[asterisk-users] asterisk on mini-itx

[Mail Lists]

On 3/10/07, Gordon Henderson <gordon+asterisk at drogon.net> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 10 Mar 2007, Mail Lists wrote:
>
> > I've had a look around and I think I have settled on one of the VIA EPIA
> > fanless boards. Does anyone have any experience with these running
> asterisk
> > as far as performance and reliability is concerned? Has anyone run
> asterisk
> > with any compressed codecs on this setup?
>
> I've built several systems based on this motherboard (the 1GHz fanless
> one) Compressed codecs are fine - as long as you aren't transcoding ;-) I
> figured I could push 30 non transcoded calls through one, but I've never
> had the ability to fully test it out. The max. I had going on one system
> was 20 calls.


I probably will be doing transcoding .... phone(ulaw)->PBX(gsm)->VTSP
At least in some circumstances.

Boot it off flash and have it load an initrd.gz into RAM. Everything will
> run entirely from RAM - no writes to the flash at all! I can get
> everything inside a 48MB flash drive, but I use 64MB ones which gives me
> space to store configs, etc.. (of-course, I make it sound so simple ;-)
> but I'd already worked this out some years back for a diskless router
> project)


I'm guessing you don't have any sort of graphical UI? I was hoping to run
freepbx in
some way - probably have the mysql database stuff stored somewhere else..


>
> I keep voicemail on a 2nd flash IDE device mounted as ext2 (not 3 as ext3
> writes regularly!) and force the fsck at boot time if it's dirty - I'd
> rather lose all voicemail than have it dump itself into single user mode
> waiting for keyboard input... (your thoughts here might be different :)


Have you ever burnt out a flash drive from voicemail usage alone?

> Also, I would really like to run this as a router/firewall appliance as
> well
> > so that that the box can sit on a public IP if the client only has one.
> For
> > this reason I kind of have my heart set on openbsd. The routing and
> firewall
> > utilities on openbsd are very simple to configure and easy to use. Does
> > anyone know what limitations asterisk might have on openbsd (besides
> lack of
> > zaptel.. ) ? I have run asterisk 1.2.? on openbsd before and found it
> worked
> > pretty well.
>
> I run similar motherboards as routers, booting off flash too. Also running
> Linux, but then I find the Linux firewall an easy thing to work with for
> most simple cases.
>
> Watch your interrupts - especially if you're plugging in a 2nd Ethernet
> card and a TDM card. The VIA motherboard which has 2 Ethernet ports has a
> processor with only 64MB of cache ram. The ones I'm using have 128KB
> cache.


I don't think TDM is even a consideration - at least not right now. Do the
boards you use have
2 PCI slots??



Drop me an email and I'll send you a simple shell script to setup a basic
> firewall, do nat, etc.
>
> I'd probably not recomend running the router/firewall on the same box as
> asterisk though...


That'd be great thanks!

Why would you not do that? security? resources?  Single point of failure?


Thanks a lot for all your advice - its nice to know that this sort of setup
is working for people. Up till now I've only run asterisk on IBM eservers
with redundant everything - which works well - but for most small-medium
size clients it's definitely overkill and not very elegant.
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