On Sat, 9 May 2009, Dave Walker wrote:
I was not endorsing a particular product or asking for recommendations about
specific
products. I personally tried Trixbox and was not really satisfied with the
results. The
last time I was asked about an appliance I referred the person to Switchvox.
There were a few other responses that seemed to answer my question. The vote
tally so far
(both on and off this list) seems to lean towards CentOS, download/compile of
source then yum
for the rest. For properly configured/secured small systems behind a firewall
then FreePBX
or AsteriskNow is fine.
Nobody has commented on my question regarding monetary contributions for
FreePBX, AsteriskNow
or any other project that helps encourage support for Asterisk. I have
contributed to the
CentOS project. Their recommended contributions are $25 per installation, per
year which is
fine.
One way of reducing your "guilt" is by contributing - even if not actively
maintaining the code, or contributing money, but by stay on the mailing
list, answer questions, giving feedback to the maintainers, help others -
that sort of thing. This goes for all open source projects though.
So as for a professional setup... Well, I do it "professionally"... Well,
I charge people money and for the most part they pay...
I did look at the various pre-canned and GUI offerings when I started out,
but I didn't really like them and they didn't seem too suited to what I
thought at the time was my target market, so I started from scratch with
my own thing.
An advantage I had was that I already had a diskless booting Linux system
that I was using to make routers and small NAS boxes from - boot off
flash, run from ram, rather than run from flash, which most other systems
seem to do... So I just had to compile (asterisk) from scratch, write
my own dialplan, my own php front-end and off I went...
I don't think there's any issue in you using Trixbox, etc. ... The main
part, I think is actually knowing how to run a Linux server - that's
something I think where most people might get stuck - it's all very well
slapping in a CD or USB stick that loads up Linux, trixbox, pbxinnaflash,
etc. but if you don't know much about how to actually care and feed the
underlying operating system then I fear you'll come unstuck at some point.
The advantage I have (In my view) is that I have a system exactly tailored
to the underlying hardware. A custom Linux kernel compile (no modules, no
udev, hoptplug or anything like that to get in the way), asterisk built
for the platform (old i586 stuff - maybe not that relevant today!) and so
on. There's no X windown GUI and nothing running that's not absolutely
needed.
Eg. one of my productions boxes:
% ps ax | wc -l
34
And I've just looked at it and am wondering why there are 5 apache
instances when one or 2 will do - so I can tweak the config file for the
next release...
And FWIW, that's running in 256MB of RAM, of which 132MB is taken up by a
ramdisk, leaving the rest for applications. There is no swap. The ramdisk
currently has 20MB free, but that's just fine.
Maybe that's just me though - 28 years ago I was shoehorning assembly
code into 200 bytes of RAM, so that sort of optimisation has stuck with
me!
Well, that's my tuppence of it all, anyway!
Cheers,
Gordon
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