PABX Replacement using LinPhone
Background
This article was written on 25-Jul-24.
Perhaps similar to many other organization with ancient PABX system, we question whether we should replace them with new PABX or get rid of it entirely as most staff would have their cellphone and other IT devices, connected to office LAN.
OK, but replace it with what? Social media messenger are mostly private and perhaps some staffs are reluctant to use their private account for office use.
Internal chat services, like RocketChat, are available, but what if we need to do voice call?
Do we want to use external chat services just to call across the floor? That would be easier, but I do not want to add additional load to our internet bandwidth.
So, LinPhone comes to rescue.
Precautions
There is no precaution at the moment.
Prerequisites
Of course you need an IT device in which you should setup LinPhone.
LinPhone client is available for mobile and popular OS.
LAN is required for internal office communication.
Microphone and speaker is required for voice communication.
LinPhone
https://linphone.org/
LinPhone is an open source VOIP project.
You can use it with an SIP account; or (as it turns out); just peer to peer communication will also work.
Installation
Installation is straight forward, but for the life of me, I could not auto install it using group policy. So no choice but install it one by one :(
After installation, Linphone will automatically create “sip address” of your username@ip.
Great, so this is the address that we are going to communicate to each other.
Address Book
Now that you know the likely sip address, you need to build your address book, so that your staff can search and communicate with each other.
“Romi-PC” will be shown when you search for contacts, and you need to create SIP Accounts of username@device-ip.
In Windows, linphone working folder is in %localappdata%\linphone.
https://wiki.linphone.org/xwiki/wiki/public/view/Linphone/Desktop%20application%20Files%20Tree/
Address book filename is friends.db.
In order for other user to have the same address book content, you need to copy the file friends.db.
I tried many ways, but what work is using logon script, something like:
copy /Y [shared folder]\friends.db C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\linphone
Usage
For review, you can setup at least two devices and try to chat or communicate with each other.
Once friends.db file is copied, you can click or search.
That’s it, good luck on using Linphone !
