Home Box to Trixbox

The last thing to deal with is call routing to and from the VoIP trunk. To route calls from internal extensions to the trunk and calls from the trunk to my office extension, I needed to modify the dial plan files a bit, which can be done through the WebUI or from the command line. From the initial WebUI screen, I selected System Administration, Config Edit, and then extensions_custom.conf to bring up an editing window for that file. Adding the lines shown in Listing 1 to the from-internal-custom context allow all internal extensions to connect to my work VoIP trunk. Incoming calls from that trunk do not need to go through all the processing that calls from the PSTN line do, because they were already filtered by the office PBX. So, I also created the context custom-from-work (Listing 2), which does nothing but ring my extension (ZAP/2) whenever a call arrives. I attached that context to the trunk at the beginning of this article when I changed the context option for the trunk. So, now all calls coming from the office will ring my phone, and dialing #8 from any of our phones connects to the office VoIP system.

I now have a full-time answering system that meets my goals. I am able to call from one part of the house to another simply by dialing an extension or ring group. Because the system picks up the line before we hear a phone ring, we have cut our spam calls to almost none. If people call when it is late, they are reminded of the time and directed to voice mail, but urgent calls still can get through. I am able to make and receive calls from the office PBX as though I were in the same building as the system. All this and the only investment I had to make was the cost of the Digium TDM card and my time. I had the computer here already, and our house was wired for analog phones when we got here.

So, I found that Trixbox does not compromise much flexibility in gaining tremendous ease of use. There are still some features I would like on the system, however. Most notably, I would like the phones to ring differently for internal vs. incoming calls. I also would like my office phone to ring differently to differentiate my office calls from home calls, and my intra-office calls from my incoming office calls. Watch for those topics in a future article.