I am being harassed by some prank caller that is spoofing his/her number neither T-Mobile nor the police can do anything about it. I have been told from one of my friends that if I set up an Asterisk server, I can accomplish the tracing of the prank caller. I am hardly knowledgeable in terms of networking, so a lot of what they told me was filled with jargon I couldn't really understand. But first things first, I downloaded Asterisk 1.5.0 and was finally able to install it (had issues with partitioning... In the end I just had Asterisk hog the entire HDD space).

I tried out Asterisk, and it was slightly complicated for me so I decided to install trixbox 2.8.0.4 instead. It looks very similar to Asterisk... I'm not entirely sure what to do from here. I know I have to get the server up and running, but do I need a PBX card or something to accomplish what I'm trying to do? I'm running trixbox on a laptop to minimize electricity usage.

Also, will I have to open any ports for the server? I have limited administrative permissions because of my father who is very uncomfortable with opening ports.