8. Asterisk Administration

Asterisk has a well-earned reputation for being complex to setup and administer. Graphical management overlays often add to the actual complexity of the installation, in their attempt to shield users from the system internals.

Astlinux takes only small steps in the GUI direction, providing by default a Web-based administration portal at https://192.168.101.1/ Note that this is a private IP address; the Web page is secured by default and only available on the LAN side of the device.

The Web-based administration GUI provides pages for examining the Asterisk configuration, accessing the Asterisk command line, listing the FTP root directory, and looking at the call history log (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Asterisk Call Log

You can also load a general status page (Figure 7), access ping and tracert utilities, and access the Linux shell.

Figure 7: Server Status

Finally, there is also a General setup page (Figure 8) with functions such as reboot, reload Asterisk settings, back up key files, etc.

Figure 8: General Setup

In exposing the various config files via a Web-based presentation, these pages provide enough to get a beginner started without forcing them to learn the vi editor. However, users will still probably need to edit config files directly.