[Asterisk-Dev] Asterisk Port to Windows

[Josh Roberson]

On 1/18/06 2:30 PM, "tim panton" <tpanton at attglobal.net> wrote:

> My advice would be:
> 1) Don't think that soft PBX is going to be happy sharing a system
> with any other resource hungry software. The whole manta here is
> to keep the Asterisk box doing the minimum and farm out as much as
> you can to satellite boxes. That being the case there is no visible
> benefit in moving asterisk to a general purpose server (of any kind).

Absolutely.  Phones are a mission critical application (generally speaking).
Each critical application should have it's own dedicated system in my eyes,
and phone systems have almost ALWAYS been segregated, and should remain that
way.

> 2) Asterisk knows _lots_ about the platform it is on, interrupt rate,
> file
> system semantics, threading, locking etc. Look at the fun folks have
> trying to port it to Darwin (they gave up), Windows is going to be
> lots of work. You'd get something that nearly works pretty quickly,
> then get bogged down in the other 10% :-)

It does know lots about the platform it's on, but I must correct you here.
Asterisk runs fine on Darwin (it's the back end of OS X).  I for one have
made it a point to fix any problems on Darwin, and nobody has given up.
What you're thinking of is zaptel, which is a different animal than Asterisk
altogether... Even if asterisk makes use of it.

> 3) You'd do best to to a packaging/integration exercise with Asterisk,
> so that it co-operates with SBS - sharing users, leveraging cool
> exchange features, storing call records in SQLserver etc, but leave it
> running on a box - that happens to be a cutdown linux distro.

Also a very valid point.  Most SBS do not care, as long as they can "plug
and play" with their existing applications.  There are lots of companies
(such as the one I work for (http://www.asteriasgi.com - Shameless plug))
that are constantly finding and developing new ways to integrate asterisk
into other platforms and make it work seamlessly.  You don't even need a cut
down distro - just something that is stable, and has the necessary tools for
the job.

I may be pulling a "me too", but I do not see any reason to port such a
highly flexible telecommunications platform to a highly un-flexible
operating system that has even less stability and uses at least twice as
many resources.

-- 

Josh Roberson                            Email: josh at asteriasgi.com
Solutions Development                          Direct: 256.705.0269
Asteria Solutions Group, Inc.                    Main: 256.705.0277
2904 WestCorp BLVD, Suite 203                     Fax: 256.705.0280
Huntsville, AL, 35805                        Fax2Mail: 256.705.0269
http://www.asteriasgi.com                  Toll-Free: 877.ASGI.4.ME
                   
                       Ask me about Asterisk!
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