[How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router in VOIP Tech Chat

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

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:40:59 EDT

neftv : Yea that price is up $5 from November when I got mine. It's funny how the weekend before cyber Monday it was $39 with $10 rebate. I'm glad I didn't think that the price was going down and I got mine just in time.

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

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:25:47 EDT

BigTex2 : Newegg has the WL-520GU for $35 after rebate - but the coupon expires 12/31/09.

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

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:44:12 EDT

Mango : FYI:

NCIX has the WL-520GU on special for Canadian $28.99 after rebate. There's only 100 available at this price.

»www.ncix.com/products/index.php?···oid=1217

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

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:35:48 EDT

venk25 :

said by Mango :

... but later on I'll post my extensions.conf, as well as my technique for propagating Message Waiting Indicator from your VoIP provider.

Hey Mango2, did you get a chance to post this ? I searched but couldn't find. Did I miss it ?

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

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:40:17 EDT

mazilo :

said by baysoor :

Has anybody used TrendNet TEW-632BRP with openwrt and asterisk? It has 32 MB RAM and on sale @ buy.com for $25.

At $25/each, this isn't really a bad deal. The only problem I can see is OpenWRT reports this device comes only with a 4MB Flash space and with no USB port to add an external storage.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:05:07 EDT

baysoor : Has anybody used TrendNet TEW-632BRP with openwrt and asterisk? It has 32 MB RAM and on sale @ buy.com for $25. I just ordered one. No, external USB but I suppose more RAM and faster CPU can be used with CIFS mount somewhere else on network.

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:59:42 EDT

mazilo :

said by pagemen :

Can you post the output of "cat /proc/meminfo"?

Here is the output from cat /proc/meminfo:

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:26:00 EDT

pagemen : Depending on how you define "free memory" but this value should be equal(or close) to Tomato's "Count cache memory as free memory" output.

The backslash shouldn't be a problem, just don't c/p directly, use "view plain" instead.

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:18:55 EDT

BigTex2 : Thanks pageman for the script. I got it to work on my Asus running Tomato after a little massaging. I copied/pasted to Notepad, then joined together all the lines that you had separated with backslash, and then sourced it. I think the forum may have messed up your original. I've attached the file I created. If you do these steps, then it should work:


1. download the attached file and open with notepad
2. copy the contents to the paste buffer
3. In Linux on the router,
cat >freemem
[paste in from the paste buffer]
[type ^D to end the input to cat]
 
source ./freemem
---------------------------------------

 
Here's the result I got:
 

root@RT-0026184E2C93:/tmp/home/root# source ./freemem
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         14436      14092        344          0        884       5276
-/+ buffers/cache:       7932       6504
Swap:            0          0          0

 
Is this telling me that the free is actually 6504?
freemem.txt 461 bytes

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:09:01 EDT

pagemen : I tested it on OpenWrt and Tomato but they're both on 2.4 kernel and are both broadcom device, maybe /proc/meminfo has a different layout on other system. Can you post the output of "cat /proc/meminfo"?

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:35:48 EDT

mazilo :

said by pagemen :

Run the script with .(or source) to get a better result and that's why there is no #!/bin/sh on the first line.

I sourced your scripts (saved into a file called freemem), i.e. source freemem, and got the following error message:

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:59:17 EDT

pagemen : The busybox builtin free utility is actually missing Cached memory from display and has a different output layout than the standard Linux free utility. I wrote a script to do the math and emulate the output of the regular free command. Run the script with .(or source) to get a better result and that's why there is no #!/bin/sh on the first line.

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:16:20 EDT

BigTex2 : Tomato is also set to a 3 second refresh rate. When I uncheck the ""Count cache memory as free memory" option, then the free memory that Tomato displays correlates well with the free utility's number, like yours.

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:52:20 EDT

mazilo :

said by BigTex2 :

Here is my memory usage, with nothing going on:


              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:        14436        14168          268            0         1040
 Swap:            0            0            0
Total:        14436        14168          268

But each time I run the free utility the number changes.

That is good that the numbers get changed every time when the free utility is executed. With about 268KB fresh RAM available, you may want to do some tests like Mango had done to find out if this has some effects, especially when your asterisk is serving a call. You may want to run two console windows with one console runs the top utility and observe it. Please let us know if you decide to try this.

I'm running Asterisk 1.4.22.1. I don't think that the "free" utility tells the full story.

AFAIK, what is printed out from free utility is the exact RAM/Swap information available during the snapshot by free utility. What free utility doesn't show is the amount of RAM the cache memory had consumed to hold some of the usable (running) codes, i.e. router + asterisk modules.

This Tomato FAQ leads me to think that the free memory will always appear low:

"Why is my router's displayed free memory very low?
Free memory is often used temporarily for cache and is automatically freed when needed. If you want the free memory display to count the cache size as free memory, go to Administration/Debugging. But unless you're getting error messages about not having enough memory, don't worry about it."

When I check the "Count cache memory as free memory" box as described above, Tomato shows my free memory to be:

Total / Free Memory 14.10 MB / 6,156.00 KB (42.64%)

If I may ask, how often does the GUI page refreshes itself on a Tomato firmware? My Linksys WRT54GS v3 running on a DD-WRT v24sp1 firmware refreshes its GUI page every 3 seconds. The Memory usage taken @snapshots shown on the GUI page and free utility matched as shown below:

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:53:16 EDT

BigTex2 : Here is my memory usage, with nothing going on:


              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:        14436        14168          268            0         1040
 Swap:            0            0            0
Total:        14436        14168          268

But each time I run the free utility the number changes.

I'm running Asterisk 1.4.22.1. I don't think that the "free" utility tells the full story. This Tomato FAQ leads me to think that the free memory will always appear low:

"Why is my router's displayed free memory very low?
Free memory is often used temporarily for cache and is automatically freed when needed. If you want the free memory display to count the cache size as free memory, go to Administration/Debugging. But unless you're getting error messages about not having enough memory, don't worry about it."

When I check the "Count cache memory as free memory" box as described above, Tomato shows my free memory to be:

Total / Free Memory 14.10 MB / 6,156.00 KB (42.64%)

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

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:49:17 EDT

Dan_voip : I had samba enabled to transfer some files and my free ram was:

After I stopped samba:
I'm using Asterisk 1.4

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

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:19:51 EDT

mazilo : On my FON2100 unit, if it has about 840KB available RAM after the asterisk-1.6.x has managed to service a call with AGI scripts, the asterisk-1.6.x should have no problem to process any future call. If the available RAM drops below 800KB, it is then the asterisk-1.6.x will run into problem processing any call. These are all based on my observations and experiments with my asterisk-1.6.x on my FON2100 unit.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:43:03 EDT

Mango : I've been trying but I can't pin it down. It seems to fluctuate so much that even when I load/unload modules I can't tell for sure what's making a difference.

For example, I unload a module, RAM usage goes down by 1%.

I load it again and RAM usages goes down by 2%.

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

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:29:28 EDT

mazilo :

said by Mango :

[code]
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 14444 13480 964 0 812
Swap: 0 0 0
Total: 14444 13480 964
[/code]

Can't explain that one.

Was that from the same Asus WL-520U system? If so, I am just curious how much the size of RAM gets changed if you try to place a call.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:49:42 EDT

Mango :
Can't explain that one.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:44:57 EDT

mazilo : Mango, your asterisk had probably been recently served at least a single call when you took the snapshot with the free utility. The way I see this is perhaps your asterisk has already reserved enough RAM (when it processed previous calls) and won't have any problem to process a future single Inbound/outbound call. Can you try to place/receive two concurrent calls and observe how much RAM will get depleted?
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:24:46 EDT

Mango : I have a minuscule amount of free memory. I think I'll switch back to Asterisk 1.4 (I'm using 1.6 now) and possibly disable DNS and DHCP.

What is the process named "init noinitrd"? Whatever it is, it's using 12% of RAM.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:12:48 EDT

mazilo : Can anyone who has an Asus WL-520U router + asterisk please post the output from the free memory utility to show how much RAM is used by the system with asterisk? On my FON2100 unit with no NAT/Firewall features, the output from the free memory utility i shown below:

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

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:04:03 EDT

Mango : Glad to hear it's working for you :) I thought it was a fun project.

You can get other sounds too, like this:
ipkg install asterisk14-core-sounds-en-ulaw
ipkg install asterisk14-extra-sounds-en-ulaw

It's available in other formats too if ulaw does not suit your purposes.

As far as how good the firewall is, it's simply NAT. When I do a port scan of my IP, the device does not respond at all. Can't get much better than that :)

I am not particularly confident with QoS (although my setup appears to work) so hopefully someone more knowledgeable will step in here.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:26:19 EDT

Dan_voip : Very nice device and very good topic; thanks Mango2!
I've bought an wl-520gu from newegg.ca and the installation worked flawless.
I've played with the settings, it took a while being the first time I had to setup an asterisk box but was ok in the final.

