The Michigan Telephone blog

Disclaimer: The following instructions are for experimenters and tinkerers, and may or may not be correct and complete.  Use them at your own risk, or don’t use them at all.  Just because something worked on my system doesn’t mean it will work on yours, so if you don’t have confidence in your ability to recover from any problems that may arise, don’t do this!

Image via CrunchBase

If you have an Asterisk installation and are trying to get something related to Google Talk (do not confuse with Google Voice) to work, or, perhaps you are trying to send Jabber-based notifications from your Asterisk box and it’s not working, it might be because of a couple of missing modules.  The specific problem may be that the modules res_jabber.so and/or chan_gtalk.so are missing in your Asterisk installation.  These are normally found in the directory /usr/lib/asterisk/modules and if they aren’t there, it’s probably because of missing dependencies that existed when you (or the installation script you used) built Asterisk. One way to tell is to go to your Asterisk source directory (typically something like /usr/src/asterisk-1.x.xx where the x’s are replaced by your version number) and run make menuselect, then arrow down to Channel Drivers (to see chan_gtalk) and then to Resource Modules (to see res_jabber).  If either have an XXX in front, that means there is a missing dependency and if you move the selection bar over the file (use the tab key and arrow keys to move around) and then look at the bottom of the screen, it should tell you what’s missing, or what the problem is.

Note that if you want these modules to become available you’ll need to recompile Asterisk so if you don’t know how to do that, you may want to read up on that first.  I used to recommend the page How to upgrade Asterisk on the FreePBX site, but it is getting a bit long in the tooth (basically it skips a couple of steps), however I’m sure you can find current instructions using Google (anyone know of a better page offhand?). EDIT: You might also want to at least take a glance at these more recent articles: Links and Information: Updating an Asterisk/FreePBX system so you can use Google Voice and How to use Google Voice for free calls on an Asterisk 1.8+/FreePBX 2.8 system (the easy way).

The fix is to first install any missing modules – in my case, one thing it complained about was gnutls and it turned out that to fix the problem (under CentOS) I had to do this:

yum install gnutls-devel gnutls-utils

(If it complains about missing repositories, you can exclude them using the --disablerepo=repo_name flag)

Also, if you are going to do this, you may as well get the latest version of iksemel (used by both modules) as it has a few bug fixes, and may need to be recompiled anyway (according to this post on the PBX in a Flash forum, “it’s a dependency for res_jabber.so, which in turn is a dependency for chan_gtalk.so”).  Go to http://code.google.com/p/iksemel/downloads/list to find it, save the latest version to your Asterisk server, unzip it to an appropriate location (such as /usr/src/iksemel-1.x) and then do this from the iksemel source directory (where you unzipped the downloaded file):

./configure --prefix=/usr --with-libgnutls-prefix=/usr --with-gnutls

(For the moment don’t worry if it spits out a warning, as long as the configuration is successful)

Then do the typical installation:

make
make check
make install

If that goes well, the next thing to do is go back to your Asterisk source directory, and do the following:

./configure
make menuselect

At this point res_jabber.so and chan_gtalk.so should no longer have the XXX in front of them, and will likely be already selected “[*]” – if not, select the two modules. Then Save and Exit (don’t forget to do this!).

Now it is time to recompile Asterisk. I recommend backing up the system before you do this, in case anything goes wrong, but that’s up to you – it’s your system. If you are not upgrading Asterisk then you should be able to just do the following:

make
make install

If all goes well you should now have the res_jabber.so and chan_gtalk.so modules in your /usr/lib/asterisk/modules directory. If it didn’t go well, see the disclaimer at the start of this article, and remember, I’m not your tech support guy.  Feel free to post any issue you encounter in a comment (particularly if you figured out how to resolve the issue – it may help someone else) but please don’t be surprised if I can’t do any more than shoot dumb looks in your general direction!

For more information on Google Talk and Asterisk, see http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Google+Talk