Asterisk 17

Asterisk was amazing fun, in one place we had it hooked up to a big chunk of Python -- everything driven by a program connected to the manager API, with events percolating through to a pre-websocket, pre-AJAX ColdFusion app (we used long polling, I think) that put up a popup with the customer's info as your extension rang. The preferred extension to ring was pulled out of the customer's call history, so they'd always get the same agent if possible.

For another customer it was a similar deal, only this time it was to glue an old school call center PBX system to Asterisk for reasons I can no longer remember. The PBX had its own management interface, so again a Python app connected to both interfaces and figured out call identities on both sides, which were dumped into a MySQL database for (I think) the web app used by the call center staff.

I talked to those guys a few years later and it was all still running. He told me it reliably hung once a week but he never bothered to report it because a shell script automatically restarted it in that case. Resourceful sysadmins! Good times

AllStarLink (https://www.allstarlink.org/about/about.php) is software for linking ham radio repeaters that's based on Asterisk.

It's funny to me to see "was cool" and "amazing this is still alive", because I absolutely love Asterisk. I cut my teeth building Freepbx boxes at a small/mid business voip provider in college before moving on to a different field.

To give an idea why I think it is so cool, my podcast offers neat things to folks who call in to leave a voicemail. You can listen to entire podcast episodes, explore a crude phone sound "museum", and if you're a subscriber to the podcast you are given the password to our party line, where you can talk to our hosts and other subscribers. I'm also building a choose your own adventure type game on our phone system using IVRs and things for our top tier subscribers to play.

We're not a phone-centric podcast, but it's super easy supplemental content to provide folks for cheap. It's also currently running in the raspberrypi specific release http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/

There are other folks who absolutely rely on Asterisk for their shows, some that have been around forever, like the Phone Losers of America Snow Plow Show.

Definitely. FreePBX was an amazing way to get a fully featured PBX with very little time investment.

When I finally wanted to ditch the GUI and get to a bare-bones Asterisk years later, the concepts carried over. The hardest part was tuning the very full-featured default config down to only the features I needed for a simple home PBX! I probably only retained 5% of the modules and config files that were default enabled

It has been commoditized, you can buy a cheap IP-PBX just almost like you buy a SOHO router.