I ran in a problem[one of many :)] about call transfer to another extension; Sound files aren't included in this distribution and I found some free and good ones at »www.voicevector.com/
For call transfer at least 1 is needed:
/opt/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/pbx-transfer.ul

I wonder if it's too much for this device to enable voice mail on asterisk.
Other 2 thinks I have to check or if somebody have the answer already will be nice to share it:
- how good is the firewall
- QoS settings; I have some, I need to check how good they are

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

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:10:26 EDT

mazilo :

said by Mango :

...perhaps I was wrong. I ran dmesg like you said (thanks for the tip!) and saw some messages that said Asterisk had been killed because the device ran out of memory.

With a 16MB RAM, that's predictable. Since your Asus WL-520GU device has a USB port, you may want to create a swap space on a USB drive to use (even though it will be pretty slow).
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:10:52 EDT

Mango : ...perhaps I was wrong. I ran dmesg like you said (thanks for the tip!) and saw some messages that said Asterisk had been killed because the device ran out of memory. I turned on Wireless last night to test something (usually I have it disabled) which was right around the time the problem occurred.

I've set everything back to normal and it seems to be working again. Perhaps I'll downgrade to Asterisk 1.4 which used less memory, or disable cron, dns, and dhcp.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:55:12 EDT

mazilo :

said by Mango :

Both of them were Flash drives.

Ooops..., I thought you had a broken USB drive that its HD emitted sounds over and over again (as you mentioned in your post) when plugged into a USB port. :D

On your Asus WL-520GU, what does dmesg show when you plug the flash drive into its USB port? Also, you may want to check its partition using fdisk.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:19:48 EDT

Mango : Both of them were Flash drives.

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

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:13:47 EDT

mazilo :

said by Mango :

Not really :( It just plays the Windows "Device found!" "Device removal!" sound over and over again until my wife tells me to make it stop :P

This sounded like a defunct interface card. To confirm this, you may want to pull out the HD and physically install it on your computer to see if that it will still work. If so, just get a new USB enclosure to house this HD.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:50:10 EDT

Mango : Not really :( It just plays the Windows "Device found!" "Device removal!" sound over and over again until my wife tells me to make it stop :P

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

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:14:44 EDT

mazilo :

said by Mango :

My router just munched another USB drive.

Will your USB drive still work when plugged into the USB port on your computer?

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

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:50:42 EDT

Mango : Dammit :(

My router just munched another USB drive. I thought the first time was because it was a cheap brand but two dead drives in such a short timespan is too much of a coincidence.

Do I have a bad router? Has anyone else had this problem?
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:00:22 EDT

Dan_voip : Asus has another good router WL-500W with 2 usb ports and wireless N but is not listed for Tomato firmware.
I wonder if somebody did try to install Tomato on it.

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

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:15:54 EDT

Mango : Does it actually have an SD slot? Or did you mod it?

Double the memory would not go unnoticed. If Tomato firmware is available for your router I am sure the project would work well.

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

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:11:05 EDT

suckithard : Well I was thinking that allowing SD card use would open up more routers. Especially the linksys ones.
I have the wrt54g-tm with double the memory and a 1gb sd card installed. I feel like it would run better than the 520gu.

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

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:43:31 EDT

Mango : The WL-520GU does not have an SD slot. I did read an article about modifying a WRT54GL to use an SD card but that required soldering and I decided to go the USB route instead :-)

What may work is a USB-to-SD adapter. Perhaps it would appear just like a regular USB drive? If you try it, let us know.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:00:42 EDT

suckithard : Is it possible to install this to a SD card instead of a USB drive?
I think it involves changing some commands in the 3rd post, but I have no idea what.
Any guidance?

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

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:02:31 EDT

mazilo :

said by yanfw :

In this Skypiax Wiki, it is clearly stated that Skypiax works on Asterisk.

I believe Skypiax requires a Linux Skype client softphone to run on its host. Unless you can find a Skype client softphone for an Asus WL-520GU router, Skypiax is not going to work with your asterisk hosted on an Asus WL-520GU router. Even if you found a Skype client softphone for an Asus WL-520GU router, I can speculate that the router probably will have not enough CPU resources to process the Skype call.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:00:48 EDT

yanfw : I would like to install Asterisk on the Asus WL-520GU router. Mango2 has already documented this process earlier. I would also like to install Skypiax on the Asterisk in this router. As I am a total newbie to this, can anyone of you expert out there help by teaching me on how to do this ?
The link to the Skypiax Wiki is:
»wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Skypiax
In this Skypiax Wiki, it is clearly stated that Skypiax works on Asterisk.

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

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:28:50 EDT

netdevil : I think the biggest problem will be the limited computing power and RAM of the router.

This is what the website you quoted states:

System Requirements
* Windows 2000/XP/2003
* Pentium 500MHz or above with at least 32MB RAM
* Broadband Internet Connection (for external VoIP lines).

I think you'll have to spend the $60 the Asterisk plugin costs - but as Mazilo pointed out it's unclear if it'll work on the Asterisk version on the router.

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

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:13:54 EDT

yanfw : Here is a link which is for MHSpot.com .
»www.mhspot.com/sts/siptosis.html
It has built a free open source application that can bridge the Skpye API to a pbx or Asterisk. If any of you geeks out there who is able to modify the codes to install it in the USB storage, to make it bridge the Skpye API with Asterisk, it will be great.

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

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:13:51 EDT

yanfw : The company NCH is selling the Skpye to Sip integration client for USD38.50 or GBP23.91 for the month of September. It is also offering a 14 days free trial. Here is the link:
»www.nch.com.au/skypetosip/index.html
I am hoping to get a work around that is free.

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

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:06:19 EDT

mazilo :

said by yanfw :

Actually, my aim is to install Skpye on the router which will be switched on 24/7.

AFAIK, there is no way to use Skype on a router. Perhaps, the Chinese firm, mentioned here, that successfully reversed engineer Skype protocol may help you if they release the source. On a second thought, may be you are better off to spend a lot of money to invest on a Skype WiFi Phone that plugs into an RJ-45 port.

I understand that Skpye has just released a version for integration into Asterisk, but it is not free.

Since this isn't free, I suspect the binary version of Asterisk channel driver for Skype is only released for an ix86 platform which isn't compatible with most (Linux) embedded system under a MIPS platform.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:52:44 EDT

yanfw : Actually, my aim is to install Skpye on the router which will be switched on 24/7. If I can have Skpye and the other Voip service provider (e.g. Pennytel ) connected 24/7 ( but without the computer being needed to be switched on ), then I can save alot on long distant voice communication expenditure without incurring any significant cost on hardware. I understand that Skpye has just released a version for integration into Asterisk, but it is not free. If you would be kind enough to teach me how to make this dream come true, I would be very grateful. Could you do a detailed tutorial on how to go about setting this up or implementing a solution to achieve this aim, from scratch, for a router with USB ( like the Asus WL-520GU ) ? I am just a newbie to this.

I guess there are alot of people interested in this solution too.

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

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:49:21 EDT

mazilo :

said by yanfw :

I am a newbie to this but I would like to ask you whether it is possible to install DD-WRT ( Voip Version ) on a router with USB port and then we install ' Skpye for Linux ' on the USB storage device and then bridge the DD-WRT voip with Skype.

Yes and you can do this if you know how to; however, the existing Linux Skype softphone for ix86 platform is not going to work on your router unless you have the Skype version softphone compiled for your router platform.

If we can, then we are able to use Skpye by attaching an ATA ( such as the PAP2 ) to one of the Lan port of the router.

I am not sure what exactly you try to achieve. However, one doesn't need Skype to use an ATA device connected directly to an RJ-45 port.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:44:35 EDT

anon : I am a newbie to this but I would like to ask you whether it is possible to install DD-WRT ( Voip Version ) on a router with USB port and then we install ' Skpye for Linux ' on the USB storage device and then bridge the DD-WRT voip with Skype. If we can, then we are able to use Skpye by attaching an ATA ( such as the PAP2 ) to one of the Lan port of the router.

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

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:52:24 EDT

Mango : Thanks BigTex2 - I'll include this in the revision of the how-to, when I get around to writing it!

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

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:39:31 EDT

mazilo :

said by BigTex2 :

A simpler, more general solution than the Tomato Init code I posted earlier is to simply add a command to the Tomato USB section to sleep for 15 seconds before starting asterisk (USB and NAS/USB Support/Run after mounting):

[ -d /mnt/USB ] && mount /mnt/USB /opt
sleep 15
/opt/sbin/asterisk

with the above change, I no longer need the init code.

An excellent idea to include a 15 seconds delay to get the USB steadily mounted. Thanks for sharing this.

I speculate that the reason my providers stopped registering after reboot, after I flashed DD-WRT to my Linksys WRT150N, was because the WRT150N was taking longer to boot than with the Linksys ROM. The internet was not available when Asterisk booted.

On my FON2100 device running on an OpenWRT firmware, the /etc/rc.d/S40network starts the network. By the time /etc/rc.d/S99asterisk is started, it has elapsed enough time for asterisk to launch and run. I am sure the network on your WRT150N device has been ready when your asterisk is launch, except the USB as you pointed out above. In your case, perhaps there is a way for you to edit your /etc/init.d/asterisk file to check for the USB device before it launches the asterisk. For instance, if the asterisk needs to access the /etc/asterisk/modules.conf file on the USB device, you can inject some delays as shown below (please check the syntax) in the start() section of your /etc/init.d/asterisk file before asterisk is called:
The above while loop will keep looping in an X seconds increment until it finds the module.conf file.

