Building a PBX with Yate

Introduction

YATE ("Yet Another Telephony Engine") is an open-source alternative to Asterisk, but is also available and supported on Windows.

Yate receives some sponsorship from hardware maker Sangoma, hence the references here and there. At first sight, Yate seems to be a fork of Asterisk ("Zaptel drivers", etc.), but the documentation says "Yate is not an Asterisk fork; in fact, the original idea for Yate comes mostly from Bayonne."

As of Oct 2006, there's no forum on the site; Help can be found by subscribing to a mailing list. An IRC channel is also avaible: #yate on irc.freenode.net.

The monitoring application is a Java application called YateGUI; An alternative is YateAdmin, a free web-based appplication. Yet another way to connect to Yate is by telneting to port 5038.

As of Oct 2006, I don't think it's ready for showtime: No admin documentation for even the most basic tasks (like... what to do after running setup.exe?), the application stops opening ports even though the service starts OK, etc.

Update 14 Jul 2010: "FreeSentral is a full IP PBX consisting of a Linux Distribution, an IP PBX and a Web Graphical User Interface for easy configuration." In addition, "YateClient is an universal, skinnable VoIP client which supports H.323, SIP, jabber, and IAX based on the QT library."

Setup

Linux

For a minimal install, which files do we need where?

To configure SIP accounts, just edit regfile.conf

Windows

If you are using Windows 2000,2003,XP then Yate will install a service. Yate can be configured by edit files from directory conf.d. More documentation about what those files should contain can be found here. To reload the configuration use YateGUI or remote connection to address 127.0.0.1 port 5038.

  1. Download Yate

After each configuration change you should restart the YATE server to be sure they have taken effect. To get a list of running services, net start. Write a batch file to stop/start the Yate service:

net stop "Yet Another Telephony Engine"

net start "Yet Another Telephony Engine"

Info:

Yate doesn't support syslogd: to have it send debug messages to a text file,

Important: When restarting the Yate service, all clients must be restarted, and calls won't be routed (404).

To get debug infos even when Yate is running as a service, go to its properties in the Service section, and type in the "Start parameters":

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\yate

ImagePath = C:\Program Files\Yate\yate-service.exe -w "C:\Program Files\Yate"

 

-vvvvv -l "c:\\program files\\yate\\yate.log"

-vvvvv -l c:\\program files\\yate\\yate.log

-vvvvv -l c:\program files\yate\yate.log

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\yate

Yate-service listens on the following ports:

Files under /conf.d

Q&A

Does it require MySQL or PostgreSQL?

What does YATE offer over Asterisk or sipXPBX?

How to do I install YateAdmin?

The "YateAdmin" link on the site points to http://yateadmin.null.ro/ instead of the download section where that application could be downloaded.

Can Yate work with non-Sagoma hardware?

"Yate can be the glue between an internal IP telephony network and the PSTNetwork. For this application you'd need one or more Sangoma PRI (E1/T1) cards."

Resources