[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk on windows

[Rich Adamson]

Any of the more current Win32 systems can be programmed to handle near
real-time events (eg, sip, rtp) just like linux, bsd, and other O/S's.
Obviously, Call Manager is one such system. It's really not an O/S
religious war/discussion, but rather a lack of knowledge (on any O/S
that a poster might not be familiar with) on how to design/implement 
it in code.

With that said, porting the low level drivers (zaptel, wctdm, etc) from
linux to Win32 is no where near a trevial task, and would basically
involve a complete rewrite of such code. Since there are very few
people (maybe one or two) that truly understand _all_ the interworkings 
of the linux-zaptel drivers, and, I venture to guess those same people
are not even remotely cognizant (no offense intended at all) of how
to write Win32 drivers, don't look for asterisk to be fully ported
to the Win32 environment any time soon. As far as I'm concerned, there
isn't any real justification to do so either.

A pbx is intended to be a near real-time system and as such should not
have programmers/technicians mucking with it in a production environment.
That also suggests that any form of GUI interface that is resident in
pbx s/w is not only not required, but not desirable as it will lead to
someone mucking with it and impacting availability. Running a GUI
interface via a manager (cti or whatever) interface that is not part of
the real-time pbx environment certainly is doable and has been done on
lots of pbx and central office switches over the years regardless of 
what the underlying O/S happens to be on the switch.

Those companies that have implemented near real-time systems have probably
questioned their choice of O/S years after deploying production systems,
but that's perfect 20-20 hindsight.

Cisco (as only one example) tends to purchase the majority of their 
non-core products from other companies (or purchase the entire company), 
and in a fair number of cases, will attempt to enhance/port that product 
to something different generating significantly more negatives then if
they would have left the product alone. I'd be one that would certainly
stay away from the port of CCM on another O/S for at least a year.

Rich


> been following this for a while, just thought I would add a bit to the 
> debate, but doesn't the Cisco system (Call Manager?) run on an Windows 
> 2000 based server - if it was that bad why would Cisco choose to run it? 
> Also 3Com use NT/2000 to run the H323 gateway. Admittedly the call 
> processor runs on VXWorks but to cross the boundary of proprietary 3com 
> and rest of world - they jump onto windows.
> 
> Curiously
> Wayne.
> ps I don't know a great deal about the cisco system - its more hearsay 
> so please jump in on :)
> 
> Patrick wrote:
> 
> >Reminds me of an Internet Call Diversion pilot WorldCom did back in 2000
> >where Alcatel & some M$ drones brought in 2 very big Alpha servers
> >running NT. These boxes needed to be rebooted multiple times. They were
> >surprised WCOM felt having to reboot these boxes all the time was
> >unacceptable in an environment requiring 5nines availability. Never
> >laughed so hard when I saw the incredulous faces of the M$ drones. We
> >brought in a Stratus based solution and won the project.
> >
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