[Asterisk-Users] The Smallest Asterisk Server Ever?

Greg Boehnlein damin at nacs.net
Tue Feb 3 09:32:22 MST 2004


Hello all,
	Saturday night, after a couple of shots of bourbon, I realized 
that I had an old PC sitting in the garage that I could use as an Asterisk 
gateway if I just blew the dust off it and reloaded it with a modern Linux 
distribution. In my characteristically impulsive manner, I grabbed it and 
started cleaning it up so that I could put it in my office without my wife 
having a fit.
	The sytem is an old Gateway system, that I used to use as an 
X-terminal. Nothing special really, P-133, 16 megs of ram, 3 PCI slots, 
3.2 gig hard drive. The box booted and I was greated with a RH9 login 
screen from my X-server.
	After imaging the hard drive over to my server for backup 
purposes, I proceeded to try installing Fedora, RH9, RH8 and finally RH73 
without any luck. The 16 megs of ram was just too small to do the 
installation. So I grabbed a Debian 3.0 netinstall image and got the box 
online and running.
	8 hours later, "apt-get dist-upgrade" completed and the box was 
running Debian 3.0 unstable. Now it was time install Asterisk. An 
"apt-cache search asterisk" revealed that Debian unstable has pkg files 
available. Yay! That'll save me the time of bulding everything on this 
box so all I will need to do is rebuild the Zaptel modules.
	20 minutes later, I had my Zaptel modules built and was ready to 
give it a whirl, so I loaded the wcfxo module and started Asterisk. My 
GrandStream registered against the server and I was able to able to place 
calls out the PSTN using the box.
	Initially, I was prepared for this to be an excercise in futility, 
but I have been extremely surprised by the results. I can support up to 3 
concurrent SIP sessions before I start to get degraded quality, and the 
box appears to be rock solid. I have it registered against our production 
Asterisk server at work over my Cable modem, and my staff can simply dial 
3xxx to ring my extension at home. Voicemail works just fine and with the 
addition of the "Asterisk-sounds" pkg inbond callers now know that we are 
out "Gambling and getting drunk" when they call.

	Is this the smallest Asterisk server ever? :)

asterisk:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 5
model           : 2
model name      : Pentium 75 - 200
stepping        : 12
cpu MHz         : 132.957
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : yes
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8
bogomips        : 265.42

asterisk:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         13984      13696        288          0       1372        868
-/+ buffers/cache:      11456       2528
Swap:        92728      17316      75412

asterisk:~# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.6  1492   84 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 init [2]       
root         2  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Feb02   0:00 [keventd]
root         3  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SWN  Feb02   0:00 [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
root         4  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Feb02   0:14 [kswapd]
root         5  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Feb02   0:00 [bdflush]
root         6  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Feb02   0:00 [kupdated]
root        85  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        DW   Feb02   0:01 [kjournald]
root       292  0.0  1.1  1540  164 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 /sbin/syslogd
root       295  0.0  0.0  2156    4 ?        S    Feb02   0:01 /sbin/klogd
root       309  0.0  0.0  1520    0 ?        SW   Feb02   0:00 /usr/sbin/inetd
root       316  0.0  0.4  3064   56 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
root       325  0.0  0.9  1752  128 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
root       329  0.0  0.4  1488   56 tty1     S    Feb02   0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty1
root       330  0.0  0.4  1488   56 tty2     S    Feb02   0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty2
root      2609  0.0  0.2  2276   40 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/sbin/safe_asterisk
root      2611  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:03 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2612  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2613  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2614  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2615  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2616  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2617  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:21 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2618  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:13 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2619  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2620  0.4  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   7:52 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2621  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2622  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2625  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2626  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2627  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2628  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c
root      2629  0.0  7.3 42144 1032 ?        S    Feb02   0:00 asterisk -vvvg -c

-- 
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         http://www.n2net.net Where everything clicks into place!
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