[Asterisk-Users] ultra-cheap asterisk box

[Chris Albertson]

I'm looking to do about the same thing, build very low cost
systems.  (I'm looking at putting Asterisk at some
non-profit organizations.)   but one thing you can't make
a compromise on is reliabilty.  It has to work and keep working
for years to come.  I was able to keep the price of a new PC
to about $300 ad still use an ASUS mainboard and an AMD XP2600+
The trick is to add absolutly nothing not needed.  No floppy,
no CDROM so you can run off a 200W P/S.  Next I'll experiment
with a notebook sized IDE disk drives and to see if _underclocking_
the CPU reduces it's power comsumption enough that we can save
one fan.

Ideally Asterisk will be ported one day to Linux/ARM or some
other very low cost platform.  for VOIP you do not need the
PCI slots.  In theory Asterisk could run on a Lynksys router
box with re-flashed EEPROM.  After all Lynksys' latest wireless
router runs Linux inside

Low cost to me means "low total cost of ownership"  To get this
I don't think buying the lowest priced parts is the way to go.
I want quality mainboard, and a quality power supply and, this
is importernt:  A low internal case temperature.  for this reason
I'll spend the extra $50 to go with Antec cases and ASUS mainboards
over the generic ones.

What I'm finding is that the PCs are so cheap that the cost of
electric power to run them is now a large part of the cost.
(assume 0.20/kwh times 200W times 365 days = $350.  So you
pay for the PC again every year in electric power to run it.
Worse.  In an office with airconditioning _all_ of that PC's
200W goes to heat and your A/C unit will use about 220W of
power to remove that 200W of heat.)
and at a small office they will not have a server room so noise
from the fan is an issue.

--- Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk <roy at karlsbakk.net> wrote:
> hi all
> 
> what about this...
> I just put together a box on a web shop (komplett.no) that will cost
> me
> NOK ~1850 (¤ 216) plus a small ¤50 drive and cables, so say ¤300.
> This
> consists of a cheap MB with a duron 1400, 256MB SDRAM and two HFC-PCI
> cards (if capijod will finish off the zaptel-driver soon). This is
> all
> in a cheap PC case.
> 
> What do you think? Should this be doable? as a product? With only IP
> phones and potentially a fax solution? any ideas?
> 
> thanks
> 
> roy
> 
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=====
Chris Albertson
  Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278 at yahoo.com
  Cell:   310-990-7550
  Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson at aero.org
  KG6OMK

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