[asterisk-users] Newbie Asterisk: Install Asterisk as non-root

[James Sneeringer]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 3:04 AM, Lee, John (Sydney)
<John.Lee at compuware.com> wrote:
> First of all, thanks Philipp, Alan, Tzafrir and James for your valuable
> comments.  I have listed below the exact list of commands to run for
> reinstalling asterisk 1.4.* as non-root on a Redhat / Fedora distro.
> Hope others can benefit.
>
> I have the following comments/questions though:
> 1) #####What is safe_asterisk used for actually?  I did not touch it in
> my modification because I don't know when is it triggered?

The safe_asterisk script monitors the actual asterisk process, and if
it dies for some reason, it restarts it and optionally notifies you.
It's just a precaution. MySQL is often run under a script called
mysqld_safe for the same reason.

> 2) #####I do not actually know whether we really need to modify
> /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf?  Is this file read by asterisk at all?
> Seems like an important file name - asterisk.conf?

It is read by asterisk, but whether you need to change any of the
defaults really depends on your environment. Most of the options in it
have equivalent command-line options, so you might want to use
asterisk.conf instead of modifying the startup script (which could be
overwritten the next time you upgrade).

> 4) There is an additional chmod to run for letting voicemail.conf to be
> written by group asterisk.

What I found was that /etc/asterisk also needs to be writable by the
asterisk user, because asterisk will unlink and recreate the file, so
it needs to be able to write to the directory, not just the file. You
can protect yourself a little bit by setting the sticky bit on
/etc/asterisk, so even if asterisk goes nuts, it can't whack files it
doesn't actually have write permissions on.

chmod g+w /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf
chmod g+w,+t /etc/asterisk

-James