[Asterisk-Users] Linux Distribution for Asterisk server use

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 04:33:29PM +0100, Subhi S Hashwa wrote:
> Quoting TWV <voip at teleweb.be>:
> 
> > My question is about which Linux distribution to choose for Asterisk. (/me
> > holds breath)  OK, hopefully you're still reading, because whatever you were
> > thinking now, you're thinking wrong! ;)
> 
> Your email is an excellent example on a well researched question a perfect
> example on how questions should be asked on a public forum. Thank you.
> 
> Back to your question.
> 
> In a commercial environment where you're providing a (I assume managed) service
> for users you want to make sure your tools will be up to the job and you won't
> be let back by your supplier(s).

You'd also want to avoid vendor lock-in.

> 
> In this kind of environment on a business level you want support if you're
> stuck,
> a backup in case things go fubar, the only distros that can provide that are
> SuSE
> (Novell) and RedHat.

Actually this is incorrect: Everybody can provide support for CentOS, 
Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD, or whatever. With RedHat or SuSE
you're locked to a single vendor to provide maintinance.

A small example of how annoying it is: Suppose you don't trust the
vendor's QA (the vendor did not check the updates with Asterisk, did
he?) and want to provide your own local updates source that only updates
manually with tested packages.

With apt, yum, urpmi: this is a matter of basic scriptology (if this
scriptology doesn't exist already). But if you use
up2date/YOU/red-carpet/whatever then your server has to be registered
directly with the download source at redhat/suse/ximian/whatever and you
have to install the updates directly from them.

Anyway, let's as our fountain of knowledge if there is any commercial
support for Debian:

  http://www.google.com/search?q=commercial+support+for+debian

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