# Asterisk Project : Validating Your AsteriskNOW Installation

Added by malcolmd , edited by mdavenport on Nov 22, 2013

Before continuing on, let's check a few things to make sure your system is in good working order. First, let's make sure the DAHDI drivers are loaded. After logging in as the root user you can use the lsmod under Linux to list all of the loaded kernel modules, and the grep command to filter the input and only show the modules that have dahdi in their name.

    [root@server asterisk-1.6.X.Y]# lsmod | grep dahdi

If the command returns nothing, then DAHDI has not been started. Start DAHDI by running:

    [root@server asterisk-1.6.X.Y]# service dadhi start

If you have DAHDI running, the output of lsmod | grep dahdi should look something like the output below. (The exact details may be different, depending on which DAHDI modules have been built, and so forth.)

    [root@server ~]# lsmod | grep dahdi

    dahdi_dummy          4288   0

    dahdi_transcode      7928   1 wctc4xxp

    dahdi_voicebus       40464  2 wctdm24xxp,wcte12xp

    dahdi                196544 12 dahdi_dummy,wctdm24xxp,wcte11xp,wct1xxp,wcte12xp,wct4xxp

    crc_ccitt            2096   1 dahdi

Now that DAHDI is running, you can run dahdi_hardware to list any DAHDI-compatible devices in your system. You can also run the dahdi_tool utility to show the various DAHDI-compatible devices, and their current state.

To check if Asterisk is running, you can use the Asterisk initscript.

    [root@server ~]# service asterisk status
    asterisk is stopped

To start Asterisk, we'll use the initscript again, this time giving it the start action:

    [root@server ~]# service asterisk start
    Starting asterisk:

When Asterisk starts, it runs as a background service (or daemon), so you typically won't see any response on the command line. We can check the status of Asterisk and see that it's running by using the command below. (The process identifier, or pid, will obviously be different on your system.)

    [root@server ~]# service asterisk status
    asterisk (pid 32117) is running...

And there you have it... you have an Asterisk system up and running! You should now continue on in Getting Started with Asterisk.