AstRecipes » Peering two Asterisk servers using IAX

It is quite easy to "join together" two Asterisk server using IAX. Unfortunately it takes a while to get things right by reading the docs, so here is a ready-made recipe that you can use to have two Asterisk box dial each others extensions.

We imagine that we have two Asterisk boxen, called foo and bar. foo is at 192.168.1.2 while bar is at 192.168.2.3. Le's start with foo; here is its iax.conf file:

This configuration means that on foo we can do Dial(iax2/bar/23) and this will call extension 23 at context fromiax on bar.

Here is the meaning of the options:
We use bar as the name of the section so we cal dial iax2/bar and we add login and password so we don't need to remember them in the dialplan
We define the type as friend, meaning that we will both send and receive calls to bar. This is the same as defining both user and peer sections, but does save time
The username is the name of the iax.conf section on bar where we will look for IAX peering information; the secret is the connection password. Use the same password for both sides of the peering, if you are using type=friend! The auth is the kind of authentication performed; you may want to use safer methods that sending plaintext passwords as in this case, like setting it to md5.
The host is the IP address of the server bar. As we specify IP addresses, no need for a separate registration
The context is the context in which we will accept the extension bar will be sending us when bar tries to call us. We can have more than one possible context line for bar, so they can choose in which context they want to call us.
The peercontext is used to avoid typing in the context in the Dial() command, so that we can write the easier dial string iax2/bar/23 instead of iax2/bar/23@fromiax
The qualify option generates a bit of 'pings' between the servers, so they make sure the other part is ready
The trunk option makes sure that if more than one call is travelling between the servers, they will be sent in a way that saves quite a bit of IP overhead.

Now we build a very similar configuration for the other server, bar:

As you can see, we made specular changes in the section name and username and host, while keeping the same password.

Of course, on both servers we have to create a context named fromiax in extensions.conf that acts as a 'landing zone' for incoming calls from the other server.

Now on foo we can Dial(iax2/bar/23) to reach extension 23@fromiax on bar, and on bar we can dial Dial(iax2/foo/42) to reach extension 42@fromiax on foo.

That was easy, wasn't it?

See also:
http://blog.thegoldfish.net/dundi-tutorial-for-asteriskhome/
http://kneh.xs4all.nl/tijmen/asterisk/Using%20DUNDi%20with%20Trixbox.pdf

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