasn’t gone far enough with Asterisk Business Edition. Every time I have an ABE owner contact me to support an existing ABE installation, I am annoyed at the unnecessary configuration files and sample configuration data that is enabled in a ‘commercial’ solution. The simple fact of enabling every asterisk module and channel driver leads to confusing warning, notice and error messages when starting/reloading Asterisk. While those messages are typically benign, it is very much confusing to those that haven’t lived and breathed asterisk for many years (like I have.)

Installing every config file and module in Asterisk, in my experience, has confused those less technically savvy that have chosen to purchase ABE. I have a supported a non-trivial number of people who have very simply suffered from information overload when they attempt to make configuration changes to ABE without using some sort of Asterisk GUI.

I have had a few discussions with a couple long time Digium geeks. They have both said there has been internal discussions on this topic, but thus far Digium has elected to keep every config file and asterisk module installed for simplicity and to have that particular functionality available if the customer decides they need to run some of the non-typical applications and channel types (like or DUNDi, MGCP or Skinny)

In my opinion, Digium/Someone needs to develop a some sort of asterisk configuration ‘wizard’, if you will, that would ask very specific questions to provide a smaller, more custom suite of modules and thus config files that are loaded at run time. Having a smaller footprint and less config files to manage will go a long way to help those less technically savvy companies mange their own asterisk configurations. Then when it is time to make changes to the asterisk featureset, they would run the asterisk configuration wizard again.

I realize there is the ‘make menuselect’ feature, which I utilize very heavily in my own configurations, however being that ABE is binary there needs to be some other method to ‘configure’ which asterisk modules and associated configuration files exist within the system in order to provide a better tasting, less filling PBX environment.

Perhaps the asterisk configuration wizard could be something generally similar to the OpenSER Wizard at least in terms of providing some sort of graphical method to pick and choose those required features for each particular instance of Asterisk.

This process sounds simple and straight forward, however in reality it is very much a non-trivial task, which I presume why something doesn’t already exist today.

Filed under: Asterisk, Digium, Open Source