[Asterisk-bsd] This client or thin browser in BSD

[Tim St. Pierre]

BSD is rather good at running over a network.  I don't think you need the 
terminal server.  For something light, you might as well let the local 
processor do some of the work.  

You could netboot the machines, then use NIS or LDAP to share the user 
database.  Home folders would get mounted over NFS.  As each user logs in, 
the machine would mount their home folder, and launch all their apps using 
their personal settings, no matter which machine they sat down on.  You can 
customize the workstation and speed things up a lot.  Use a simple window 
manager like mwm or fvwm.  You can write a common .xinit that will launch the 
browser, the softphone, and whatever else they need.  The menu can be set to 
only include things they should have access to.  I find this is very fast and 
efficient, and makes it more like an embedded device than a computer.

If you don't want to netboot, you could use a CompactFlash to IDE adaptor, and 
boot from a CF card.  Even if you only put the root partition on CF, you can 
mount the /usr and /var partitions from the server using nfs.  This allows 
you to have a common /usr for everyone (makes software upgrades really easy), 
and by having an individual /var on the server for each machine, you would 
have ready access to all the log files on the server.

I haven't tried a softphone on BSD yet.  There are lots of nice browsers.  I'm 
partial to Firefox, but there are others as well.  X-lite is available for 
Linux - it would probably run fine with binary compatability mode turned on, 
since it is a self-contained binary.  There is also GnoPhone.

-Tim

On Tuesday 06 February 2007 02:07, Roland Giesler wrote:
> In a call centre environment, an Asterisk telephony setup, which would
> be better to use with a FreeBSD client?  I'm hoping to use an eBox
> 3800 (http://www.compactpc.com.tw) with a Via Eden-N processor and
> 256M RAM as operator machines.  The application is browser based and
> we pretty much control the whole environment.
>
> Questions:
> 1. Which softphone is best for this kind of setup?
> 2. Should I run a terminal server client (like LTSP / does it have a
> BSD equivalent?)
> 3. Wouldn't a minimal OS, with a browser and a softphone running on
> the client OS be better than a terminal server client?
>
> Some comments and input would be great.
>
> Thanks all
>
> --
> Roland Giesler
> Green Tree Systems cc
> Stellenbosch, South Africa
> +27 (0)72-450-2817
> http://www.thegreentree.za.net
> _______________________________________________
> Asterisk-BSD mailing list
> Asterisk-BSD at lists.digium.com
> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-bsd

-- 
Tim St. Pierre

IP telephony specialist
sip://5101@communicatefreely.net
Toronto: 647 722 6930
Toll-Free 1 888 488 6940
tim at communicatefreely.net
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