[Asterisk-Users] Planning "hotel" phone system - Need input

[Michael Loftis]

--On Monday, January 17, 2005 22:20 -0800 tech at thefalls.bc.ca wrote:

<...>
> The basic arrangement would be:
> Telco <-> T1 <-> Asterisk <-> T1 <-> Channel Bank <-> POTS <-> regular
> phone
>
> Here are my questions thus far:
>
> - Firstly, which channel bank would best suit me?  I only need FXS, but
> I'll  need Caller ID, Visual Message waiting, and a decent ring
> generator.  I haven't  found much info on which FXS channel banks output
> FSK, or what loop length they  can tolerate.  ASDI would be nice too, but
> not yet a requirement.
>
> - Can someone point me in the direction of sample configs for DID
> applications?

Check the asterisk wiki http://www.voip-info.org/  but basically incoming 
lines are tied to a context, with a T1 the phone company usually delivers a 
4 digit DID so you'll have an incoming context with a bunch of 4 digit DIDs 
*or* you can do something more complex and do a lookup to some sort of 
database, which for you might be ideal since you want things more dynamic. 
extension changes on the fly are definitely doable, reload reconfigures the 
extensions list without disturbing in-flight calls.

> - What size server will I need?  Assume for now a pair of quad-T1 cards,
> 2 T1s  incoming, and 5 channel banks.  Shouldn't require much horsepower
> since it's T1  <-> T1 switching

Without transcoding you'll be able to get by with almost any mid to high 
end P4 Xeon (not celeron) system.  Go for the 1MB cache as the Pentiums 
really suffer badly without the extra cache in my experience, and the price 
jump is not that much.  go to a 2.8ghz and 1mb or a 3.0 ghz and 1mb instead 
of a higher clock rate.

You might want to consider one of the other options rather than the Digium 
hardware...someone had a link to some hardware that had onboard DSPs and 
was very similar to the Digium hardware otherwise.  This would certainly 
make a solution much more scaleable.  That said I think you'll be fine with 
2xQuad PRIs in the same box, and if you're worried though it'd be simple to 
split the Quad PRIs to two different boxes, then have them handoff to 
eachother only when necessary.

I'm posting probably later tonight a few bits of framework to 
asterisk-users here that I used to make a dialplan based 'agent' system 
since chan_agent was horribly and uselessly broken for me.  I'm still 
running 1.0/1.0.1 so I dont' know what's been fixed in 1.0.3 or 1.0.4 -- 
nor will i find out anytime quite soon, everything's in production now and 
i can't afford to experiment for lack of time at the moment.

> - Can I get my NMS AG-T1/E1 card working with Asterisk for tinkering
> purposes?

Uhm, probably not, but someone else can better answer this.

> - What kind of uptime am I going to expect on Asterisk?  Am I going to
> have to  reboot the server every 2 weeks?  Can I hope for carrier class
> service?

I'm having problems with 1.0 and 1.0.1 on the analog TDM ports after about 
a week to two weeks, they stop ringing.  However I'm pretty sure there are 
patches in that fix this as of 1.0.2.  I haven't had time to investigate it 
nor upgrade but scheduling a late night reboot after checking for live 
channels has me fixed for the time being.  The T1 card has been flawless 
since we put it in.

> - Is it possible to change extensions on the fly?  For example, this week
> 555- 1111 rings in unit #10.  Next week theres a different tenant, so i
> want to make  555-2222 ring in unit #10, and send 555-1111 to voicemail.
> Some kind of GUI to  accomplish this would also be nice.

See my above note....I am not aware of anything exists out of the box, but 
there are certainly those whose services could be contracted to produce 
this.

>
> Thanks in advance for your responses