[asterisk-users] Comments on new system plan.

[Dave Fullerton]

Greetings

I'm in the process of planning my first production system and wondered 
if those with some experience would let me know if I'm doing anything 
stupid or have some suggestions.

This is going to be used in a manufacturing facility with about 22 
phones. About 10 of which are office staff. I'm not going to implement 
call recording, meetme, or queues or anything fancy at this point. I'll 
be using Polycom 601's and 501's for the office staff and 301's for the 
plant phones. I've already had a few phones set up in my office to test 
with and I've got what I need for provisioning figured out. I'll have 
all the phones set to canreinvite=yes and use the transfer functions of 
the phone. Voice mail will be provided for office staff. Since I don't 
have that many phones and everything will be on the LAN I'm just going 
to stick with ulaw for the codec.

The planned server will be an HP Proliant ML110 G3 with a 3Ghz Pentium 
630 processor, 1GB of RAM, and two 80GB SATA hard drives in a RAID1 
(linux software raid) configuration. I'm planning on using the on-board 
gigabit network controller.

I'll have about 8 POTS lines (no caller id or call waiting) connected to 
the system. I'm planning on using a Sangoma Remora A20004D (8 FXO with 
on-board echo canceler). Echo is actually my biggest fear of the whole 
project. There won't be any faxes coming through the server.

For the few analog phones that may be used I'll be using some SPA-3000's 
I already have on hand for FXS ports.

We will have need for overhead paging eventually. This is one area I'm a 
little unsure of. My current off-the-cuff plan is to use a Budgetone 
phone with the headset jack plugged into the amp and set to auto-answer. 
(Saw this on the wiki). I've looked at some of the other devices on the 
wiki but I'm not sure how to implement them. Any advice would be 
appreciated.

I'm also trying to decide whether I want to use Asterisk Business 
Edition or stick with the downloaded version. Money really isn't a big 
issue but I'm not sure what the pros and cons are. I know I would get a 
"hardened" version thats not likely to have many bugs and support from 
Digium, but I'm not sure what "version" of asterisk it is or what 
features are in the 1.2 branch that aren't in ABE or vice-versa. I'm 
assuming ABE is in binary form, will it even work with Sangoma hardware, 
is it distro sensitive? (I was going to call Digium but ran out of time 
this week).

I think that covers it. If anyone has some tips or constructive 
criticism I would appreciate hearing it.

Thanks!

-Dave