asterisk users - Oct 2003 - preplanning for a new home installation

In the next few months I'll be moving and will have a room specifically for 
my office.  As part of this move, I'll be putting in cat5e or cat6
throughout
the new location and extra phone pairs.

I'll want to replace my Talkworks/WinfaxPro based voicemail system with an 
Asterisk system, so what do I need to do cabling wise to make best use of 
Asterisk?

I'll have at 2 phone lines coming into, one personal and one business, and 
possibly a second personal line for my girlfriend.  I'll want all incoming 
calls to be answerable from any room in the suite and have the ability to 
transfer calls between rooms. I'll also want the system to answer the phone 
with different messages for each phone line and also for different rings 
(smart ring) or incoming caller id. Also the ability to pickup any phone in 
the suite and be able to check voicemail messages.

Ideally the ability to do voip and video conferencing through a central 
control point would be handy, both to external sites and internally between 
rooms.  Also I'll want all voip and video over ip to go over the ipsec vpn 
connection from my router.

So what hardware do I need? A couple of the Wildcat cards, plus lots of 
cabling?  What else? Note the internet connection, basic networking and 
router configuration will already be done when I get around to setting up 
Asterisk.
-- 
Harondel J. Sibble 
Sibble Computer Consulting
Creating solutions for the small business and home computer user.
help@pdscc.com (use pgp keyid 0x3AD5C11D) http://www.pdscc.com
(604) 739-3709 (voice/fax)      (604) 686-2253 (pager)

What you want sounds pretty doable, with the exception of distinctive
ringing detection - reading the list recently I think someone had a patch to
allow caller ID to be received if the incoming call was a distinctive
ringing call but I don't think Asterisk differentiates or distinguishes
between different inbound ringing cadences.

Caller ID matching does work though (the anti-ex-girlfriend feature!) so you
can make different things happen when certain people call  you.

Not sure about your video conferencing stuff - it's more an IP/routing thing
than an asterisk thing.. and I wonder about VoIP over VPN - it should be ok
I think cos it's all handled by your router so invisible to your Linux box?

I notice you're in 604 land - me too.. Give me a shout off-list if you want
to talk further.

Cheers
Paul