6. Finishing Touches

Let's change the default password for security reasons and let Asterisk know our email address so that it can send us email notifications of new voicemails:

nano voicemail.conf

Search for 1234 and change the 4242 to a new four digit numeric password. Also change the example email address to your own:

1234 => 3421,Example Mailbox,root@localhost

Reload asterisk to pick up these new changes:

/etc/init.d/asterisk reload

A few other handy things to know are that:

asterisk -vvvcf

will bring up the Asterisk console, while:

set verbose 1000

will increase logging detail. Now call in again and you will see all of the steps execute that you created in /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf. To exit the console type:

stop now

You can also see the raw log file which contains CallerID information by typing:

cd /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv tail -100 Master.csv

Now that you have a working Asterisk PC acting as an answering machine, you can start experimenting with adding additional capabilities. For example, you could set up multiple mailboxes or issue different greetings based on the incoming CallerID. And, of course, you can always add VoIP PBX functions.

For further info, be sure to check out the Asterisk on Debian Wiki page as well as the Asterisk User Documentation Project.