A simple, light weight GUI for Asterisk. Mini Asterisk is a simple Web GUI for Asterisk with comprehensive tool tip documentation and a learning curve of a few minutes. Analog ports and IP Phones are automatically detected, and no knowledge of Asterisk configuration is required.

Mini Asterisk is "unfeatured" - many of the Asterisk options are not available. Instead it tries to make very basic, very common Asterisk installations fast and simple, for example:

* An Asterisk server running on your home gateway/firewall/server. You want to connect a few IP Phones and make cheap phones calls using VOIP. An Asterisk distro on a CD is a possibility but you don’t want to dedicate a full PC just for Asterisk. You don’t really want to learn Asterisk dial plan syntax and yet another conf file format.

* A small office that already has an old analog phone system. You want to keep your current analog lines for incoming calls, but use IP Phones for handsets and VOIP for outgoing calls. You know enough to set up a DSL router and don’t want to rely on "the Phone Guy" or "The Computer Guy" at $100/hr to maintain your phone system.

* You are a "Phone Guy" who doesn’t understand Linux and Asterisk but you want to install IP-PBXes.

Why Another Asterisk GUI?

There are a lot of Asterisk GUIs out there already. So why do we need another one?

Well I needed an Asterisk GUI that was very easy to use for the IP0X family. Something that would lower the technical skill required to install and maintain an Asterisk Phone system. Something my wife and kids could use.

The IP0X can’t run a LAMP stack very well so the GUI had to be light weight.

I was also interested in exploring the ease-of-use meme, as we have been discussing it a lot on the Village Telco project. Just how easy can we make Asterisk to use? So I scratched the itch.

Mini Asterisk has the following features that make it reasonably unique. They may be good or bad features depending on your point of view!

* Mini Asterisk is "un-featured" - it hides many of the advanced Asterisk features in the interest of simple and fast configuration.

* Light weight so it can run on embedded boxes like the IP0X family. No SQL database or PHP or LAMP. Only a basic web server and a very basic Perl are required (microperl - no CPAN libraries).

* Works directly on extensions.conf and sip.conf, but honors any edits you make to these files. So all the powerful Asterisk features are available if after a while you want to dive into Asterisk conf files.

* Doesn’t use AJAX or the built-in Asterisk web server or users.conf magic. Plain old HTML, a little Java-script and CGIs written in shell script and Perl.

* Doesn’t use the Asterisk programming model. For example you don’t have to understand what a dial plan is, much less understand how to code one. Plain English terms are used instead, for example "Phones and Phone lines". Terms like Asterisk, Linux, SIP, Zap/1 don’t even get mentioned.

* Extensive tool tip documentation. No manual.

* Doesn’t require a dedicated PC, not installed from an ISO CD. So you can use it as a GUI for Asterisk on a little SOHO Linux box that is also your firewall, server etc.

* Mini Asterisk tells you when something is wrong, for example you get a warning if your Phone System can’t see the Internet, or if it can’t see your ITSP.

* Extensive pre-configuration of extensions.conf and sip.conf. The phone numbers of extensions are pre-configured and ITSP configurations are selected from a pull-down menu. Analog ports are auto detected, at least on the IP0X. This makes adding phones and ITSPs fast and simple. It also gives people new to Asterisk a working starting point.

Download it now!