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

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:05:51 EDT

BigTex2 : A simpler, more general solution than the Tomato Init code I posted earlier is to simply add a command to the Tomato USB section to sleep for 15 seconds before starting asterisk (USB and NAS/USB Support/Run after mounting):

[ -d /mnt/USB ] && mount /mnt/USB /opt
sleep 15
/opt/sbin/asterisk

with the above change, I no longer need the init code.

I speculate that the reason my providers stopped registering after reboot, after I flashed DD-WRT to my Linksys WRT150N, was because the WRT150N was taking longer to boot than with the Linksys ROM. The internet was not available when Asterisk booted.

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

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:52:38 EDT

mazilo :

said by Mango :

I believe Asterisk uses about 50% memory with the above modules.conf, but I am trying out 1.6 now.

That's good. Mine is around 72%!

1.4 used about 30%.

Wow, that's even better that your asterisk takes up less RAM. The way I interpret this is your device will have more RAM for asterisk to process more calls + functions.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:12:29 EDT

BigTex2 : Thank you for the replies.

mazilo,

STP mode is disabled on my WRT150N.

When I do a top, I see 6 instances of asterisk, and each reports 33% of memory usage. I assume that 33% is the total for all of them since 33% x 6 = 200% :)

Mango2, thanks for explaining about cru. I think the Tomato init script is going to be better than my crontab one, so maybe it was good that I didn't know about cru, forcing me to see what Tomato has. Good to have it in the toolkit for the future, though.

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

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:27:46 EDT

Mango : I see that you found a workaround, but just for future, the program to set up cron jobs is called 'cru'.

I believe Asterisk uses about 50% memory with the above modules.conf, but I am trying out 1.6 now. 1.4 used about 30%.

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

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:20:31 EDT

mazilo :

said by BigTex2 :

root@RT-0026184E2C93:/opt/etc/asterisk# cat modules.conf
[modules]
autoload=no ; only load explicitely declared modules
load => app_echo.so
load => codec_ulaw.so
load => pbx_config.so
load => res_features.so
load => chan_sip.so
load => app_dial.so
load => format_pcm.so
load => app_playback.so
load => func_callerid.so
load => app_setcallerid.so
load => func_logic.so
load => app_macro.so
load => app_mixmonitor.so
load => format_wav.so
load => res_musiconhold.so

Wow, those are minimal modules to load. When you do top, how much %MEM does your asterisk take? On my asterisk-1.6.1.6 with a whole lot more modules loaded, it takes about 70% %MEM. Perhaps, I should implement the above to see how much %MEM is used on my asterisk.

Come to think of it, I think I started seeing this problem after I flashed the WRT150N from the Linksys ROM to DD-WRT.

If your WRT150N is connected to a cablemodem, make sure the STP mode (on SETUP menu) is disable.
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:58:27 EDT

BigTex2 : Well, I found a workaround. I inserted the following into the Tomato Init script (I pasted the script below into to the window that appears after clicking Administration, then Scripts, then Init).

#---------- Start Script
while !(/opt/sbin/asterisk -rx 'sip show peers' | grep vitel)
do
/opt/sbin/asterisk -rx 'sip reload'
sleep 20
done
#---------- End Script

Note: when my provider is registered, then a line with the words "vitel" will appear in "sip show peers". I use that to tell me the reload has succeeded.

This works, but I'd rather fix the root problem because if I change providers, I'll need to change "vitel" to something else.

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

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:28:20 EDT

BigTex2 : Oops - I confused myself. The remote extension IS registering. It's just my provider that is not.

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

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:24:25 EDT

BigTex2 : Hi mazilo,

Thank you for responding. I'm running Asterisk 1.4.22.1. I've stripped down the modules.conf file to be the same as suggested by Mango2:

root@RT-0026184E2C93:/opt/etc/asterisk# cat modules.conf
[modules]
autoload=no ; only load explicitely declared modules
load => app_echo.so
load => codec_ulaw.so
load => pbx_config.so
load => res_features.so
load => chan_sip.so
load => app_dial.so
load => format_pcm.so
load => app_playback.so
load => func_callerid.so
load => app_setcallerid.so
load => func_logic.so
load => app_macro.so
load => app_mixmonitor.so
load => format_wav.so
load => res_musiconhold.so

Seems like when it starts up, asterisk is giving up on connections that aren't local. I neglected to mention earlier that I have an external extension [102] and it doesn't register until I do the SIP RELOAD. My Tomato is configured to be a simple switch with a Linksys WRT150N running DD-WRT connecting to the internet. Come to think of it, I think I started seeing this problem after I flashed the WRT150N from the Linksys ROM to DD-WRT.

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

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:15:52 EDT

mazilo :

said by BigTex2 :

I'm finding that when the Tomato reboots, it doesn't register to my provider. SIP SHOW PEERS only lists my extensions.

What version of asterisk is hosted on your Asus WL-520GU router? I had noticed some other problems, i.e. crash on the 1st run, with my asterisk-1.6.x on a FON2100 unit. As it turned out, it was the default /etc/asterisk/modules.conf file that autoloads every module. So, after editing the /etc/asterisk/modules.conf file to only load the needed modules, this problem got resolved. Perhaps, loading all modules on a system with a limited 16MB RAM depletes all its RAM needed to run asterisk properly.
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:50:38 EDT

BigTex2 : I'm finding that when the Tomato reboots, it doesn't register to my provider. SIP SHOW PEERS only lists my extensions. I have to do a "SIP RELOAD" to get the provider to register. So I tried to work around this by creating a crontab entry that wakes up every minute and does a SIP RELOAD if needed, but there is no "crontab" command in busybox, and when I directly edit /tmp/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root, my edits get destroyed when Tomato reboots. Any suggestions on either the root problem (providers not registering) or the workaround (getting crontab or equivalent to work)?

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

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:38:26 EDT

netdevil : OK - I tried the settings from your SIP provider and also checked the settings that mine recommends again but to no avail - I get the same comment. Weird thing is, it works with the other provider... The nat=yes solved the problem for the one. I guess I'll get in touch with my SIP provider to find out if they have any suggestions.

Mango, did you change any settings in Tomato, eg. QoS or so? Mine is still set to factory defaults except for things like wireless LAN.

Edit:
OK, I solved the problem. There was indeed a typo in a context name in my extensions.conf, although I figured Asterisk would have complained about it a little bit more explicitly. This was combined with a port problem - I changed the port both on my SIP provider side as well as on the Asterisk side and it works like a charm. I'll keep testing for reliability and so on.

Thank you very much Mango2 for this brilliant project - though my wife thinks I spent wayyyyyyyy to much time on it ;)

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

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:26:18 EDT

Mango : I get this when I use bad credentials when connecting to my SIP provider. So, double check your username and password. This is what works for me, and was supplied to me by VoIP.ms:

said by netdevil :

will a NAT consider itself "nat'ed" or not?

I do not yet know the answer to this and would appreciate it if anyone does. I think the question is if Tomato installed in this manner is considered behind NAT.
--
Who is the best VoIP provider? | Which ATA should I buy? | Dial Plan Tips and Tricks

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

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:19:54 EDT

netdevil : Hey, thanks, that was quick! Here's what Asterisk complains about:

-- Executing [780XXXXXX@XXXXX:1] Dial("SIP/pap2t1-00590998", "SIP/780XXXXXX@ext-voicenetwork-out") in new stack
== Everyone is busy/congested at this time (1:0/0/1)
-- Executing [780XXXXXX@XXXX:2] Hangup("SIP/pap2t1-00590998", "") in new stack
== Spawn extension (XXXX, 780XXXXXXXX, 2) exited non-zero on 'SIP/pap2t1-00590998'

The X's, of course, are in fact numbers or the context I have set. I will try the NAT thing again - I figured this will be tricky - will a NAT consider itself "nat'ed" or not?

My dialing rule is pretty much exactly what you suggested.

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

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:09:08 EDT

Mango : Start the Asterisk console in verbose mode, using something like this:

Attempt to make a call and let us know what it says on the screen.

This problem could be due to a bad dialing rule in extensions.conf. Something like the following might work:

As for the problem of the other side not being able to hear you, this is often caused by a NAT issue. Try adding nat=yes to the appropriate context in sip.conf.

Will post my config files asap.

m.
--
Who is the best VoIP provider? | Which ATA should I buy? | Dial Plan Tips and Tricks

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

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:31:59 EDT

netdevil : Hi everybody.
I followed the instructions and got Asterisk to run on my 520gu (yeah!) but a big problem remains: for some reasons it will not let me make calls out with one peer though it rings and answers no problem, and on another I can hear everything but the other side does not hear me. I had configured the extensions.conf and sip.conf for a test asterisk server that I ran on my computer before and changed all the references to the right IP addresses. Any idea what the problem might be? Do I need to change firewall/QoS/Port Forwarding or something like that?
Any help is greatly appreciated.

My setup is: Cable Modem --> WL-520gu --> PAP2T

@Mango2 - you said you might post your configuration files... could you so that I can compare?? If you do not want to post them, could you pm them to me?

