[Asterisk-Users] "Out the box" solutions?

[Chris Miller]

Lane wrote:
> Hi, again.
> 
> I've spent a week trying to get asterisk to work on FreeBSD unix, with some 
> success.  Everything works until I plug the box into the TELCO line and then 
> the line goes off-hook and stays that way.

I wasn't able to get the zaptel stuff working under 5.3, but that has
more to do with me running the amd64 port, but I do understand it works.
I think the FreeBSD port is a little behind the Linux stuff.

> So I bit the bullet and decided to install the application on a fresh linux 
> install.  Not to start an OS war, here, but linux is ... difficult ... for an 
> old unix hand to get his mind around.  It's a completely different landscape!  

I've been a BSD guy for years and I had not really been interested in
learning Linux, but everyone seems to want to see that on your resume. I
finally got the opportunity to start working with RedHat 7.3 in
production about a year ago (not for * mind you). I also used Red Hat
Enterprise and played a little with Fedora. All I can tell you is it
will be easier if you _embrace_ Linux and learn it. I find things much
easier to resolve now that I understand how things are wired under the
hood. I'm still a BSD guy, but as someone else pointed out there are
pros and cons to both.

> But I digress.  
> 
> I chose FC3 (Fedora Core) for the install, and now I'm sorry that I did.

Well I must say that the Core 3 release is much closer to production
stable than any of the previous releases, I'm pretty impressed with how
well the OS is put together in comparison to RHES (which sort of comes
from Fedora anyway).

I've gotten everything to work so far, but it did take some reading and
really had more to do with learning * than Fedora.

> At least with unix I was able to get a dial tone!  Not so much with this 
> flavor of linux.  Each time I run "modprobe wcfxs" I get the following errors 
> in /var/log/messages:

The problem seems that you may not have updated your system, this is a
udev issue that's fixed in an update. If you're not familiar with
up2date and this is a test system, you might want to install a full
system and use Gnome (like windows) or KDE so you can get exposure to
the system.

You also need to modify the init.d script to load the modules with the
correct *mod* commands (like you said, all Linuxes are a little
different). Here's a good pointer page for FC3, I wish I saw it before I
figured it out myself...

http://voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk%20Fedora%20Core%203#comments

> I'm not so interested in notifying these guys at lists.sourceforge.net, since 
> I'm only interested in running asterisk.

They already know and fixed it :

http://lwn.net/Articles/111858/?format=printable

> So ... the question:  What flavor of linux does asterisk actually run on "Out 
> the box?"

None. As a BSD guy you should know nothing just runs out of the box ;-)
Although ports does a good job.

> I'm not scared to compile asterisk, but I'm not at all interested in 
> recompiling a linux kernel.

Not needed, you just need to download the SRPM (that matches the updated
kernel, at this time is kernel-2.6.9-1.724_FC3) install it (rpm -ivh
kernel-2.6.9-1.724_FC3.src.rpm) and follow the instructions on the wiki
page above. All you're doing is the equivalent of "make depend" to
update/create a header file.

> Of course if that is the only way, then I guess I'll just bite another bullet. 

Keep an open mind, that's all I can say. At this point I like the RedHat
based Linux distro. Others are also good, some more suited to desktop or
server, but I believe that RedHat is one of the leading distros in terms
of community/commercial support, much the same way FreeBSD is over
Net/Open BSD.

> Hell!  I want this PBX to work so bad that I can almost taste it!

Been there, I've got dialtone now and have both TDM400P FXO/FXS ports
working.

Chris