After receiving help in the installation of Tikal Networks Call Recording Interface (CRI), I was asked to write a review for the good of the community, so here goes.
CRI is a GPL web based interface into the existing Asterisk call recordings. As an organisation that requires calls to be logged securely, I felt that I could not rely upon the AsteriskNow offering (ARI) as any user with a voicemail could gain access to all call recordings and could delete them. This was no good for me as I may rely upon these to answer complaints of bad service, hence I looked for an alternative.
I found CRI at http://www.tikalnetworks.com/voip/index.php?cid=38 where it can be downloaded. There is also a ‘demo’ of the interface which can be found here, http://www.tikalnetworks.com/demo/cri/
Now allow me to mention that I am a ‘Newbie’ to Linux and to Asterisk although I have been ‘into computers’ since DOS so I am comfortable with a command line interface and am quite good at ‘Googling’
My first challenge came after downloading the package, as I downloaded to a Windows platform I had to unzip the package and transfer it to my Linux box. There may be many ways to do this but I chose to FTP it over. As the interface is simply an addition to the FreePBX ‘web front end’ the package contents were merely the files and the directories which could be copied directly to the web server on my asterisk box. Once FTP’d I needed to move the files to the correct spot on the Linux box (so from the ftp folder… mv /dev/www/html/cri).
There were two files to check for correct config ‘part.php’ which contained the mysql password which needed changing and ‘vars.php’ which needed file paths checking (but as this was a standard FreePBX install I didnt have to change anything). For those unaware of how to do this I used the Linux text editor vi. (#vi /dev/www/html/cri/part.php - look up vi on Google for usage).
I also found I had an issue with file permissions (which is where my help came in). So I had to set the CRI directory and its sub directories to have full permissions (I used chmod 777 /dev/www/html/cri).
Once complete I browsed to http://myfreepbxipaddress/cri and away it went.
The package has now been installed for a few days, and whilst there has not been a deal of usage yet I can say that I am happy with the functionality. It may not suit all, and for those who prefer the web interface to voicemail, which ARI offers, then you probably wont want this.
I was frustrated by the install process as there was no mention in the (included) README file about setting permissions, and this caused me a 24 frustration!
I hope this reveiw helps others.
Regards
Mark.