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

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:45:38 EDT

Fisamo : Thanks for the tip. I think I had seen it (the tip) before, because I have downloaded the book.

I thought it would be easier to 'build' my dialplan from a known-good (on a PiaF box) configuration that I could strip down the non-essentials for the router. Guess that's not the best way to go... :o ;)

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

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:51:41 EDT

mazilo :

said by Fisamo :

Some of my want to clean it up is because, as I said earlier, I'm trying to work off my PiaF-generated files, so there's almost definitely a bunch of chaff in with the wheat... I don't want to drown you in 500+ line files. :o

Definitely a prudent decision to make.

Of course, I have to admit that there is an element of, "I want to do it myself!" stubbornness, too. :D

Your best secret weapon on this is probably to read the Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition e-book.
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:10:53 EDT

Fisamo : Stay tuned... There's a good chance I'll take you up on that, but I will want to clean it up (and probably play with it some more) first. Some of my want to clean it up is because, as I said earlier, I'm trying to work off my PiaF-generated files, so there's almost definitely a bunch of chaff in with the wheat... I don't want to drown you in 500+ line files. :o Of course, I have to admit that there is an element of, "I want to do it myself!" stubbornness, too. :D

If I don't get it in the next week or so, I'll be posting it.

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

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:31:50 EDT

BigTex2 : If you attach your sip.conf and extensions.conf, I'd be happy to compare them against what's working for me.

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

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:18:20 EDT

Fisamo : This information is helpful. I was able to get a softphone to register after setting Tomato's DNS server to my home gateway. To me, this is strange, because I'm attempting all of my phone registrations within the lan with IP addresses, but who's to argue with success?
However, I'm not quite 100% there. I'll need to figure out where else I've made errors in my sip.conf and extensions.conf files. I can't make an outbound call yet. :( I'm sure that a good part of my problem is that I'm trying to force-fit auto-generated (PiaF) code into the ASUS...

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

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:02:34 EDT

BigTex2 : I played around with things and inbound and outbound calls are working well now. I was testing inbound calls to an X-Lite soft phone. When I switched to my ATA it started working. Oddly, when I switched back to the X-Lite, it worked too. I'm not sure what was up there.

The outbound problem was due to a change I had made to my provider's NAT setting (using the provider's web configuration page) when I switch from using Asterisk back to a direct SIP registration.

So it looks like I've successfully converted the ASUS to a simple switch that also runs Asterisk. It looks like this has offloaded the ASUS enough that I'm now getting incoming calls reliably.

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

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:37:29 EDT

BigTex2 : Well, I got extension [101] to register, but I'm not there yet. I figured out that I needed to also set the Tomato's default DNS and gateway for the LAN to the primary router. Now if I dial in from my cellphone, Asterisk reacts, but not like I'd like. It immediately says everyone is congested. Here's the message for an inbound call (I substituted my phone number and user name with 5551112222 and xxxP11111 respectively):

RT-0026184E2C93*CLI>
-- Executing [5551112222@inbound:1] Dial("SIP/xxxP11111]-005925d0", "SIP/101") in new stack
== Everyone is busy/congested at this time (1:0/0/1)
-- Executing [5551112222@inbound:2] Hangup("SIP/xxxP11111]-005925d0", "") in new stack
== Spawn extension (inbound, 5551112222, 2) exited non-zero on 'SIP/xxxP11111]-005925d0'

When I try to dial out, it times out after awhile, again with a message about congestion.

The Asterisk sip.conf and extensions.conf files are the same ones I was using when everything was working, except for the intermittent problem dialing in, when I was using only the ASUS without a front-end router.

So something's still not set up correctly. Any suggestions?

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

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:31:24 EDT

BigTex2 : Thanks everyone! I'm back in contact with the ASUS. I did this by temporarily changing the Linksys' base address from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.1.2. Then I released/renewed my PC's ipconfig, which enabled my PC to see the ASUS base address of 192.168.1.1 and I was back in. So right now I'm using the ASUS as a switch, and I can access the Tomato screen as well as ssh into it to access Asterisk. I'll try getting my [101] extension to work next. BTW, I'm using the WAN port as a LAN one and it's working fine.

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

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:07:23 EDT

Fisamo : If the ASUS is disconnected from your WAN and you plug your PC into its LAN, you should be able to assign a static IP to your PC at 192.168.1.x, and then connect via 192.168.1.1, presuming you haven't changed the ASUS subnet.

Are you able to connect to it in this config?

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

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:06:06 EDT

pagemen : To run the Tomato as a switch, after disabling WAN, you'd better set a static IP for the Tomato within the subnet of the main router. In your case, should be sth. like 192.168.0.200, and connect main router's LAN port to Tomato's LAN port. IIRC, after set WAN type to "Disabled" the Tomato router will become a 5-port switch, i.e. WAN port works just like another LAN port, but don't count me on that, as I didn't test it and run Tomato as main router -- so to be sure, just use the 4 LAN ports.

If not, assuming you still have the old 192.168.1.1 value on Tomato, you'll have to change the PC's IP to static 192.168.1.x, disconnect Tomato from main router, connect PC to the LAN port of the Tomato, then you should be able to access Tomato via 192.168.1.1 and modify the settings accordingly.

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

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:58:38 EDT

screenname : Did you switch ASUS' WAN port into a LAN port? To configure the Asus as a switch, you need to connect a LAN port of your router to a LAN port of Asus.

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

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:24:03 EDT

BigTex2 : I was testing out the ASUS as an all-in-one router/Asterisk box and all was working until I discovered that incoming calls were intermittently early terminating. When I put my other router in front of the ASUS to offload it, with only the SPA2102 ATA connected to the ASUS' lan, I was able to receive calls reliably. But I couldn't make calls - the ASUS-initiated outbound calls never made it to my provider. Thinking it might be a NAT issue, by having a router behind a router, I moved the ATA to the WAN side of the ASUS, but couldn't ever establish a local connection as extension [101]. Then I noticed this thread had been updated and so I tried turning the ASUS into a simple switch. But now I can't figure out how to communicate with the ASUS. When it was still a router, I could get to the Tomato login either from the LAN side with 192.168.1.1, or from the WAN side with MYDYNDNSADDRESS.com:80. Neither of those work now, nor does trying to access it with the static IP address that my Linksys router assigned it (192.168.0.14). And putty doesn't know how to ssh to it either. Any suggestions?

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:33:57 EDT

Fisamo : Nice suggestion--that saves me the hassle of switching wiring around, losing network shares when I want to test configurations, etc. Unfortunately, I still get the registration timeout. :(

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:35:16 EDT

pagemen : This is a double-NAT setup and might mess things up. Since you have a router already, why not disable WAN interface/DHCP/NAT on the 520GU and use it as a switch. In this way, all devices will be on the same subnet.

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:29:02 EDT

Fisamo : Knowing me, it was probably configured incorrectly. :) I didn't do anything special with the Asterisk configuration, because it seems to work that way just fine on my PBX-in-a-Flash box that's also running on that subnet. (I don't blame the PiaF box for the troubles, because it hasn't shown any effect from my playing.)

Regardless, when I couldn't register a 192.168.1.x client through the WAN port of the Asterisk router, I tried putting my PC in the LAN of the router to test the third configuration listed in my previous post. No luck. :( And yes, I did confirm that my PC's software firewall was off when testing. (Not that it should need to be, but again--best to knock down as many possible issues...)

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:53:29 EDT

mazilo :

said by Fisamo :

Here's what I tried...

Internet router is 192.168.1.1; Asterisk's router is (WAN) 192.168.1.111, (LAN) 192.168.10.1.

Always best to double-check. :)

How did you configure your asterisk to handle your PAP2 and X-Lite that are on the same subnet as your Asterisk?
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:47:02 EDT

Fisamo : Yeah, that's why I'm banging (scratching?) my head... Will have to play some more. :)

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:47:02 EDT

Mango :

said by Fisamo :

X-lite at 192.168.10.x set to register to 192.168.10.1 also gives timeout, error 408.

This one should work, provided that the computer running X-Lite is connected to a LAN port of the Asterisk router.

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

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:37:04 EDT

Fisamo : Here's what I tried...

Internet router is 192.168.1.1; Asterisk's router is (WAN) 192.168.1.111, (LAN) 192.168.10.1.

Always best to double-check. :)

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:01:53 EDT

Mango : 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

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:56:20 EDT

Fisamo : 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...

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:41:10 EDT

mazilo :

said by Mango :

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Can you confirm if the available RAM on your device drops below 800KB when this happens?

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:05:54 EDT

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

Well, there's your problem!

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

m.

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:58:44 EDT

Mango : 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

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

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:33:06 EDT

BigTex2 : 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.

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

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:16:54 EDT

screenname : 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.

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

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:16:10 EDT

Fisamo : 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.

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

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:10:19 EDT

Mango :

said by BigTex2 :

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

If you read my post carefully, you'll notice I did mention decompressing the file. Did anyone else have to rename the file after decompressing? If so I will add it to the instructions.
--
Mango's recommended PAP2T settings
Linksys/Cisco dial plan tips and tricks

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

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:53:12 EDT

BigTex2 : 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!

