yes.. cisco phones are cool.. they run on the "H.323" protocol.. wich is one of the better VoIP protocols.. each phone DHCP, or static assigns an IP address, it contains an id number, and a server IP address (as far as i know) I really don't know much about the security of the whole thing.. which is why i'm trying to get my hands on some equip (talking to a cisco vendor currently) nope.. it's all open standard.. from what I can tell.. you could buy nortel call manager, and cisco phones, and they would all play nicely. or atleast basic stuff would work fine.. that's what the goal of VoIP was.. make it non-proprietary. the hardware involved is a mostly standard PC, with addon boards to do things like T1's pots lines, and other such telco-specific hardware. oh.. and an ethernet card to connect the IP based phones.. the cisco phones plug into ethernet, and have a pass-through port for a PC, (10/100) and even better.. is no reverse engenieering is necessary.. all the protocols that are used are open, and there are even GPL implamentations of most of it.. but the problem i'm running into is this.. there are no good all-in-one soltions in the GPL community.. each one is doing their own little bit.. one is doing the BPX core, one is doing the H.323 core, another is doing some other things.. but no one does voicemail, T1 routing (for incoming voice T's) and other "normal" phone system features. but the NT based call managers are complete in functionality. luckly i'm not in desperate need of a system right now.. so i have time (haha.. not really) to play with this stuff. maybe in a year.. i'll have the software together in a nice package, and I can go into business for myself installing linux based phone systems.. places to read: http://www.asteriskpbx.com/ http://www.linuxtelephony.org http://www.vovida.com/ (they don't do PBX anymore :( Thank You, Ben Kochie (ben at nerp.net) *-----------------------* [ - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - ] | Unix/Linux Consulting | [ Haiku Error Message: ] | PC/Mac Repair | [ Chaos reigns within. ] | Networking | [ Reflect, repent, and reboot. ] | http://nerp.net | [ Order shall return. ] *-----------------------* [ - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - ] "Unix is user friendly, Its just picky about its friends." On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > hey.. is there anyone out there doing anything with Voice over IP? I am > > researching VoIP based PBX's right now.. to replace our existing > > proprietary PBX system (fujitsu series 3) I have found 2 systems, a > > nortel, and a cisco, both are based on embeded windows NT.. (bleh) i have > > found a bunch of stuff on linuxtelephony.org.. but it's all really > > beta.. and there are no VAR's for it. :( > > have your researches found anything about those Cisco IP phones? they seem > like a really cool idea, especially in combination with a freenix telephony > server. > how well will they work on the same network as your computers? any > security issues with them? I'm sure they're designed to be served by a Sun > box or something; but how easy would it be to reverse engineer the protocol > and make a free server? > > why ever would you put a PBX on embedded NT? if you were deteremined to go > with a non-free OS, wouldn't you at least go QNX or VxWorks or SCO or > something that wasn't designed to be rebooted once a day? > > Carl Soderstrom > -- > Network Engineer > Real-Time Enterprises > (952) 943-8700 > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org > For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org