Recipe 5.8. Connecting Your Asterisk PBX to Analog Phone Lines

5.9.1. Problem

You're running a small shop with fewer than 10 analog phone lines. You're not quite ready to give up your nice reliable analog phone service, but you do want to set up an Asterisk server for your local PBX, and to integrate some VoIP services. Your first job is connecting Asterisk to your analog lines—how do you do this?

5.9.2. Solution

First, follow the previous recipes to install and test Asterisk's basic functions. In this recipe, we'll route incoming and outgoing calls through Asterisk. Incoming calls will be routed to our existing extension 250, which is probably not how you want to set up your system permanently, but it's fine for testing. Later in this chapter, we'll set up a proper digital receptionist.