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

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:51:38 EDT

mazilo :

said by pagemen :

Please remember, OpenWrt kernel is already highly customized and many features are built as modules, ...

This is true; however, I still had to remove some built-in kernel features. You ought to remember, the default kernel settings are to transform the embedded device into a NAT/Firewall WiFi router. A lot of NAT/Firewall/WiFi/router main functions are built into the kernel. Only those add-ons are basically built as modules. TBH, some functions, built as modules, even get loaded when the device is turned on even such functions are not needed. For instance, if I don't remove NAT/Firewall/Router/WiFi modules, as soon as the device is ready, the kernel will have already had these modules loaded even though they are not needed, especially in my case just use the device to run an Asterisk PBX system.

... 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.

For an embedded device, and additional of 100KB RAM means a lot. Not only the kernel size becomes smaller and using less RAM, but also the kernel itself will run with less interruptions that used to serve the requests/pagings from those (built-in and/or built as module) functions. With the kernel CPU cycles freed from serving such interruptions, more of its CPU cycles can be made available to process user programs (Asterisk in this case). As far as the user is concerned, the device seemingly runs faster even though it still runs on the same clock speed.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:00:22 EDT

pagemen : 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.

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

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:23:19 EDT

mazilo :

said by pagemen :

Stripping down OpenWrt is mainly for space

Not necessarily. When a lot of un-used codes are stripped, it not only strips for space, but also less RAM is used. For instance, in my remarks, I mentioned that I have stripped off a lot of un-necessary kernel functions (including WiFi module). These will make the Linux kernel smaller and occupies less RAM as well as less overhead. As such, the kernel will consume less CPU resources and gives more to user programs that need them.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:40:14 EDT

pagemen : 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.

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

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:01:17 EDT

mazilo :

said by BigTex2 :

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.

My remarks are based on my experience with an Asterisk PBX system hosted on a mediocre and/or underpowered FON2100 WiFi router. Currently, my FON2100 WiFi router that has been overclocked to 220MHz runs on a self-built stripped OpenWRT firmware with no WiFi module. I have completely stripped off a lot of Linux kernel non-essential functions to fit the Linux kernel into a compressed 640KB in size. I have also replaced a lot non-essential programs (that make a FON2100 device a WiFi router) with an Asterisk PBX program + G729 IVR sound files + Python-2.6.1 (just to support Paul Marks' GV Dialer Python scripts through AGI). The Asterisk itself runs pretty smoothly with plenty of RAM (about 3M free RAM on idle). However, the problem starts when Asterisk is trying to serve Paul Marks' GV Dialer Python scripts through AGI where its available RAM drops to less than 640KB. This triggers the mtdblockd process that eats up a lot of CPU resources. The call does get established after a ridiculous 45s later on. Had a FON2100 been equipped with a 32MB RAM, I believe this problem won't even exists.

I hope those who have used any NAT/Firewall WiFi routers (with 16MB RAM) + Asterisk + the Paul Marks' GV Dialer Python scripts will chime in on this.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:48:40 EDT

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

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:27:01 EDT

BigTex2 : 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!

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

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:35:32 EDT

mazilo :

said by BigTex2 :

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?

According to the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, an Asus WL-520GU only comes with a 4/16MB Flash/RAM. Based on my experience with an asterisk-1.6.x hosted on a FON2100 WiFi router with an 8/16MB Flash/RAM and flashed with a self-built stripped down OpenWRT firmware with no WiFi module, its 16MB RAM is barely enough to serve ONLY Asterisk with no AGI. That said, if you want to build an Asterisk system to do the GV Dialing with AGI on an Asus WL-520GU, you may want to think twice unless you don't mind to run into some unresponsive issues even though you may get by with a swap file on a USB memory stick.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:24:33 EDT

anon : 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).

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

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:41:18 EDT

txcas : FYI, the WL-520GU is on a 24-hour sale at Newegg for $39 and free shipping.

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

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:12:55 EDT

Fisamo : Ultimately, you should not need a second router. However, if you want to be able to reboot, flash firmware, tweak dial plans, etc., without interfering with other household internet traffic, having your toybox (ASUS) behind another router lets you play in peace. :D

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

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:35:56 EDT

Dan_voip :

said by screenname :

Cable Modem --> Router --> ASUS --> PC

I wonder why do you need another router?
For all devices connected to "Router" QoS will not work.

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

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:32:53 EDT

screenname :

said by Fisamo :

I set up my ASUS behind another router as follows:

Cable Modem --> Router --> ASUS --> PC

Of course, the router connects my other networked equipment to the 'net, and my PC is normally connected directly to it. I have the router using 192.168.1.1 as its lan address, and the ASUS grabs a dynamic IP. (It's connected ASUS WAN to Router LAN.) The ASUS uses 192.168.10.1 for its lan, and while I am configuring/playing, my PC access the ASUS through its lan. I've had no trouble getting at files. HTH

Thanks!

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

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:21:30 EDT

Fisamo : I set up my ASUS behind another router as follows:

Cable Modem --> Router --> ASUS --> PC

Of course, the router connects my other networked equipment to the 'net, and my PC is normally connected directly to it. I have the router using 192.168.1.1 as its lan address, and the ASUS grabs a dynamic IP. (It's connected ASUS WAN to Router LAN.) The ASUS uses 192.168.10.1 for its lan, and while I am configuring/playing, my PC access the ASUS through its lan. I've had no trouble getting at files. HTH

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

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:37:51 EDT

screenname : I did that but I can no longer talk to it. When it has 192.168.1.5, I can telnet to it from my PC and able to access its web interface. At 192.168.0.1, I cant.
BTW, I hook up the Asus to my main router LAN port to LAN port. Is this the correct way?

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

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:32:41 EDT

Mango : As I said before, if the router connected to the internet has an IP address of 192.168.1.1, try setting the Asus router's LAN IP to IP 192.168.0.1. ;)

If that doesn't help, try pinging 209.123.109.175. If that works, then your DNS settings are incorrect.

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/

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

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:25:17 EDT

screenname : Still have issues downloading files when my Asus 520gu is behind another router (it has tomato 1.25 with usb support firmware loaded). on Basic->Network, I have WAN/internet set to DHCP. LAN -> Router IP address 192.168.1.5, subnet mask 255.255.255.0, statis DNS 192.168.1.1 (My main router), DHCP server unchecked.
The status at Status->overview shows "Renewing...".
when I try wget »www.3iii.dk/linux...., I got "wget: bad address 'www.3iii.dk'.
I can ping 192.168.1.1. I got "ping: bad address 'www.google.com'" when I tried ping www.google.com.

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

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:48:04 EDT

anon : I was wondering if anyone has been able to get the 520gu with tomato+asterisk to work well with Googlevoice + SIPgate to get free incoming/outgoing calls. Any info or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:55:02 EDT

screenname : thanks. That was my problem. I set the gateway and dns to the address of the routing router and I am able to download files from the Asus.

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

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:49:03 EDT

Mango : If the router connected to the internet has an IP address of 192.168.1.1, try setting the Asus router's LAN IP to IP 192.168.0.1. Or, vice versa. As far as the Asus router's WAN settings go, have you configured DNS properly? You should be able to safely set the Asus router's WAN settings to DHCP.

Does ping work?

m.

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

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:21:53 EDT

screenname : If I put my Asus behind another router, it cant download files. Wget and ipkg return with errors. I set it up to have 192.168.1.5. Any trick to get it to do wget behind another router?

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

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:17:17 EDT

Fisamo :

said by Mango :

That's all for now, but later on I'll post my extensions.conf, as well as my technique for propagating Message Waiting Indicator from your VoIP provider.

Happy VoIPing!

m.

If all goes well, I'll run this install (or a similar one) on a router this weekend. One of the things I'd like, though, is to use my VoSP's email system. I'd love to see your technique for propagating the MWI signal from the VoSP... Thanks!

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

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:36:46 EDT

Fisamo : Sounds similar to my situation, except for the moving part. Instead, I have a wife in graduate school and three children under the age of ten... :o :D

I'm definitely in need of honed programming skills if I'm going to get this off the ground... either that, or a lot of help from DSLR, FreePBX forums, and Google! :)

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

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:20:55 EDT

ropeguru : Good points... You may very well be correct...

I know what you mean about time... I am in the process of getting work done on my house so I can move and start a new job in the end of this month. I am really hoping once I get settled I will have a little more time to play with things like this. It is something I am really interested in but I need to hone my programming skills a lot more.

I was thinking of starting with FreePBX as a base concept and go from there. I have to admit that I have not looked at any of the other interfaces out there. I am going to try and browse those too as one of them may be better.

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

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:17:03 EDT

Fisamo : Makes perfect sense. I just think (perhaps in error) that I'd need to run Asterisk on the home system if I want to keep the nv-apps working and any other custom tts features alive. The idea there is that I would not be running anything that may be CPU-intensive (e.g. swift tts engine) on the router, but would have it up and running on a linux box that's already set up. The linux box would be running Asterisk and set up as a sip proxy for that purpose.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to do it. :D With time (what's that?), I'm sure I could...

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

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:44:28 EDT

MartyT : I thought the AJAX interface to Tomato already used some of these concepts.

