A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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You will want a couple things. First get yourself some VoIP phones. Yealink is a decent brand. Grand stream Wave is a good option for Android and iOS softphones.
Secondly download a PBX. I recommend Fusion PBX others will recommend 3cx but the main thing is to avoid Asterisk.
Finally get yourself a SIP trunk from a phone provider.
Now cry in pain as you are constantly bombarded with SIP attacks in your home.
Interesting - why avoid asterisk?
I looked into fusion to play with but I’ve been using asterisk casually since like the 00s with no issues.
Owned by a for profit *aaS provider whose motivations are money.
Fusion PBX is a front end of freeswitch is not. Mark and the team at Fusion are top notch with their support.
Ah yes that makes sense. I was taken aback by my latest install of freepbx. I feel it wasn’t as aggressive during the Digium days but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.
I heard good things about free switch, although it seems like a paradigm change. I’ll have to check it out.
Is fusionpbx completely open source? Do you have any further reasons why you would recommend it?
I was looking into asterisk the last couple of days for a new company PBX and need some alternatives to compare against. Asterisk looks also a bit complicated though not impossible
mostly open. Here is the git repo for FusionPBX so you can see. https://github.com/fusionpbx/fusionpbx
Super easy to get off the ground. Here is the install page https://www.fusionpbx.com/download.php
We used it as a multi tenant hosted pbx back when I was working for an ISP. works really well.
What's the problem with Asterisk? FreePBX uses it and as far as I can tell, it's the only way to get Lenny working.
Is it possible to just run your own SIP-trunk? We're not intending on sending or receiving calls from external numbers outside of our little network.
If you don't need external calls sip trunk is not needed.
If you don't need external calling you don't need a trunk, it's just for connecting to the outside world. I found [[https://www.asterisk.org/|Asterisk]] was a good place to start. The config is rather involved though, so there are various front ends for it.
Assuming you already have the IP phones, you need two things. A PBX server (for the VoIP stuff), and a SIP trunk with a block of external phone numbers.
Start with the PBX server software, there's several free/open-source implementations. Once you're comfortable with it and have internal calling good to go, then you can spend on the SIP trunk and number blocks.
Next step. Have your on site manager call in and tell the ISP to change your sip trunk settings to fuck everything and let no one know. 😎
Step 3: unfuck the SIP settings, then email both HR and their supervisor to throw them under the bus. Also covers your ass for step 4.
Step 4: Route the manager's calls to a disconnected number. When they come knocking about their phone not working, tell them, "No, you should be able to dial out, unless someone changed the SIP trunk settings and didn't tell me."
What do you mean by "a block of external phone numbers?" We'd like to simply have our own internal numbers ideally, nothing to connect to the regular phone network.
SIP providers usually sell numbers in contiguous series for businesses. For example, if your company buys a block of 50 numbers, the SIP provider then allocates XXX-5100 to XXX-5150.
But since you're keeping this strictly internal, you don't have to worry about that.
I've been running 3CX for a couple of years with a Voicehost trunk configured. I found it much simpler than free PBX to setup and maintenance has been a breeze. There's apps or a web based option too. 3CX can be a little picky with older unsupported hardware - the old Cisco phone I bought was a tricky setup, but the Yealink I have phone was plug and play easy.
The tricky bit was configuring the opnsense router and firewall to correctly handle all the ports properly, but I think that'd be the same for any solution and for an internal only option probably not required.
I administer a handful of FreePBX systems that run pretty smoothly and are relatively friendly to use. Crosstalk Solutions on YouTube has a bunch of videos on the software if you want to get up to speed about how everything works.
Yes, it's possible
You need a SIP trunk to connect to and a PBX server. I would also recommend a proxy server to obfuscate your SIP server as it will be constantly attacked.
It doesn't technically need its own network, but having it on its own VLAN is recommended as you will want to have some QoS policies for the UDP voice traffic otherwise your call audio will be choppy
You can do this pretty easily using asterisk and then just point your VoIP clients to it's IP address
But....
Whatever you do, unless you're an expert with network security, don't leave it on its default port if you'll expose it to the internet.
You'll have that many bots trying to get in that it'll DDoS you within a few hours of setting it up. Even if you have it on a different port, you'll have lots of bots trying to get in.
If you ever see those "unlimited international calls" cards sold in third world countries for like $5-10, those are mostly hacked VoIP systems that have accounts or access to a phone line
Why don't you use regular chat apps that have voice video capabilities?
Sounds like OP is interested in learning to set up/administer a VoIP system rather than just looking for a communications platform
Oh yeah I missed the "just for fun' bit...
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| UDP | User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #666 for this sub, first seen 8th Apr 2024, 18:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
If you happen to have a Fritzbox with VoIP capability it contains a SIP server and you can register SIP clients on it (e.g. Fritz App Fon, linphone, twinkle) and use them to phone internally.