Hello, <br><br>I'm trying to put together a low cost - low powers PBX appliance for several customers. I have purchased a couple of the soekris net4801 boards and have asterisk up and running on them fine but they just don't quite cut it in the processing power department. I've been able to get about 10 simultaneous SIP calls with simple ulaw (no encoding decoding). While this might be OK for a very small business or home I just don't think it leaves a lot of overhead to do anything else.
<br><br>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?
<br><br>I am going to TRY to run the system from flash memory one way or another - I realize the hoops I might have to jump through to prevent a large number of read/write cycles but I'd really like to have the whole thing solid state... Maybe someone has a better idea regarding program storage?
<br><br>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. <br><br>Failing that I suppose I would settle for running the routing/firewalling on linux. I've just found the linux networking tools very awkward up until now - perhaps someone know of a linux distribution - or tool - that makes routing/firewall/NAT as painless as on openbsd? Maybe I just need to sit down for a day and learn the tool properly ;)
<br><br>Anyways, <br><br>I know there are a lot of questions in here but perhaps someone has done one or all of these things? <br><br>Thanks for any advice or warnings!<br><br><br>Steve Glaus<br>