System information

You will need to have Internet access when running the make all com-
mand, as it will attempt to download the latest hardware firmware from
the Digium servers.
After installing DAHDI, we can move on to installing Asterisk.
You can also download the source via wget from http://downloads.aster
isk.org/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux-complete/.
Asterisk
With both DAHDI and LibPRI installed, we can now install Asterisk:
$ cd ~/src/asterisk-complete/asterisk/1.8
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make config
With the files now installed in their default locations, we need to modify the permis-
sions of the directories and their contents.
There is an additional step that is not strictly required, but is quite com-
mon (and arguably important): the make menuselect command, which
provides a graphical interface that allows detailed selection of which
modules and features will be compiled. We will discuss this in “make
menuselect” on page 59.
Setting File Permissions
In order to run our system more securely, we’ll be installing Asterisk and then running
it as the asteriskpbx user. After installing the files into their default locations, we need
to change the file permissions to match those of the user we’re going to be running as.
Execute the following commands after running make install (which we did previously):
$ sudo chown -R asteriskpbx:asteriskpbx /usr/lib/asterisk/
$ sudo chown -R asteriskpbx:asteriskpbx /var/lib/asterisk/
$ sudo chown -R asteriskpbx:asteriskpbx /var/spool/asterisk/
$ sudo chown -R asteriskpbx:asteriskpbx /var/log/asterisk/
$ sudo chown -R asteriskpbx:asteriskpbx /var/run/asterisk
$ sudo chown asteriskpbx:asteriskpbx /usr/sbin/asterisk
In order to use MeetMe() and DAHDI with Asterisk as non-root, you must change
the /etc/udev/rules.d/dahdi.rules so that the OWNER and GROUP fields match the non-root
user Asterisk will be running as. In this case, we’re using the asteriskpbx user.
50 | Chapter 3: Installing Asterisk