While I downloaded Asterisk@Home-2.5, I assembled the machine that was to run it. It’s an old Compaq Deskpro PIII 450, with 256mb of PC100 RAM and a 6gb drive. A modest workstation at best. We’ll see how it goes…

Installing the operating system (CentOS 4) took around an hour, and went very smoothly.
Installing Asterisk took *considerably* longer, as everything is auto-configured and built from source.
However, in spite of seeing some errors fly by, and prompts to change passwords fly by, everything seemed to build, install, and succeed. For such a long build and install process, it’s impressive that it worked without any real help.
It automatically found and configured my cheap WildCard X100P clone, and prompted me to change my passwords. Upon reboot, everything seemed to work fine until I used “yum” to update CentOS. Upon rebooting after the yum updates, it kernel panicked and froze. Fun. *dammit*

Upon closer inspection, yum updated udev and obliterated the zaptel modules.
So, I cd’d to /usr/src/zaptel, and re-built and re-installed like so:

# cd /usr/src/zaptel
# make && make install && make install-udev
# shutdown -r now

When the system came back, everything was fixed and functional.
The web interfaces are intuitive, (although I would like to see a single admin login for all web interfaces)
and the CDR reporting features are great. There is a mailbox-like web interface from which your users can check and listen to their voicemail, An awesome graphical interface to the trunks, as well as direct access to editing the config files by hand.
The following phones registered on the first try:

• sipura SPA-841 with a Linksys wireless G bridge
• snom 190
• xten-lite for MacOS X
• Grandstream Budgetone

You really should be downloading this already…