[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk on KNOPPIX, I have it working, somewhat.

[JR Richardson]

Asterisk Brethren,

 

This has been a fantasy morphed into reality; albeit not quite how I had it
planned.  Learning how to re-master KNOPPIX into my own customization WAS a
challenge but very educational.  Once I learned the process of re-mastering,
installing Asterisk was a whole new challenge, but 47 hours, 32 pots of
caffeine and a slice of Papa John's later, whoa-la'.

 

I have 2 versions, one on a full KNOPPIX CD distro ~700M (works fine, not
great, but ok) and one compiled onto a Damn Small Linux distro ~50M (this is
untested, having some issues).  This project if far from refinement but does
work as planned.  I can boot the large CD and Asterisk comes up and runs as
a demon.  I pre-configured sip.conf, extensions.conf. iax.conf and
voicemail.conf (no zaptel cards stuff yet) for basic operation to support 10
sip extensions and iax trunking into a PSTN gateway.

 

I solved the issue of writing new configurations, voicemail and logging onto
to the read-only medium so NVRAM will hold and maintain any configuration
changes (the swelling from head-butting the monitor are subsiding nicely).

 

The ultimate solution I'm attempting to create is an Asterisk soft switch
that is hardened onto an un-corruptible image so a quick re-boot will
restore the server to a pre-defined condition (kind of like firmware for a
dedicated hardware platform, router, switch, etc.).  I would like to move to
a single USB device, like FLONIX KNOPPIX or DSL USB NOPPIX.  Also a USB
memory stick will allow re-mastering new software releases and upgrades
without needing to burn a CDR every time.  This would allow servers to be
built without the need for a hard drive, floppy or CDROM, reducing the
overall cost of the server.

 

Please understand and forgive me, but I'm not quite ready to generally
release the images just yet.  I'm feeling pretty good about what has been
accomplished so far but I want to wait and release a product that can be
used with ease and satisfaction and not disappointment for having downloaded
and burned a piece of crap imaged that wasted your time.

 

I'm really divulging this work to let you all know what's coming but
primarily, I'm looking for a few interested experts for refinement and
problem solving.  The biggest road block to a stable product is working with
the Debian distro and compiling the latest Asterisk package onto the smaller
DSL.  The smaller the distro, the smaller the RAM and storage are needed,
the cheaper the product and so on.  Right now I'm in dependency hell :-(
with Debian and can't seem to compile the latest CVS tree into the
distribution.

 

If there are any interested parties that would like to jump in, please
contact me by e-mail directly.

 

Thanks for your time.

 

JR

Jr.richardson at cox.net

 

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