Installing Windows 3CX VOIP telephone system with Pennytel – Part 1

I have been configuring a 3CX Windows Voice over IP phone system. We use an Asterisk VOIP system in the office but I thought I would have a look at windows based VOIP system. 3CX offer a free edition for up to 4 simultaneous lines, but the enterprise version for more lines is still under US$400.

I ran it up on an P4 2.4GHz 2Gb RAM XP system. I patched up up with SP3, IE8, and also had to go and manually install dotnet 3.5 from http://www.microsoft.com/net/.

I also used add/remove programs to install IIS. It can use its own calina web server. The install wizard gives you the option of what to use, but you need to have IIS operational before doing the 3CX install for it to detect it.

The box sits behind a NAT firewall. The system requirements say

 · Windows XP Pro, Vista Business (Home editions are not supported), 2003 server or 2008
· Port 5060 (SIP), 5090 (Tunnel – Optional) to be opened
· Port 5480, 5482, 5483, 5485, 5486, 5487 to be free
· One port for IIS, 3 if using Cassini (5000, 5481, 5484)
· .NET Framework version 2.0 or higher
· 1 Gigabyte Memory or higher, Pentium 4 processor or up

These setup instructions do not specify clearly but the port forwards need to be using UDP – when you configure your router it will typically give a UDP or TCP option of what protocol to forward so make sure you select UDP. Later in the documentation is says to forward ports 9000-9003 for RTP.  My port forwards in the router look like this:

 

3CX-port-forwards

The intial install being only 40Mb only took a few minutes. It then ran a wizard when asked me to setup the extensions which I spent 20 minutes doing, only to find once it went into the main screen, all the extensions were missing and I had to set them all up again i.e. don’t bother setting up extensions with the initial wizard.

During set up it created ivr, myphone and management virtual subfolders in IIS as shown below.

3cx iis virtual folders

 That was the initial setup. See part 2 for more on the configuration at http://technicians-blog.kingcomputer.com.au/index.php/installing-windows-3cx-voip-telephone-system-with-pennytel-part-2/