[TriLUG] Asterisk 1.4 - great release!

[jonc]

I upgraded some of my PSTN gateways to Asterisk 1.4 last week. So far,
I'm very impressed. This new version seems to be very stable and the new
features I've tried out so far have worked very well.

Moving to Asterisk 1.4 is no easy upgrade - especially for a guy like me
who compiles in his own mods. I had to upgrade:
- Zaptel drivers (Zaptel v1.4.0), 
- PRILib libraries (PRILib v1.4.0)
- the G729 codec (downloaded from Digium), 
- and of course Asterisk itself (Asterisk v1.4.0).

I also had to modernize a lot of configs - things I've used forever like
BYEXTENSION were no longer supported, and all the channel commands are
now "core channel". Most of the items marked "deprecated" in v1.2 were
taken out of v.1.4. The logging is also done differently - actually more
sanely.

It took me about 20 hours (reading, recompiling, editing config files,
and testing) to upgrade my first PSTN gateway to the point where it was
production ready again. It was worth it. I used to compile in several
small mods to make the gateways work better in our environment, but now
all those mods have been moved into Asterisk v1.4.0.

I'm most happy about
- the jitter buffers for SIP connections (the static setting seem to
work well)
- the ability to pass-through recvonly announcements (supposedly Music
on Hold) played by remote VoIP PBX's,
- the ability to set Asterisk NOT to clear all channels when it
temporarily losses data connections (our PRI's are transported across
Bell's fiber which occasionally flips direction causing us to lose
timing for up to 5 seconds)
- Also, DTMF detection seems to be better.

===
I compiled asterisk the first time using the defaults:
  cd /usr/src/asterisk-1.4.0
  ./configure
  make
  make install

When it finished up I noticed that I was missing a few modules that I
needed and some that I really like. The defaults had been changed;
however, there is a new tool for easily modifying the defaults

>From the asterisk-1.4.0 source directory I did "make menuselect". This
pulled up a surprisingly easy to use selection tool. Using this, I
selected all the modules/features I wanted loaded or compiled in. Now
when I did the "make" and "make install" a second time it went out to
the net and downloaded additional tar files... At the end, I had all the
modules I needed. Sweet!

Jon Carnes
FeatureTel