H323 Trunks with Trixbox: My results

Hi all,

as you know a few weeks ago I wrote a post asking for help with H323. I needed to link an old Alcatel OmniPcx Office (OXO) PBX with Trixbox using H323. As information regarding H323 protocol under Trixbox/Asterisk was not easy to find, I had to do a bunch of tests.

The short way: Yes, I've been able to link my old PBX with Trixbox using H323. The included ooh323 channel did not work properly, so I'm using the h323 channel included (but not compiled by default) in Asterisk.

The long way:
As a first approach, I tried to link the PBX using the included ooh323. ooh323 is included in Trixbox, in the asterisk-addons package. Using this channel I achieved half-success: I was able to place calls (Trixbox calling to old extensions) but I was not able to find a way of receiving calls (Old extensions calling Trixbox phones). Don't know why, but some sort of codec incompatibility did exist, maybe the Alcatel is reporting the codec with a name that ooh323 did not understand. I was stuck with this for 2 days.

After that, I started to look for other solutions. First, I downloaded oh323 (another H323 channel) but I was not able to compile it under Trixbox 2.6 (it seems to be developed for asterisk 1.2. A version for 1.4 seems to exist, but I was not able to compile it either). Next, I found this link (in Spanish, but easy to understand) with information about how to compile the h323 channel included in asterisk. One compiled and installed I was able to place and receive calls.

A few hints:

1. Obviously, as I needed to recompile Asterisk, this brokes the TB installation "a little".
2. I'm still in the testing stage. Calls are beeing placed and received, for a week now, without any problem.
3. Just an Alcatel specific hint: I needed to only allaw alaw (I'm in europe) as codec auto-negotation did not work (neither with h323 nor ooh323). Setting alaw as the default codec solved the problem.

That's my "h323 experience". I hope someone may find this useful, as it was not an easy way for me getting this working. Any advices or whatever will be welcomed!

Thank you all for your help!