Overhead Paging

A common request of larger companies is the ability to do overhead paging. Overhead paging is a system such as those used in airports, supermarkets, and train stations to make announcements. On our TrixBox system this is done by setting up an extension that can be called in order to make announcements.

We require a sound card in the TrixBox server. There are two steps to enable paging. Firstly, add the paging lines to the dialplan, and secondly, enable the sound card output within Linux.

To do the configurations, we need to go back to the Config Edit page that we accessed earlier. This time we are interested in the extensions_custom.conf file.

Here we are interested in the [from-internal-custom] section as shown in the screenshot. We want to add the following lines here:

exten => *52,1,Dial(console/dsp)
exten => *52,2,Hangup()

To enable the sound card, we need to run the alsamixer program.

[root@asterisk1 ~]# alsamixer

We can access the paging system by dialling *52...