VOIP etc > Voice Over IP - VOIP > VOIP Tech Chat > [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

reply to Mango

Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

I would like an Asterisk box for home and it looks like Tomato with Asterisk on the Asus WL-520GU would work and would give arguably the best VOIP QOS. But I recently bought a WRT150N to expand my range (N standard) and to provide QOS. Do you think the best approach would be to buy an Asus WL-520GU, disable its wi-fi, and hang the VOIP ATA and the WRT150N off of the Asus ports, using WRT150N for wifi only?

I wish the QOS answer were DD-WRT so that I could just use my WRT150N for the Asterisk box (if everything would fit).

Thanks for the response mazillo. If I understand this thread correctly, Mango2 had good success overlaying Asterisk onto Tomato on the Asus WL-520GU ("I've had five simultaneous calls in progress at once and the unit didn't even break a sweat. For a home PBX, a unit this size is ideal"). But mazillo predicts from his experience that it would be a marginal result to overlay Asterisk onto a stripped down Open-WRT on the AsusWL-520GU. So the differences in outcome seem to me to be due to the items in bold above.

I have a clarifying question for Mango2: Does your Tomato-Asterisk WL-520GU still function as a wireless router, or did you strip that out of Tomato somehow to get more room (I didn't see you do that in your tutorial)?

This is an awesome thread - thanks everyone for taking time to write it!

The other thing I notice is that Mazillo uses Asterisk 1.6 whereas I use 1.4. Perhaps 1.6 requires more system resources. I do not use a swap file.

Yes, my unit does indeed still function as a router with QoS. I have never used the wireless portion of it, but that's just personal preference. Interestingly, routing even large volumes of internet traffic does not appear to cause load on the router.

m.
--
Mango's recommended PAP2T settings: »www.toao.net/25/linksys-pap2t-vo···-review/
Linksys/Cisco dial plan tips and tricks: »www.toao.net/108/cisco-dial-plan···-tricks/

reply to BigTex2

Not everyone uses GV and the Python dialer script, so lets focus on (basic) Asterisk+Routing/QoS setup here. To put Asterisk on a router, the real challenge is the amount of flash ROM instead of RAM. 4MB is enough for 3rd party firmwares but little space left for Asterisk, and one definitely wants a router with at least 8MB flash or some kind of expandable storage capability, thus makes WL-520GU a good choice.

Stripping down OpenWrt is mainly for space -- to fit OpenWrt+Asterisk+Python in an 8MB flash is a hard job -- but not a problem for 520GU at all. Might get some additional performance advantage as well but I highly doubt if its noticaeble.

At least this makes you feel better

Please remember, OpenWrt kernel is already highly customized and many features are built as modules, running a stock kernel without unnecessary modules is just as good as your stripped kernel, you might save 100kB flash/ram but that's all. I insist this opinion unless there is some real world benchmark to say otherwise.

reply to Mango
I ordered an Asus from Newegg.com ($45), and I'm now set up with Tomato and Asterisk on it! I found that the Asus provided better wireless signal coverage than my relatively new Linksys WRT150N, especially after increasing the Transmit Power to 42 via Tomato (I'm now just using the Asus, not the Linksys, but see below).

I followed Mango2's directions and had good success even though I've never installed Tomato or Asterisk before. I did stub my toe a couple of places so I thought I'd pass these clarifications along to others:

1) There's a step missing that I got past after some googling: After flashing with DD-WRT and before flashing with Tomato, you have to download the Tomato flash file. What you download is a "rar" file (extension is ".rar"). You have then download and install 7-zip to uncompress this rar file, yielding a ".trx" file. You then have to change the file type of the resulting ".trx" file to type ".bin" because the DD-WRT firmware upgrade requires a ".bin" extension.

The part in bold above was missing in the Mango2's How-To.

2) When it's time to partition and format the drive, Mango2 suggested to be sure you've selected the correct drive with the "p" command. Since I was hesistant to run "fdisk" until I knew it was the right disk, I tried typing "p" into linux directly. Of course this didn't work. I eventually discovered that the "fdisk" command won't immediately format the drive. In fact, it will let you enter commands to it, and one of these is "p".

Other than those two bumps, everything went smoothly when installing Tomato and Asterisk. I had problems getting Asterisk to work properly with my VOIP provider, Vitelity, until I remembered that you have to configure the Vitelity DIDs differently if you are using Asterisk vs. an ATA.

I agree with Mango2 that just editing the config files is easy enough without needing a GUI. There are just two that I had to mess with - sip.conf and extensions.conf. But I've had a lot of past Unix experience that I'm sure helped out.

