[asterisk-users] Professional Setup..

[Gordon Henderson]

On Sat, 9 May 2009, Dave Walker wrote:

> I was not endorsing a particular product or asking for recommendations about specific
> products.  I personally tried Trixbox and was not really satisfied with the results.  The
> last time I was asked about an appliance I referred the person to Switchvox.
> 
> There were a few other responses that seemed to answer my question.   The vote tally so far
> (both on and off this list) seems to lean towards CentOS, download/compile of source then yum
> for the rest.  For properly configured/secured small systems behind a firewall then FreePBX
> or AsteriskNow is fine.
> 
> Nobody has commented on my question regarding monetary contributions for FreePBX, AsteriskNow
> or any other project that helps encourage support for Asterisk.   I have contributed to the
> CentOS project.  Their recommended contributions are $25 per installation, per year which is
> fine. 

One way of reducing your "guilt" is by contributing - even if not actively 
maintaining the code, or contributing money, but by stay on the mailing 
list, answer questions, giving feedback to the maintainers, help others - 
that sort of thing. This goes for all open source projects though.

So as for a professional setup... Well, I do it "professionally"... Well, 
I charge people money and for the most part they pay...

I did look at the various pre-canned and GUI offerings when I started out,
but I didn't really like them and they didn't seem too suited to what I
thought at the time was my target market, so I started from scratch with
my own thing.

An advantage I had was that I already had a diskless booting Linux system
that I was using to make routers and small NAS boxes from - boot off
flash, run from ram, rather than run from flash, which most other systems
seem to do... So I just had to compile (asterisk) from scratch, write 
my own dialplan, my own php front-end and off I went...

I don't think there's any issue in you using Trixbox, etc. ... The main
part, I think is actually knowing how to run a Linux server - that's
something I think where most people might get stuck - it's all very well
slapping in a CD or USB stick that loads up Linux, trixbox, pbxinnaflash,
etc. but if you don't know much about how to actually care and feed the
underlying operating system then I fear you'll come unstuck at some point.

The advantage I have (In my view) is that I have a system exactly tailored 
to the underlying hardware. A custom Linux kernel compile (no modules, no 
udev, hoptplug or anything like that to get in the way), asterisk built 
for the platform (old i586 stuff - maybe not that relevant today!) and so 
on. There's no X windown GUI and nothing running that's not absolutely 
needed.

Eg. one of my productions boxes:

   % ps ax | wc -l
   34

And I've just looked at it and am wondering why there are 5 apache
instances when one or 2 will do - so I can tweak the config file for the
next release...

And FWIW, that's running in 256MB of RAM, of which 132MB is taken up by a
ramdisk, leaving the rest for applications. There is no swap. The ramdisk
currently has 20MB free, but that's just fine.

Maybe that's just me though - 28 years ago I was shoehorning assembly
code into 200 bytes of RAM, so that sort of optimisation has stuck with
me!

Well, that's my tuppence of it all, anyway!

Cheers,

Gordon