[Asterisk-bsd] Diskless Asterisk Server

[Frank Griffith]

"Tim St. Pierre" <tim at communicatefreely.net> wrote:  I'm just getting onto a similar path - although not with Asterisk.

When you say diskless, do you mean booting from a read-only device, or do you 
mean netbooting of some sort.

The big question, is what do you have available for storage?

There are lots of nice ways to make asterisk get configuration from a network, 
and return logs and CDRs there. Are you doing everything on a local CF card?

If that be the case, perhaps a file-backed ram disk for things like CDR and 
voicemail data. This could be set up to periodically write back to the flash 
memory. You could make it save the data on shutdown, but an unclean shutdown 
would cause you to lose voicemail and CDR information.

Either way, lots of ram is important.

If you are doing this on a scrap computer, you can pick up an IDE to CF card 
adaptor pretty cheap (around $20) and build it on a CF card. Then when you 
do get that Soekris machine, just move the card over.

Good luck with it!

-Tim

On Sunday 06 April 2008 22:08, Frank Griffith wrote:
> Okay, I know I'm probably pushing the envelope but I
> did loads of experimenting with diskless setup this
> past week. Getting past all the outdates docs, typos
> and bad information was difficult, but this weekend I
> got the diskless client to boot and got some of the
> advanced configuration done with it. And I even got it
> to work with 8.0-CURRENT.
>
> Of course, now I would like to setup a diskless
> machine to run Asterisk. I don't have any dough left
> after paying my income tax to buy a Soekris box so I'm
> making do with an older machine that has lost use of
> it's hard drive.
>
> Can anyone offer me some pointers on how I could
> advance this process. I like asterisk as my phone
> system but the thought of having to buy hard drives
> every few years is starting to make me think, who
> needs them when the diskless process could take their place.
>
>
> 
> ___________________________________________________________________________
>_________ You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of
> Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.
> http://tc.deals.yahoo.com/tc/blockbuster/text5.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
>
> Asterisk-BSD mailing list
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
> 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

_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--

Asterisk-BSD mailing list
To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-bsd

I'm doing this via pxeboot over my LAN. The root-path is stored on a machine with several big hard drives so finding the space for Asterisk to write it's files to is not an issue. Except I haven't advanced the bootless process to get past the read-only stage. Setting up a read-write partition is no problem, but getting the diskless machine to read-write to is is not as eazy as I first thought. Still I believe it is possible as so many other people say they've done it. So I keep slugging through the docs and testing and hacking. I really want to do this without any drive or flash cards. This way my * box does not need to worry about spinning a hard drive 24/7 just to be able to answer my phone calls.
       
---------------------------------
You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-bsd/attachments/20080408/73451262/attachment.htm