Welcome back to the Transparent Telephony series. If you're a new reader, you may want to start at the beginning: Part 1 - An Introduction.

In the previous installment, we walked through installing Asterisk. In this article, we'll be picking up where we left off and configuring Asterisk to make and receive phone calls using VoIP!

Specifically, we'll:

Welcome back to the Transparent Telephony series. If you're new, you may want to check out part 1 here: Transparent Telephony - Part 1 - An Introduction.

This series is designed for technical people, programmers, and just general enthusiasts who want to learn: how telephony works, how to setup your own phone server (PBX), how to write telephony applications, and how to reduce your phone expenses. There are tons of neat things you can do with telephony knowledge, so keep reading!

This article will walk you through installing Asterisk on your CentOS or Ubuntu server. If you are going to install on a virtual machine to follow along, I recommend using VirtualBox, as everything should work out of the box. Certain virtual machine programs like Xen have kernel issues which makes installing Asterisk difficult. Also, never ever use Asterisk in production on a virtual machine! You'll have timing issues (this will be explained later in the series).