That's what it sounds like. You didn't say it was a Distro machine at the start, so I assumed it was a machine you'd built yourself.
... Oh, bugger, you did. The very first line in your first post. Sorry about that, I missed it totally, I was just looking for the error.
However, re-reading it, now your problem is obvious:
[root@pbx administator]# ls -al /etc/asterisk/
total 488
drwxr-x---. 3 asterisk asterisk 12288 Nov 4 13:58 .You'll need to fix the permissions on /etc/asterisk so that whatever user you're logging in as can read that folder, or, add that user to the 'asterisk' group.
Sorry for the misunderstanding!