If anyone has actually pulled Asterisk config files off a real PC based installation and gotten them to work on an embedded router based implementation, speak up. I've tried in the past and failed, but that probably means I simply was over my head technically.

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

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:22:53 EDT

ropeguru :

said by Fisamo :

I was thinking that if the router's "Easy Setup" button can be programmed to run a script when pressed, you could have your reload there. :) (Why log in if you can just hit the reload button?)

I'm thinking similar thoughts--having the home phones run off the router-asterisk, but continue to run * on a regular PC. The PC would (ideally) be able to run the configuration GUI as you describe, along with possibly some nv-apps (weather-by-zip, news clips, etc.)

You got it.... Or, instead of actually running a full blown * system on the computer, just run a management and monitoring interface setup. My best thought would still be something like FreePBX on to computer with no actual * code but the * runs on the router.

Did that make any sense??

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

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:42:50 EDT

Fisamo : I was thinking that if the router's "Easy Setup" button can be programmed to run a script when pressed, you could have your reload there. :) (Why log in if you can just hit the reload button?)

I'm thinking similar thoughts--having the home phones run off the router-asterisk, but continue to run * on a regular PC. The PC would (ideally) be able to run the configuration GUI as you describe, along with possibly some nv-apps (weather-by-zip, news clips, etc.)

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

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:08:44 EDT

ropeguru :

said by mazilo :

said by ropeguru :

A setup like this could also be used if you wanted to have multiple asterisk "routers" running and have a different config for each. Hence the idea of having a directory named by the mac address to store the config files.

This would be for those folks that don't like playing with the CLI but would rather have a GUI config but not have to deal with the lack of horsepower on the router itself.

An interesting point. In other words, one just needs to run/configure a GUI asterisk locally and then have the asterisk hosted on a router to check for the new local GUI files to download.

Pretty much, just change the, "check for the new local GUI files to download", to "check for the new local conf files to download" and you will have it right. Additionally, you would not even have to have asterisk running on the configuration machine, only something that will create the conf files.

By doing it this way you keep all the horsepower needed to run a GUI on a regular workstation, or server if you prefer, and the router just gets the text conf files.

You could even have a reload button in the router's lightweight gui, or you could just use a cli command, to do an "on the fly" reload of the conf files if you change something. That way you might have a brief interruption of your asterisk but not your router itself if you are using it for that purpose also.

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

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:02:09 EDT

mazilo :

An interesting point. In other words, one just needs to run/configure a GUI asterisk locally and then have the asterisk hosted on a router to check for the new local GUI files to download.
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:35:52 EDT

ropeguru :

said by mazilo :

said by ropeguru :

You guys have given me some good ideas on setting these units up for asterisk.

You lost me here. What did you mean by setting these units up for asterisk? Did you setting asterisk + tftp server + other server? If so, can't they all be hosted on the same computer / router that hosts the asterisk?

By "units" I mean those like this thread are about. The WL-520GU or even the linksys routers. My thought was not to have a dedicated "server" for the config machine but being able to use something like an XP workstation that would not have to be on all the time if you didn't want it to be. If it were down and the config check failed on the router, then the current config would be used.

A setup like this could also be used if you wanted to have multiple asterisk "routers" running and have a different config for each. Hence the idea of having a directory named by the mac address to store the config files.

This would be for those folks that don't like playing with the CLI but would rather have a GUI config but not have to deal with the lack of horsepower on the router itself.

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

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:31:39 EDT

mazilo :

said by ropeguru :

You guys have given me some good ideas on setting these units up for asterisk.

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

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:52:45 EDT

ropeguru : You guys have given me some good ideas on setting these units up for asterisk. I will even share my thought if anyone wants to run with it as it will be a while before I could even think about having time to do this.

This would require a second computer to be up and running with something like a tftp server running on it.

Create a program or web server like freePBX for configuration only. You add in your extensions, trunks, and whatever else you want, or that the router can handle hardware wise, and the configurations are stored as asterisk text config files. In your tftp server you store these config files in a directory that is given the same name as the MAC address on the router.

Next, create a permanant script on the router that upon boot, and before asterisk boots, contacts the tftp server and checks to see if any of the config files have changed. If not, the config currently stored on the router is used. If one has changed then it gets transferred and overwrites the old file on the router. Then the asterisk on the router get started.

On the more beefier routers you might even be able to used the API, I don't know since it has been so long since I messed with asterisk, to pull current call info for FOP to display on the config server.

Any thoughts??

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

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:55:20 EDT

wifi4milez :

said by mazilo :

said by global_dev :

I vaguely remember that my NSLU2 had a port of AsteriskNOW! or something like that and it sort of worked.

Cool. Then, it shouldn't be hard to port it to OpenWRT to run on a device with a USB2 port.

How much flash is required for a new version of Asterisk with a GUI anyway?
--
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Re: [How to] Install Asterisk on an Asus WL-520GU router

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:35:40 EDT

mazilo :

said by global_dev :

I vaguely remember that my NSLU2 had a port of AsteriskNOW! or something like that and it sort of worked.

Cool. Then, it shouldn't be hard to port it to OpenWRT to run on a device with a USB2 port.

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

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:57:23 EDT

global_dev : I vaguely remember that my NSLU2 had a port of AsteriskNOW! or something like that and it sort of worked.

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

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:08:29 EDT

mazilo :

said by wifi4milez :

Do you know if it would even be possible to load the GUI on this device?

AFAIK, I haven't seen the GUI part from any asterisk distro ported to an asterisk for an embedded device, yet. I can only speculate the reason is perhaps most Linux embedded devices come with a limited Flash space that may not be sufficient to hold the GUI codes. OTOH, DD-WRT has a built-in simple GUI editor to edit asterisk *.conf files.
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
US Phone: +1-678-601-0907
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:40:42 EDT

wifi4milez : Do you know if it would even be possible to load the GUI on this device?

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

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 03:03:25 EDT

Mango :

said by pandora :

Wouldn't it have been easier to pop for another $20 and install the mega version of DD-WRT with Asterisk?

As I mentioned before, I opted for Tomato because of its QoS reputation and also because USB support in DD-WRT is rumored to be very tricky (though Boolah didn't mention having any problem with it.)

The reason I chose the WL-520GU is that the main purpose of the exercise was to build a functioning Asterisk box that used as little power as possible, for as little cost as possible. I got my router for CA$37 (about US$34). So far, 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, at least until my wife figures out how to talk to more than six of her friends at once ;)

said by phdeez :

Do you think you could install Asterisk on CIFS if your router doesn't have a USB port?

I would think that would be very possible. I did have music-on-hold files on a CIFS mount while I was testing something, and it worked perfectly well. So, I don't see why not!

said by wifi4milez :

Does this install allow for the GUI to be used?

I didn't install the GUI in an effort to use as small a footprint as possible. Actually, I found the syntax for the config files quite easy to learn so I haven't even tried. I will post what I used once I've tested them a bit more.

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/

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

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 01:45:04 EDT

thepirate : Mazilo don't u sleep at all? Or are you a robot?
Lol..YOu are amazing :)

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

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 01:25:42 EDT

mazilo :

said by thepirate :

Can I use netgear WNDR-3300 which support dd-wrt and open-wrt?

A Netgear WNDR3300 device is flagged as untested under OpenWRT.

Here is the list I do to make my FON2100 device runs OpenWRT + asterisk (it is by no means in details):

My asterisk-1.6.x PBX system is hosted on an underpowered FON2100 device with 8/16MB Flash/RAM. I have to completely strip off all unnecessary functions, i.e. no WiFi, no router, no bridge, no DHCP, etc., to gain more free RAM space for asterisk to use. Basically, now my FON2100 device is no longer acting as a (WiFi) router, but just a plain Linux embedded device with asterisk. At 183MHz, my FON2100 device barely has enough CPU resources to process a single call with AGI scripts. As such, I have over clocked it to 220MHz so that the same call can be processed faster and smoother. That said, I have no idea what will the outcome be to have asterisk runs on your hardware with 4/16MB Flash/RAM.

Good luck.
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
US Phone: +1-678-601-0907
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:35:42 EDT

thepirate : Can I use netgear WNDR-3300 which support dd-wrt and open-wrt?
MAzilo,
Can you guide me step by step?Can someone provide me step by step instructions?

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 19:47:36 EDT

wifi4milez : This sounds a lot like the install I did on my Buffalo NAS. Does this install allow for the GUI to be used?

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:56:48 EDT

mazilo :

said by phdeez :

Do you think you could install Asterisk on CIFS if your router doesn't have a USB port?

Yes and please read my post where I have my asterisk PBX system hosted on a crappy / mediocre WiFi router with no problem.

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:26:50 EDT

ropeguru : Great info in this thread. One thing I would like to see someone build or setup is something like freepbx but the freepbx box does only the configuration and monitoring. The router or appliance runs asterisk and pulls its configuration from the freepbx machine.

So each time the router/appliance it copies a config across the network to the local machine. This way if the configuration machine is down or cannot be contacted, the asterisk appliance will continue to function.

