My new project, building my own PBX for home. It’s geek stuff but the software exists and is opensource so why not go for it? It’s just another VM so it won’t incur more costs for me.
I did have a few requirements for this project:

• Reduce costs: I want to be able to do least cost routing, meaning select the cheapest VoIP provider for a given destination based on MySQL
• Added flexibility: I need to be able to handle a white / black list, block telemarketers, handle time of day (I don’t want to be disturbed between 11pm and 7am for example except from selected numbers), manage phones (if I’m oncall I don’t need to have all the phones ring) …
• Integration with Skype: most of my family is spread around the world, I want them to be able to call me via Skype and have my phone ring (not my laptop)
• More DIDs: I’d like to have more DID, one for me, one for Caroline, one for a fax … which can be used for our works
• Voicemail: I need a voicemail that can send email to multiple persons with an attachment, very useful when abroad
• Fax support: even though fax are not much used nowadays there are still useful for banks or insurances. I need a quick setup that can receive faxes and forward them as email.
• GSM gateway integration: that’s more of a future plan. I want to relocate abroad in the next few years but I’ll keep my mobile phone numbers so my friend can continue to reach me as usual, my home PBX should be able to handle these kind of gateways.
• XBMC plugin: I’m planning on setting up an XBMC machine as my media platform, I want to integrate it with asterisk so when I watch a movie the phone sets to DND and  a popup will display on screen with the caller name

I had the choice between 2 platforms Asterisk and SipX. I tried both of them, but despite it’s great webui with SipX I couldn’t connect to one of my SIP providers (Supinfo) whereas I could with Asterisk. So the choice was made.

I’ll post articles on my setup to describe the process of installation, configuration and security I deployed on this setup.

Articles in this series:

Basic Asterisk Configuration

Simultaneous call limitation on Asterisk

Asterisk CDR MySQL configuration

Configuring Asterisk to act as a SIP client for Cisco CallManager

SIPS on Asterisk – SIP security with TLS

Asterisk sRTP installation

Securing Asterisk

Asterisk integration with Microsoft Office Communication Server