[Asterisk-bsd] Asterisk with TDM cards [was: Does]

[William Lloyd]

I've used slackware 10, 10.1, 10.2 and Fedora Core 4.

Generally I'm running 2.4 kernel that come stock with slackware.   
Recently I've been testing the 2.6 kernel on 10.2

The only reason I use slackware is that the /etc subsystem is vaguely  
BSDish.  If someone knows a Linux system that looks exactly like a  
xBSD let me know!

I wouldn't worry about what distribution of linux you use.  They  
should all work well for your purposes.  The kernel is the same  
across the distributions(I'm sure there are exceptions).  I generally  
dislike distributions that install everything including the kitchen  
sink.  Gimp, KDE, Apache, Samba etc.   All nice but I don;t want them  
on a Asterisk server.

I've not heard about any problems with Asterisk on specific Linux  
distributions.

If you are getting all your traffic over SIP/IAX and don;t require  
any hardware drivers I think FreeBSD would probably be fine as an  
Asterisk server.  As the load increases the tweaking for FreeBSD is  
more of an unknown then Linux.  I've no idea how a dual CPU FreeBSD  
Asterisk server would perform for example.

To build a solid system. Test, test and test again.  It also helps if  
you have access to other phone equipment to cross connect with in a  
lab setting.  IE PRI/T1 PBX, channel bank, SIP phones etc.  I can  
test out different scenario's before putting them in the field.  It's  
very helpful for debugging.

So far I've not tried SIPP for load testing but I'd like to do some  
of that soon.

If you try to run Asterisk on a $200 cheapo PC with a crappy  
motherboard/power supply and use Analog FXO cards you are going to  
get what you paid for.  If you are building a serious Asterisk server  
and plan on spending less that $1K (before Digium/Sangoma cards) then  
you are buying the wrong machine IMO.  It all depends on what your  
time is worth.  RAID is a must for every machine at this point in time.

I was at Astricon back in November and it was impressive to hear  
about some of the installations out there.  Thousands of SIP calls at  
a time on the same box.  Almost 10 000 registrations at a time on  
some servers.  One company had build a 6 Asterisk server setup to  
serve an entire city with 1500 Polycom SIP phones.

-bill


On 9-Dec-05, at 12:30 PM, Dean Billing wrote:

> William -
>
> William Lloyd wrote:
>
>
>>
>> On 9-Dec-05, at 7:18 AM, Kim Culhan wrote:
>> > ...
>>
>> There are so many little issues that can come up in VOIP on a   
>> "supported" hardware platform like Linux that it's not a battle  
>> I'm  prepared to fight at this point.
>>
>
> I'd be curious as to which Linux you use?  I look for asterisk  
> installation information on Linux and there seem to be caveats  
> about all of them.  I have received several warnings about using  
> FreeBSD and the asterisk install was certainly difficult and  
> problematic.  So which Linux would make a good industrial strength  
> server?
>
> Regards -- Dean
>
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