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:27:02 EDT

pandora :

said by Boolah :

You can get the mega version of DD-WRT to run on the WL-520gU with a USB flash drive. The idea is that you flash the router with the mini/standard version of DD-WRT and then mod it so it boots from the flash drive (which has the mega version on it). I've been doing this since the beginning of the year and it's been working great! See this thread for details:

»www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=44448

That is very clever, and could be used by developers to build test firmwares without bricking routers.

Thanks for the link!
--
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:25:51 EDT

phdeez : Do you think you could install Asterisk on CIFS if your router doesn't have a USB port?

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:24:49 EDT

pandora :

said by mazilo :

If that is the case, I definitely will go with a WL-500GP v1 for additional $20. Not only the CPU is clocked to 266MHz, but also the unit comes with a built-in 32MB RAM as compared to a 200MHz with a 16MB RAM on WL-520GU.

It's not only RAM and CPU speed, but the WL-500gp has 8MB of flash while the WL-520gu has only 4MB. You can flash meta DD-WRT to the 500-gp, but not to the 520gu.
--
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:21:24 EDT

Boolah :

said by pandora :

Wouldn't it have been easier to pop for another $20 and install the mega version of DD-WRT with Asterisk?

You can get the mega version of DD-WRT to run on the WL-520gU with a USB flash drive. The idea is that you flash the router with the mini/standard version of DD-WRT and then mod it so it boots from the flash drive (which has the mega version on it). I've been doing this since the beginning of the year and it's been working great! See this thread for details:

»www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=44448

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:08:00 EDT

mazilo :

said by pandora :

At Newegg about 6 weeks ago, I looked at the WL-520GU and it was $49 with free shipping. The WL-500gp was $69 and there are mega versions of DD-WRT which already have Asterisk installed. Wouldn't it have been easier to pop for another $20 and install the mega version of DD-WRT with Asterisk?

If that is the case, I definitely will go with a WL-500GP v1 for additional $20. Not only the CPU is clocked to 266MHz, but also the unit comes with a built-in 32MB RAM as compared to a 200MHz with a 16MB RAM on WL-520GU.
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
US Phone: +1-678-601-0907
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 15:31:27 EDT

pandora : At Newegg about 6 weeks ago, I looked at the WL-520GU and it was $49 with free shipping. The WL-500gp was $69 and there are mega versions of DD-WRT which already have Asterisk installed. Wouldn't it have been easier to pop for another $20 and install the mega version of DD-WRT with Asterisk?
--
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 15:08:18 EDT

fareedf : Thanks for instruction, after Asterisk installed on the router one needs modify some of the Conf files (extension.conf, iax.conf, modules.conf, sip.conf....) in order to work with your voip provider. Is there a possibility to screen shoots of these files that include couple of providers?

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:13:27 EDT

Fisamo :

said by MartyT :

If you are successful in getting your FreePBX generated files into a router based Asterisk system, let us know. I'm not a hardcoder like Mazilo on Asterisk, and would love to simply transfer FreePBX stuff over, but I'm not sure it works that way, at least it didn't when I tried it.

It would be nice to see some kind of AJAX based FreePBX interface for Asterisk when it runs on such a small system, unless someone has succeeded in getting FreePBX to run off the USB drive on a system like this on the WL-520GU.

Don't hold your breath... ;) I'm very interested in programming and getting things like this work, but I wasn't interested enough at that important 'career choice' time (college) and haven't been able to invest the time since. :( The other limiting factor for me at this point is that I have to be wary of taking our gateway (the ASUS router) down when my wife's home. :D I may just have to hook up the old TrendNET while I play.

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:12:01 EDT

MartyT : If you are successful in getting your FreePBX generated files into a router based Asterisk system, let us know. I'm not a hardcoder like Mazilo on Asterisk, and would love to simply transfer FreePBX stuff over, but I'm not sure it works that way, at least it didn't when I tried it.

It would be nice to see some kind of AJAX based FreePBX interface for Asterisk when it runs on such a small system, unless someone has succeeded in getting FreePBX to run off the USB drive on a system like this on the WL-520GU.

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:38:38 EDT

mazilo :

said by hoolahoous :

said by mazilo :

I believe ITU once had posted some sort of G729 source code on its site and allowed anyone to download it for free.

For asterisk, you can configure both your asterisk + ATA devices to use G729 as a default CoDec and they will both work just fine to provide services with G729 calls.

do you know which chipset wl-520gu has (broadcomm??) ? I have one of these routers flashed to dd-wrt.

You should be able to find the information you are looking for on the link I provided in my post above.

i need to do transcoding since my VOIP provider does not provide G729 and I want all my extensions to use G729.

Even though you can manage to port the G729 CoDec source to any open-source firmware, I presume the CPU on the router will probably not have enough resources to perform a G729 transcoding. On my Asterisk PBX system, it is just configured with a G729 as the default CoDec and it doesn't do any transcoding.
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
US Phone: +1-678-601-0907
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:37:50 EDT

Fisamo : Very, very, very nice! I just purchased (and installed) a WL-520GU router at home, and I've already replaced the f/w with DD-wrt, so this upgrade should be pretty straightforward. The next challenge(s) will be to get my dialplan, which I 'perfected' using FreePBX imported to this system.

I'm extremely interested in the how-to propagate MWI from the provider to my internal extensions. From what I've heard, it "can't be done" with Asterisk. (Do you have a separate script monitoring SIP packets?)

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:13:25 EDT

Mango :

said by hoolahoous :

i need to do transcoding since my VOIP provider does not provide G729 and I want all my extensions to use G729.

I'm incredibly curious. Why on earth would you use G.729 if not to save bandwidth?

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/

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:12:07 EDT

Mango :

said by HumanG :

Why do you need tomato firmware at all? I think some beta version of DD-WRT also support USB2 drives

Emphasis mine.

Well, there was talk about having to hack the USB driver on DD-WRT to make it even work with my router. That didn't seem like a good idea. Tomato is also the most popular firmware amongst VoIP users that I know, I assume because of it's highly effective QoS, which edmidor mentioned.

I haven't tried QoS on any other open source firmware, but I can attest to QoS in Tomato working, and working very very well.

On that note. Oddly, it didn't work at all when using port-based QoS. But, it worked a treat when I used IP-based QoS. I have no idea why.

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/

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:30:56 EDT

hoolahoous :

do you know which chipset wl-520gu has (broadcomm??) ? I have one of these routers flashed to dd-wrt.

i need to do transcoding since my VOIP provider does not provide G729 and I want all my extensions to use G729.

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:00:41 EDT

edmidor : AFAIK Tomato has much smaller memory footprint, which is a good thing for Asterisk. It has QoS that actually works; and it just easier to operate.
If I was to install * on a router, I would only go Tomato or OpenWRT

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

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 02:16:31 EDT

anon : Mango2,

Thanks for the write-up. Very nice. Just one question though. Why do you need tomato firmware at all? I think some beta version of DD-WRT also support USB2 drives, and via optware-install and ipkg, you can install asterisk. See wiki »www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Optware and »www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/USB_storage. I am just wondering if you have tried this method or not.

said by Mango :

As promised, here's how I built an Asterisk box out of a $37 router. This will likely eventually turn into a post on my blog but I figured I'd subject everyone here to the rough draft first :D
... ...

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:11:16 EDT

mazilo :

said by hoolahoous :

do you know if g729 will work ?

If there is a GPLed G729 source codes, then one should be able to port it to any platform. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a GPLed G729 source codes. However, I believe ITU once had posted some sort of G729 source code on its site and allowed anyone to download it for free.

For asterisk, you can configure both your asterisk + ATA devices to use G729 as a default CoDec and they will both work just fine to provide services with G729 calls.
--
Mazilo always prays for FREEBIES!
US Phone: +1-678-601-0907
UK Phone: +44-703-194-2574

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:59:28 EDT

MartyT : The WL-520GU is one of my favorite routers. I use it on all my VOIP installs. Just be sure to get rid of the stock firmware. It really sucks in my experience. Tomato 1.25 is a dream.

Asterisk? My favorite PBX, but FreeSwitch with FreePBX might change that.

With Mazilo lurking around, I see a new convert to the WL-520GU platform.

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:58:14 EDT

hoolahoous : do you know if g729 will work ? if yes is there a 'test' g729 codec available for this chipset to test it out ?

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:00:13 EDT

Mango : The modified Tomato firmware does indeed support USB2. I've only been using it for a few days, but fortunately it has been very stable.

m.

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:52:51 EDT

mazilo : Mango,

Can you confirm the Tomato firmware can support USB2 on WL-520GU router? If so, how stable is the USB2 driver? I read the from the OpenWRT Table of Hardware list for Asus WL-520GU that even Asus has USB2 support disabled on its firmware.

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:52:25 EDT

Mango : Now you're finally ready to install Asterisk. The way I installed it was with Optware. First, unmount and mount your USB drive to be sure that /opt was properly created.

Next, download the Optware install script...
...and run it.

Installing Asterisk is as simple as

ipkg may recommend some other packages to install such as sound and music-on-hold files. Install them if you want. I only installed the uLaw versions because I only use the G.711 codec.

If all goes well (and when I did this it did) you will now have Asterisk installed on your WL-520GU. Start it by typing asterisk -vvvc. Or configure it to start automatically by adding /opt/sbin/asterisk to the "Run after mounting" box on the Tomato setup page.

