Configuring an IP address in AT Branded Asterisk PBX
Scope
The advice in this article applies only to Asterisk PBX servers from Announcement Technologies. Other systems may use a different network configuration method than the one discussed in this article. It also requires you to manually edit configuration text documents stored in the Asterisk's file system. Therefore, you will be working at your own risk.
Any information provided here regarding "Asterisk" or "FreePBX" servers refers only to Telos-commissioned FreePBX (Asterisk) servers used with Telos Alliance telephony products. While these are third-party servers and software, we are able to provide limited pointers and advice (like this article) under normal support.
First, log into the Asterisk's Linux terminal using the credentials provided. AT Asterisk for Telos installations usually ship with the log in credentials shown by clicking here.
Identify an Ethernet Interface
Before you set up an Ethernet port, you'll want to identify it. Sometimes the ports on these servers are not labelled, so you can click here to view a guide or use this standard Linux command for identifying a network port:
ethtool -p eth0 120
This will make the activity LEDs on the ethernet port named eth0 flash on and off for 120 seconds. You can make the port flash for longer or shorter by changing the value of the number at the end of the command. In this example, we will be working with eth0.
Edit the Network Script Config for the Interface
Now that you've identified an interface using the guide or the ethtool command above, you can now write or edit a configuration script. "cd" to the following location and view its contents with "ls"
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
Since we are working with eth0 in this example, we will use our favorite text editor to open the file named, "ifcfg-eth0" and add/edit the following lines:
DEVICE=eth0
TYPE=Ethernet
ONBOOT=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=no
BOOTPROTO=none
IPADDR=192.168.2.39
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
This file could also include HWADDR (mac address of the interface) and UUID, which is another hardware address for the interface. Don't worry about those, we won't go into the meaning of all of that because it's beyond the scope of this essay.
The ones we shall be concerned with are ONBOOT=yes (turn me on at boot), BOOTPROTO=none (don't use DHCP or anything), IPADDR, and NETMASK (you should know what these are by now)
Once you've edited the configuration script to your liking, save and return to the command line.
Configure a Route
Now that we've configured the network script for the interface configuration for ETH0, we must now make a route if this interface communicates with a Gateway to reach the Internet or another network.
For eth0, create a new file called route-eth0 with the following contents:
ADDRESS0=192.168.2.0
NETMASK0=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY0=192.168.2.1
ADDRESS0 is the network address. Usually, it's the "0" address for the network. (we're not going into the basics of IP address schemes in this article. There's tons of resources on the web about this). NETMASK0 is the subnet mask of the network. Finally, GATEWAY0 is the address of the gateway/router device on the network.
Save changes and return to the command line.
Reset the Interface
Once the configuration scripts have been saved to the file system, you have to reset the Ethernet interface to apply your changes. To do that, use this command:
service network restart
