Tutorial: Running and managing asterisk phone system

Managing the Asterisk server

From the asterisk source directory, if you haven’t already, set asterisk to start on boot:
make config
chkconfig asterisk on

Then you can start asterisk with:
service asterisk start

or stop asterisk with:
service asterisk stop

or check whether it is running with:
service asterisk status

Using the Asterisk command line interface

To connect to asterisk and establish a command line interface(CLI):
asterisk -r

From the CLI, you can run all sorts of useful commands. Particularly useful ones include:
“reload” – to reload your configuration files

Core commands

“core stop now” – to shut down asterisk

“help core” – show the help for all core commands

SIP commands

“sip show peers” – to view a list of sip agents asterisk knows about

“sip show users” – show a listing of sip users
Viewing logs

Logs from asterisk are in /var/log/asterisk by default. Messages is the file you’ll be interested in most often.

To show the last 20 lines of the messages log file:
tail -20 messages

To look for all instances of “WARNING” in the log file:
grep WARNING messages

To look for all instances of “ERROR” in the log file:
grep ERROR messages

http://asteriskvoipsystem.org/running-and-managing-asterisk-phone-system/