I have a virtual machine running Ubuntu 8.10 Server and I’ve been meaning to give VoiceGlue a try to see if I could set up my own completely open source VoiceXML platform,
I found that I was able to run sudo apt-get install asterisk at the command line, and I started to get excited. This was going to be the easiest Asterisk install yet. I was very soon disabused of this foolish notion.
The Asterisk install seemed to go smoothly, as did the basic set up and config. Just to make sure I was doing things by the numbers I set up a couple of extensions and a quick test to have Festival read something back to me. So far, so good. Next it was on to the VoiceGlue install.
Following the instructions in the VoiceGlue Wiki, the install went smoothly. All three VoiceGlue-related services started just fine (the voiceglue service itself barked at me because I had not yet set up call routing in /etc/voiceglue.conf – once I did this, it started up just fine.)
That’s when things got weird. The VoiceGlue Wiki says:
Phoneglue also needs to be contacted via FastAGI for all calls that it will handle, and it needs to use a particular context, extension, and priority to send calls to itself.
OK, no worries there. I set up a new context in /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf and then reloaded the dialplan from the Asterisk console. So far so good. Then, the oddness set in.
I kept seeing an error in the Asterisk logs saying:
res_agi.c:229 launch_netscript: Connect to 'agi://localhost' failed: Connection refused
After banging my head against the wall trying to figure it out I decided to check and see if anything was listening on port 4573 (the default port for FastAGI). No dice.
I tried running the test AGI script comes with Asterisk (agi-test.agi). Again, no dice. In fact, it doesn’t look like there are any directories containing AGI scripts anywhere.
Ubuntu Asterisk seems to be looking in /usr/share/asterisk/agi-bin/ – it doesn’t exist. Neither does the usual directory for AGI scripts (/var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/). Nor does another common directory – /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing.
Why is all of this missing from the Ubuntu version of Asterisk? Anyone have any thoughts? Did I miss something obvious during the install?
I’m still eager to try VoiceGlue, so it looks like I’ll be building Asterisk from scratch.