At this point you will probably want to play with Asterisk's configuration. When I used the sample configuration files, Asterisk ran, but the audio quality was poor because memory usage was very very high. The sample modules.conf loads a great deal of modules, many which you will not need. I was able to drastically reduce Asterisk's memory usage with the following modules.conf. For a description of these modules, type module show at the console.

Reducing logging also improved my call quality as it meant less writing to the USB drive. My logger.conf is now a blank file. I also disabled Tomato's bandwidth monitoring and logging on the Tomato setup page. Also, press the button on the back of the router to disable remote access, if you're not currently using it.

Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of a $37 Asterisk box that uses only a few watts of power. Bet you spent less than the Digium Asterisk Appliance, didn't you? That's all for now, but later on I'll post my extensions.conf, as well as my technique for propagating Message Waiting Indicator from your VoIP provider.

Happy VoIPing!

m.

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:52:02 EDT

Mango : We're almost ready to install Asterisk. But first, we need something to install it on. If you've already formatted your USB drive as EXT2, you may skip the next few steps. If not, attach your USB drive and read on.

The first drive I used for this project was an OCZ Roadster drive. I discovered however that it ran very very very hot - too hot to touch after only a few hours of use. While this would be no problem for making a quick backup, this would not do for an appliance that is supposed to be on 24/7. The other drive that I had was a Dane-Elec drive which I purchased at the grocery store of all places. It was a great deal because it was labeled 1GB and it's actually a 2GB drive. It runs very cool and is ideal for my purposes.

Return to the Tomato setup page, navigate to USB and NAS, and then to USB Support. Enable Core USB Support, USB 2.0 Support, USB Storage Support, and Ext2 / Ext3 File System Support. If the drive automatically mounted itself, unmount it before continuing.

Now it is time to partition and format the drive. Note that anything on the drive will be erased during this process. SSH into the router and type fdisk /dev/discs/disc0/disc. To be sure you've selected the correct drive, use the command p. The first line will tell you the size of the drive. The system column will tell you the format. If the drive is currently formatted as FAT32, under the System column should be Win95 FAT32.

Type d to delete the current partition, if one exists. Then, type n to create a new partition. Follow the prompts to create a primary partition. If it asks for a partition number, enter 1. Use the defaults for cylinders. Next, enter w to write the partition table and exit fdisk. If you've made a mistake, instead exit by pressing CTRL+C and start over.

Congratulations! You have created a partition. Now we need to format it. If you are a beginner such that you require this guide, you should use the ext2 filesystem. Type mkfs.ext2 /dev/discs/disc0/part1 -L USB
Note that "USB" may be anything you like. -L specifies a volume label and I decided "USB" would be easy to remember.

Finally, run a check on the new partition by typing fsck.ext2 -f -y /dev/discs/disc0/part1

Next, you should configure the drive to automatically mount. Return to the Tomato setup page and turn "Automount" on. In the "Run after mounting" box, enter [ -d /mnt/USB ] && mount /mnt/USB /opt . Why? You'll see :) Save your settings.

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:51:37 EDT

Mango : The next thing I would recommend doing is setting up SSH. SSH is a more secure way of accessing the router. If you're on a private internal network and do not allow remote access to the router, this may not matter, but it's good practice to do anyway.

First, download PuTTY and PuTTYGen if you don't have them already. If you're not using Windows, you can use any other flavour of SSH client you prefer. The way I like to access SSH is with an RSA key.

Start PuTTYGen. The default settings of SSH-2 RSA and 1024 bits will typically be fine to use. Click the Generate button and follow any prompts that appear. Click 'Save Private Key' and save the file in a safe place.

Next, load the Tomato setup page. Navigate to Administration and then Admin Access. Enable the SSH Daemon, and paste the public key in the Authorized Keys box. I recommend disabling Remote Access. Save your settings.

Now, load PuTTY. Enter the Host Name or IP Address of your router and select the SSH protocol. Navigate to the Connection category from the list at the left. Select Data and, if you like, enter root as the auto-login username. Next, select SSH, and then select Auth. Browse to find the private key file you just created with PuTTYGen. Return to the Session category, enter a name in the Saved Sessions box, and press the Save button. You should now be able to log into the router using SSH.

Now is a good time to set up a script I wrote. This script disables or enables access to the router when the button on the back is pressed. There are two advantages to this. One is that if access is disabled, the router is more secure. The other advantage is that less memory is used, and with 16MB of RAM, every little bit helps. Return to the Tomato setup page. Navigate to Administration and then Buttons / LED. Change the first two dropdown menus to Run Custom Script. Here is the script, which you may paste into the text box below:

Save your settings and test a few times to be sure the script works. At this point you may disable the Telnet service. Note that this script depends on the program "buttons" running. If for any reason buttons is killed, the script will not work. For this reason, I recommend you leave "Enable at startup" turned on for the SSH daemon so that if the button does not work, all you need to do is reboot the router.

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

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:31:03 EDT

Mango : As promised, here's how I built an Asterisk box out of a $37 router. This will likely eventually turn into a post on my blog but I figured I'd subject everyone here to the rough draft first :D I am not going to go into a great deal of detail with this post. You should be comfortable with basic networking and VoIP concepts such as how to configure a static IP, how to use Telnet/SSH, and how to configure a VoIP phone or ATA. Having said that, if anything does turn out to be particularly vague, I'd be happy to clairfy.

I chose the WL-520GU because it was one of the few routers I could find with a USB port. I read about techniques for modifying a WRT54GL to use an SD card but I decided that plugging in a USB device was easier than getting out the soldering iron. I decided Tomato would be my firmware of choice. Tomato is the most popular firmware I see VoIP users use and it has a great reputation for its QoS features.

I have heard it is possible to install Asterisk on a router without any additional storage space. The reason I chose the USB technique is that I wanted extra space for things like sounds and music-on-hold files. I also wanted space for logging, if necessary (though usually I leave logging off.)

Before we start, you may want to attach the WL-520GU to another router connected to the Internet. Some modems, such as my Motorola cable modem, don't particularly like issuing IP addresses and you will need to reboot the WL-520GU a few times during this process. In order to do this, you will need to be sure both routers have different IP addresses.

Now for the first step, which is obtaining DD-WRT. No, that's not a typo; you should install DD-WRT before installing Tomato. There is a good reason for this but I cannot remember what it is, and since this is a "How To" and not "Why", suffice to say "you need to install DD-WRT first."

First, download the latest stable version of DD-WRT. Visit »www.dd-wrt.com/ , click the Downloads tab, navigate to the stable folder, navigate to the latest version, then the Consumer folder, then the Asus folder, then the WL520GU folder, and finally to the file dd-wrt.vXX_mini_asus.trx. (Whew!) I have heard rumors that you should not save this file in any directory that has a space in it. I haven't tested this, but I'd recommend you do this to be on the safe side.

Now, you need to flash the DD-WRT firmware to the router. I would recommend setting your computer up with a static IP. I discovered that while flashing, the router did not always issue an IP address. As with flashing any firmware, be sure to do this over a wired connection and not a wireless one. You may also need to disable any software firewalls. After setting the static IP, test to be sure that you can access the router's setup page over a wired connection.

To flash firmware, you should use Asus' Firmware Restoration Utility. Note: do not use the latest version from Asus' website as it probably won't work. The best version to use is the one on the CD that came with the router. If you have lost it, be sure download the right version of the Firmware Restoration Utility for your specific router. Load the Firmware Restoration Utility and browse to find the trx file you just downloaded. Don't upload it yet!

Unplug the power from the router and consider the two buttons on the back. Using a small screwdriver or a ballpoint pen, press the reset button. Hold down the reset button and plug the router back in. When the Power LED begins to flash, release the reset button, and upload the firmware.

If all goes well, DD-WRT will be installed. To be sure everything worked, navigate to the setup page and log in. One set of instructions I was following told me to log in with blank username and password admin. Another told me username admin and blank password. Actually, I had to log in with admin/admin.

Next, take a look at this forum thread: »www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showt···?t=60185 . This is the thread that talks about a modification of Tomato that has USB support. Navigate to the download link. Note that there are a few flavours available. I chose the ext flavour because I needed tools to partition and format the USB drive. If you have a Linux box that you can use instead, you can download the smaller Standard build, or if you do not require Samba, you can download the even smaller Lite build. Download and unrar the file.

The password after we flash Tomato will be different and it is necessary to find out what it will be. In order to do this, telnet into the router. Use the username root and whatever password you used to access the setup page. Type nvram get http_passwd and copy the password that it returns.

Now, return to the DD-WRT setup page. Navigate to Administration and then to Firmware Upgrade. Browse to the Tomato firmware you just downloaded and upgrade. Attempt to log in to the Tomato setup page. When I did it, the username was root, and the password was what I found in the previous step.

Congratulations! You have just installed Tomato on your router! As with any new router install, before you continue, be sure to do the following:

1) Change the password on the router to something difficult to guess.
2) Secure the wireless connection, or disable it if you don't plan to use it.
3) You may want to disable wireless access to the Tomato setup page.
4) You may want to properly configure such settings as Time Zone.