[Asterisk-bsd] Hello List :) New to Asterisk not new to FreeBSD

[Gil Kloepfer]

(without quoting all the interesting conversation that started
this discussion)

I have been running Asterisk on 5.4-RELEASE for a while now without
much trouble.  I am not using the port of Asterisk for two reasons:
One is that I tend to run the latest development release of Asterisk,
and the other is that the port wants to install EVERYTHING which
requires more prerequisites than I need.  Asterisk compiles pretty
well with gmake / gmake install / gmake samples (note that the
Makefile requires that ports be there because it uses something
from ports to determine the FreeBSD version, even if you're not
compiling using ports).

The only exception to my success on FreeBSD is with the initial release
of Asterisk 1.2.0 on 5.4-RELEASE -- the Asterisk Milliwatt application
causes Asterisk to dump core.  I haven't installed the latest
version of 1.2 from Subversion yet, but I don't think this has been
resolved yet.  The later versions from the 1.0.x train seems to
work really well on FreeBSD (they did when I ran them).

I am running a fairly old copy of the FreeBSD Zaptel drivers (0.9
15-May-2005) and they seem to be working yet - however, on the TDM
card, I have experienced issues with audio clicking during network
interrupts.  So there's something going on there.  I am not the only
one who has reported this problem.  Again, I compile Zaptel from
the tarball and not through ports.  They pretty much compiled
without any need to do special things.  Note that the initial
/etc/zaptel.conf is (was?) not included with the FreeBSD zaptel
drivers.  You'll need to pull that from the Linux zaptel driver source.

In general, the Asterisk PBX itself *should* really work pretty well
on FreeBSD because the real OS-dependent stuff is the Zaptel drivers.
However, there are some scary parts of Asterisk that look like they
depend on compiler and OS quirks that should be fixed whether or not
it runs on Linux, FreeBSD or any other OS.

In short - if you're wanting to run a home PBX then running
Asterisk on FreeBSD should give you pretty good results (keeping
in mind the things I mentioned above).  If you're running a PBX
in a production environment for work, then I would run Asterisk on
Linux because (at least for now) it's going to be more stable (mainly
because of the number of people running it on Linux who can fix bugs).

Hope this helps a little.  If nothing else, you'll know someone was
actually successful.

---
Gil Kloepfer
astr-bsd at kloepfer.org