The Elastix PBX system [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
June 24, 2008

Elastix is a Linux-based telephone Private Branch eXchange (PBX) telephony system that is built on the CentOS Linux distribution. Elastix uses the Asterisk PBX software as its base and adds a number of extensions. Elastix is being developed by PaloSanto Solutions.

From the Elastix User Manual [pdf]:

Elastix is an appliance software that integrates the best tools available for Asterisk-based PBXs into a single, easy-to-use interface. It also adds its own set of utilities and allows for the creation of third party modules to make it the best software package available for open source telephony. The goals of Elastix are reliability, modularity and ease-of-use. These characteristics added to the strong reporting capabilities make it the best choice for implementing an Asterisk-based PBX.

Some of the Elastix features include:

A web-based user interface.
A built-in help interface.
Modular design for easy management of features.
Support for multiple virtualized systems on one platform.
Can present a variety of system status reports.
A built-in voicemail system.
Support for VoIP telephony.
Support for faxes with fax to email conversion.
Support for instant messaging.
a built-in mail server.
Support for video phones.
A billing interface.
Support for automatic outgoing telemarketing calls.
Multi-language support.

The screen shots show the Elastix user interface in action.

Stable version 1.1 of Elastix was recently announced:

This new version contains updates to more than 130 packages. It also brings together the new "Agenda" module which allows you to access an integrated Calendar and Phone Book in a very user-friendly manner. The calendar module allows a user to schedule events which can activate automatic phone call reminders.

In addition, version 1.1 brings a Phone Book interface which you should all be pretty familiar with. It lists people's names with their phone numbers. The interesting thing here is that you can click-to-call your contacts in the Phone Book. And that is not all! We have placed special emphasis on the end user. Starting with version 1.1 the end user may login to Elastix and find a "Dashboard" with quickly accessible information about personal emails, calendar, faxes, voicemails, etc.

An Elastix 1.1 CD image was downloaded and burned onto a CDROM. The CD was installed onto an old 1.4 Ghz Athlon system with a 15GB hard drive. To actually use the system, an Asterisk-compatible telephone interface card should be installed on the host machine. The system installed with no problems, booted up and the login screen came up with a message to access the system via the web on the DHCP-supplied LAN address.

The Elastix web interface was accessed from another local machine. At this point, the documentation (still at version 0.9) fell short due to a lack of information on the required username/password. A little searching on Google revealed the answer (admin/palosanto) from the online Elastix PBX Installation instructions.

Once logged into the web interface, clicking through the many different pages showed that the system appeared to be functioning normally. An incredible array of capabilities exist in the system and it looks to be fairly easy to master. It was not possible to test any real telecom uses due to the lack of a telephone interface card, however adding and configuring a card can be done after the system has been installed.

If you have a need for a low cost PBX, or simply want an easy way to play with Asterisk, Elastix is a good way to proceed.

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The Elastix PBX system

Posted Jun 27, 2008 12:47 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

> To actually use the system, an Asterisk-compatible telephone 
> interface card should be installed on the host machine. 

Such a card (zaptel^H^H^H^H^H^Hdahdi) is certainly not needed ut may helps. I did get some
reports about some systems (mainly systems with kernel 2.6.18 - Centos5 and Debian Etch -
other distributions have now mostly advanced past 2.6.22) where the RTC-based ztdummy doesn't
work well. I wonder where this information is from.

Another credit link: http://freepbx.org , that is a major component of Elastix.