[Asterisk-Users] Absolute Minimum Installation Packages

[Chris Ziomkowski]

At 10:24 AM 10/31/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>I can understand the size concerns for putting it in an appliance or
>what-not.  However, my opinion is that, due to the low cost of hard disk
>space, it is cheaper for the company to go out and buy another hard disk
>to replace the extra 500 MB they wasted on a sub-optimal installation
>than to pay me to try to get the installation as small as possible.
>
>What are the benefits to a really tiny installation, aside from possible
>appliance applications?  Moreover, won't you still need a sizable hard
>disk for voice prompts, voicemail messages, sound file to direct people
>to dial the correct extension, etc?
>
>Again, I may be WAY off track, but one of the things I really like about
>* is that I can update it easily.  Wouldn't you lose some of the beauty
>by putting it in an appliance?
>
>Moreover, I HATE Nortel because they have a user-unfriendly interface,
>proprietary controls, non-standard connections, and the like.  It seems
>to me that by appliance-izing we would be inviting the same abuses that
>the current systems enjoy.  I could see it becoming an issue of
>open-source software on extremely proprietary hardware, meaning the user
>can modify their system if they can figure out how to get in it.
>
>Of course, all of this is in the assumption that the end-user wants to
>own their PBX.  I know I do.  I think that we should be focusing on a
>useful administrative interface, database-based extension definitions,
>and other features that will advance the power, flexibility, and
>usability of * instead of shrinking the distro as much as possible.
>
>What am I missing?  I see many people much smarter than I am excited
>about this, so I am sure I simply failed to consider how it will
>revolutionize everything.
>
>Awaiting your enlightenment (preferably sans-flame),
>David Gomillion

2 things.

1) Your time might be alot cheaper than memory to a company who wanted to 
sell a product on this. $10 times 10,000 units is $100K. Just how valuable 
do you think your time is? It all depends on volume.

2) The obvious reason not to use a hard disk is reliability. If you are 
looking at mission critical applications, the hard disk in a PC is the most 
likely thing to fail. So you can either invest in an expensive RAID system 
to mitigate this problem, or else go to silicon storage devices. If you 
could get asterisk+linux down to 150 MB or so, then there is a cost 
effective way of compressing this system onto a 512 Mbit flash. Still can 
be a PC, just booting from flash instead of failure prone disk drives. If 
you want voice prompts, database, etc. do it on a PC externally via network 
storage.

I myself am very interested to hear how small one could make this. I think 
there is a entire segment of unexplored markets for an embedded asterisk 
system.

Chris Ziomkowski



>-----Original Message-----
>From: asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com
>[mailto:asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Brancaleoni
>Matteo
>Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 8:48 AM
>To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
>Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Absolute Minimum Installation Packages
>
>Hi.
>
>Il ven, 2003-10-31 alle 02:31, JR Richardson ha scritto:
> > I'm trying to get the total Linux/* installation size as small as
> > possible.  I'm wondering if anyone has looked at the installed
> > packages list from the Redhat installation [rpm -qa] and has parsed
> > out all packages not needed for * to run.  I follow the custom install
> > guide from Andy Powell but the installation yields 948+ Meg with 340
> > installed packages.  I'm sure most of those packages can be
> > eliminated.
>
>I have a very little RedHat 9.0 installation that's about 504 MB,
>with asterisk+sounds+some voicemail installed. Also devel
>tools installed. Also apache+mysql+db, since we have many things
>of asterisk moved onto a mysql db...
>stripping away devel tools, I can manage a to have 450Mb RedHat 9.0.
>surely big, but very small to be a RH ;)
>
>
>--
>Brancaleoni Matteo <mbrancaleoni at espia.it>
>Espia - Emmegi Srl
>
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