It's a bit early to tell, but I think this will be a great solution. I set up the Tomato QOS, tuned for my upload/download limits.

Voice quality is fine to and from my cell phone and to my office voice mail - I'm able to listen to what I just recorded, while leaving a message.

I stress tested it by calling my office voicemail so that a VOIP channel would be active, then went to »www.speedtest.net/ and did a test, while my daughter was streaming videos down from UTube. At the same time, I recorded my voice to my work voice mail. When the speed test ended, I listened to the message I'd just left. Oddly, it was somewhat choppy during the download test, and was fine during the upload test. After thinking about this, I'm wondering if this is because the high data rate (around 5-6 mbps) of the download stressed Tomato so much that it degraded Asterisk, while the much lower uplink speed (512K) didn't.

Since I'm normally not running a speed test, I think I'm going to give it more time. Worst case, I think I can just revert and only use the Asus for Asterisk, and my other router for everything else.

Mango2, thank you very much for this How To!

I'd like to add a few tips regarding editing the config files... once you know what you want to put in them (I'm still working on that for my setup.. ), that is.

You can install the 'nano' editor using ipkg. It's far more friendly than the default text editors (vi? yikes!), and I can't imagine that it takes up too much space. If you prefer to edit your text files on your Windows (or Mac) within your LAN, you can always turn on the samba server in Tomato. Then, you're connecting to the files as if they're a standard networked drive.

One other comment regarding the firmware flashing. When you flash from DD-WRT to Tomato, if you don't care to save your nvram settings (probably best to clear them, anyway), choose the 'Reset to default settings' in the "after flash" box. Then, you do not have to get the http passwd from nvram--it'll be admin/admin to log into the router.

reply to Mango
I believe dd-wrt reuires the new firmware to have file extension .bin. Actually, I used tftp to load Tomato directly without loading dd-wrt first.

Yes, screenname, that was my experience. When I tried to load the .trx file, DD-WRT gave me an error message that sounded like the file was corrupt. So I re-downloaded the RAR - didn't help, downloaded an earlier version of Tomato - didn't help, tried a different rar decompressor (WinRAR) - didn't help. After a bit of googling, if found this thread that suggested renaming to .bin:
»How to install Tomato firmware after DD-WRT ?
After renaming it, it uploaded without issue.

I am having a somewhat frustrating problem.

Whenever I write to a file on the USB drive, the load jumps dramatically - sometimes even higher than 5 - for 60 to 90 seconds. During this time, Asterisk cannot make any calls and the CLI slows to a crawl.

I am going to try replacing the USB drive later to see if that is the problem. At first I thought the issue was Samba but then I discovered even touch test123.txt causes the problem.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

m.
--
Mango's recommended PAP2T settings
Linksys/Cisco dial plan tips and tricks

Through no effort of my own, my USB drive is now completely blank. Fortunately I had a backup.

<Adam Savage>Well, there's your problem!</Adam Savage>

Pro Tip: Don't buy USB drives at the grocery store.

m.

reply to Mango

reply to Mango
A few weeks ago, I went through the motions of flashing my router to Tomato, followed the instructions to the letter to format/install a 4GB usb drive. Everything looked pretty good.

I edited my extensions.conf and sip.conf files to specify local extensions and one or two provider trunks to connect with.

Here's the problem. The system seems to register properly with the providers I set up, but I cannot register my extensions. I've tried registering through the router's WAN (it's behind another router so I can configure without disrupting other online connections) with a PAP2T. The usual response (no logging, just the status page of the PAP2T) is that the server is offline. When I try to register an extension using X-lite, I get a 408 - Registration timeout error. This error comes up whether my PC running X-lite is attempting to register over the Asterisk router's WAN (but within my home network) and when connected to the Asterisk router's LAN and attempting to hit the LAN-side IP address.

If watching the Asterisk console on the router (via SSH), I see no obvious registration attempts.

My first thought is that I'm missing something painfully obvious, but I haven't yet figured out just what that is. I also thought of firewall issues, but before irreversibly messing up my IPTABLES rules, I wanted to post my experience here to see what suggestions you all would have. Thanks...

Just to check...

You've set it up PAP2T & PC -> Asterisk Router's LAN port, and then Asterisk Router's WAN port -> Internet Router. Correct?

Also, the router's internal IP address will be different from the router's external IP address. Perhaps the external IP address is 192.168.1.4, and the internal IP (what you should register to) is 192.168.0.1.

m.
--
Mango's recommended PAP2T settings
Linksys/Cisco dial plan tips and tricks