System information

Option Value/Example Notes
minmemfree 1 Sets the minimum number of megabytes of free memory required for Asterisk
to continue accepting calls. If Asterisk detects that there is less free memory
available than this threshold, new calls will not be accepted. This option is not
set by default.
cache_record_files yes When doing recording, stores the file in the record_cache_dir until re-
cording is complete. Once complete, it will be moved into the originally specified
destination. The default for this option is no.
record_cache_dir /tmp Sets the directory to be used when cache_record_files is set to yes. The
default location is a directory called tmp within the astspooldir.
transmit_silence yes Transmits silence to the caller in cases where there is no other audio source.
This includes call recording and the Wait() family of dialplan applications,
among other things. The default for this option is no.
c
transcode_via_sln yes When building a codec translation path, forces signed linear to be one of the
steps in the path. The default for this option is yes.
runuser asterisk Sets the system user that the Asterisk application should run as. This option is
not set by default, meaning that the application will continue to run as the user
that executed the application.
rungroup asterisk Sets the system group that the Asterisk application should run as. This option
is not set by default.
lightbackground yes When using colors in the Asterisk console, it will output colors that are com-
patible with a light-colored background. This option is set to no by default, in
which case Asterisk uses colors that look best on a black background.
documenta-
tion_language
en_US The built-in documentation for Asterisk applications, functions, and other things
is included in an external XML document. This option specifies the preferred
language for documentation. If it is not available, the default of en_US will be
used.
hideconnect yes Setting this option to yes causes Asterisk to not display notifications of remote
console connections and disconnections at the Asterisk CLI. This is useful on
systems where there are scripts that use remote consoles heavily. The default
setting is no.
lockconfdir no When this option is enabled, the Asterisk configuration directory will be pro-
tected with a lock. This helps protect against having more than one application
attempting to write to the same file at the same time. The default value is no.
a
If any of the keys require a passphrase, this will block the startup process of Asterisk. An alternative is to run keys init at the Asterisk command
line.
b
This is critical for debugging crashes. However, Asterisk must be compiled with the DONT_OPTIMIZE option enabled in menuselect for
the core dump to be useful.
c
There is an important caveat to note when this option is enabled. The silence is generated in uncompressed signed linear format, which
means that it will have to be transcoded into the format that the caller’s channel expects. The result may be that transcoding is required
for a call that would not normally require it.
74 | Chapter 4: Initial Configuration Tasks