[asterisk-dev] Academic Asterisk Adventure

[Steve Kann]

On Jan 4, 2007, at 2:35 PM, Shawn Van Every wrote:

>>
>
> I understand the hesitation.  It does seem like taking some time to  
> consider how asterisk might work in a mult-user setup is  
> worthwhile.  IMHO it seems that one way to really encourage people  
> to experiment with telephony is to give them an easy route to do  
> so.  If Asterisk could be setup and managed by an online hosting  
> provider in a similar manner to how unix and apache are managed  
> this would enable a huge amount of experimentation.
>
> I realize that this isn't an easy task.  Just something to think  
> about.
>

Hi, Shawn,

	I started to draft this the other day, but I didn't get a chance to  
do it.  I don't know the complete details about what you're trying to  
do, but an alternate approach, which is slightly more resource  
intensive, but ultimately much more robust, would be to run multiple  
asterisk processes -- one for each student.

	With asterisk.conf and the various *.conf files, you can easily run  
many asterisk processes on a single box (each using alternate ports,  
or alternate IP addresses, depending on IP availability).  You could  
then script your web-based tools, etc, against each of these  
processes, without any ability for one student to interfere with  
other student's work.

	Depending on what interfaces you have to external system (i.e. PSTN  
via ZAP, IAX, SIP, etc), you could have a "master" server sitting in  
front of all of these, with it's own dialplan that routes incoming  
calls to the appropriate student's asterisk server, and the students'  
servers could have permission to bounce through this master server  
for outgoing calls.

	Since I Imagine you're not running a lot of volume here, a  
reasonable box should be able to run a hundred or so asterisk servers  
on one box -- I do this all the time, with up to 20 or so per box;  
they take about 20MB Virtual, and ~6MB Physical Ram each when they're  
not busy.


-SteveK