[asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

[Gordon Henderson]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Senad Jordanovic wrote:

> And yes, running the whole thing from standard PC based "desktop" will 
> eventually cause issues hence an solid state appliance is a way to go :)

My gripe is that I think people try to put too much into a system, don't 
have a "server build and operation" head, and are basically OK with 
rebooting because maybe that's what they're used to... And maybe they just 
don't have enough customers that whinge loudly enough when things stop 
working :)

Personally I don't think an "appliance" ought to be running SQL. I don't 
think it should have it's own billing platform either (Although make the 
call logs available by all means!), nor should it have a built-in CRM 
solution. Don't use agi, external scripts where dialplan will do, and so 
on.

I can see why it's attractive to put all those in, but maybe I'm just an 
old unix hacker at heart with the "make it do one thing well" type of 
mentality...

(I did put Perl & FOP in my units recently, but only under protest and 
after lots of requests from a reseller!)

As for prime-time? I think the answer is "yes, but..." You need reliable 
hardware, customised software, not generic (Cuscom compiled Linux kernel, 
distribution, asterisk, etc.), don't run anything that's not 100% 
necessary, turn off motherboard hardware that's not being used, and so on. 
Good build practices (anti-static mats, etc.) and soaktesting helps too - 
I had a duff memory stick recently which was found with a few sweeps of 
memtest86+ ...

I think you also need a "professional installation". I see lots of 
asterisk inna box solutions being sold by mail-order, but I'm not really 
convinced it's the way forward - maybe for a small techno type of company, 
but your average SME just wants to "get a man in" to make it work IME ...

Based on that, I generally have systems that "just work", although none 
might be as particularly busy as some out there - busiest right now is 
handling about 100 calls an hour - purely VoIP, no BRI/PRI) next is about 
80 an hour on 6 BRI ports.

I've yet to have a box stop working for reasons I didn't know about 
(filling the ramdisk with log-files doesn't help!) I see far more problems 
with phones than the boxes themselves, but maybe I've just been lucky!

Cheers,

Gordon