Freeswitch

The FreeSWITCH telephony engine is a powerful system enabling voice, video, presence, chat, and other media types via a variety of protocols.

Installing

Install the 'release' version with freeswitch^AUR or the git version with freeswitch-git^AUR. The following instructions assume you are using the freeswitch-git^AUR package.

Also, you may wish to configure FreeSWITCH build options. Edit the PKGBUILD and change any BUILD CONFIGURATION options to suit your desired usage.

Note: Editing the PKGBUILD will configure both modules.conf and autoload_configs/modules.conf.xml according to the modules listed in ENABLED_MODULES and DISABLED_MODULES.

Configuring

The FreeSWITCH configuration files with the custom modules.conf and modules.conf.xml reside in /etc/freeswitch. For following FreeSWITCH documentation, the base directory is /var/lib/freeswitch (generally seen as /usr/local/freeswitch in FreeSWITCH documentation).

FreeSWITCH comes out of the box with a default password for registrations to users 1000-1019 as '1234'. You are advised to change this before running it. This variable is set in /etc/freeswitch/vars.xml. The overall default configuration given is a kitchen sink featured PBX, likely many more things than are typically used. Customizing the PBX (or non-PBX) features of FreeSWITCH is beyond the scope of this document; see the FreeSWITCH Wiki for in-depth documentation.

Upstream documentation as well as the original conf/ directory are provided in /usr/share/doc/freeswitch.

Running

Startup options are configured in /etc/conf.d/freeswitch.conf. You may wish to add -nonat if you are not behind nat, see freeswitch --help for a full list of command line options.

FreeSWITCH can be started using the freeswitch.service.

To start FreeSWITCH upon each boot, enable freeswitch.service. You will need to use the -nc and -nf options to the freeswitch command line to keep it running in the foreground as supervisors expect.

Testing

Fire up a SIP Client
Register to your FreeSWITCH box as user 1000, password what you set as default_password in vars.xml
Dial 9196 (You should connect to an Echo Test)
To measure call capacity, you can use StarTrinity SIP Tester (see an example performance report for 2250 G.711 channels)

Hints

To see interesting things you can do with a dialplan, open up /etc/freeswitch/dialplan/default.xml and scroll through those examples. Dialing the numbers that match the 'expression' of a condition from your SIP client will demonstrate their use.

You can dial into the FreeSWITCH public voice conference, for instance, by dialing 9888 (8k codec), 91616 (16k codec), or 93232 (32k codec)

FreeSWITCH support is available in #freeswitch on Libera Chat.