<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On 18 Jan 2006, at 19:20, Chad Brown wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I agree. I'm running a 40 person shop distributed over 2 continents on a</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">couple Asterisk servers.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">But keep in mind...this is about capitalizing on a large group of SBS</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">implementations in the small business space. The folks know nothing</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">about Linux perhaps even have a minimal understanding of Windows. They</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">just want to run their small business and take advantage of VoIP along</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the way. Make sense?</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>No, not really. They probably don't care what</DIV><DIV>their router, printer, printserver runs. They never cared </DIV><DIV>before what OS their PBX runs, so why should they now?</DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I just want to know if the idea is viable. If it is...is there anyone</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">who would want to participate for compensation.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>My advice would be:</DIV><DIV>1) Don't think that soft PBX is going to be happy sharing a system</DIV><DIV>with any other resource hungry software. The whole manta here is </DIV><DIV>to keep the Asterisk box doing the minimum and farm out as much as</DIV><DIV>you can to satellite boxes. That being the case there is no visible </DIV><DIV>benefit in moving asterisk to a general purpose server (of any kind).</DIV><DIV>2) Asterisk knows _lots_ about the platform it is on, interrupt rate, file</DIV><DIV>system semantics, threading, locking etc. Look at the fun folks have </DIV><DIV>trying to port it to Darwin (they gave up), Windows is going to be </DIV><DIV>lots of work. You'd get something that nearly works pretty quickly,</DIV><DIV>then get bogged down in the other 10% :-)</DIV><DIV>3) You'd do best to to a packaging/integration exercise with Asterisk,</DIV><DIV>so that it co-operates with SBS - sharing users, leveraging cool</DIV><DIV>exchange features, storing call records in SQLserver etc, but leave it</DIV><DIV>running on a box - that happens to be a cutdown linux distro.</DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Thanks.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>There, that's off my chest now!<DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>T.<DIV><DIV> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><A href="http://www.westhawk.co.uk">http://www.westhawk.co.uk</A>/</FONT></P> </DIV><BR></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>