On Sat, 10 Mar 2007, Mail Lists wrote:
I've had a look around and I think I have settled on one of the VIA EPIA
fanless boards. Does anyone have any experience with these running asterisk
as far as performance and reliability is concerned? Has anyone run asterisk
with any compressed codecs on this setup?
I've built several systems based on this motherboard (the 1GHz fanless
one) Compressed codecs are fine - as long as you aren't transcoding ;-) I
figured I could push 30 non transcoded calls through one, but I've never
had the ability to fully test it out. The max. I had going on one system
was 20 calls.
5 calls to music on hold (where it's transcoding from the GSM moh file to
G711 is causing my R&D box (wich has a 533MHz VIA processor with 64Kb
cache) is using between 5 and 12% CPU. I'd expect one of my 1Ghz boxes to
hardly notice this at all.
Make sure you compile asterisk in i586 mode - it's in the Makefile in
1.2.x. It'll crash otherwise as the VIA processors are lacking some vital
MMX instructions.
I am going to TRY to run the system from flash memory one way or another - I
realize the hoops I might have to jump through to prevent a large number of
read/write cycles but I'd really like to have the whole thing solid state...
Maybe someone has a better idea regarding program storage?
Boot it off flash and have it load an initrd.gz into RAM. Everything will
run entirely from RAM - no writes to the flash at all! I can get
everything inside a 48MB flash drive, but I use 64MB ones which gives me
space to store configs, etc.. (of-course, I make it sound so simple ;-)
but I'd already worked this out some years back for a diskless router
project)
I do have a partition on the flash that does get written - rarely. It
holds a copy of the astdb file and some other local configuration things -
like sip/iax accounts, etc. I have a cron job that sees it the astdb file
has been touched and if so, I dump it to flash. There is a couple of
minutes window of failure here though, so a user could do the star code to
set his phone on divert, then system get power cycled, and that setting
might be lost... I can live with that.
I keep voicemail on a 2nd flash IDE device mounted as ext2 (not 3 as ext3
writes regularly!) and force the fsck at boot time if it's dirty - I'd
rather lose all voicemail than have it dump itself into single user mode
waiting for keyboard input... (your thoughts here might be different :)
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ram0 124M 67M 58M 54% /
tmpfs 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdc2 60M 894K 59M 2% /data
This box has 256MB of RAM. Asterisk 1.2.16, zaptel 1.2.15. It's running
apache+php, sendmail, and asterisk. There is no perl interpreter, as I've
currently no need for it. (and it's about 10MB unless I squeeze stuff out
of it!)
Also, I would really like to run this as a router/firewall appliance as well
so that that the box can sit on a public IP if the client only has one. For
this reason I kind of have my heart set on openbsd. The routing and firewall
utilities on openbsd are very simple to configure and easy to use. Does
anyone know what limitations asterisk might have on openbsd (besides lack of
zaptel.. ) ? I have run asterisk 1.2.? on openbsd before and found it worked
pretty well.
I run similar motherboards as routers, booting off flash too. Also running
Linux, but then I find the Linux firewall an easy thing to work with for
most simple cases.
Watch your interrupts - especially if you're plugging in a 2nd Ethernet
card and a TDM card. The VIA motherboard which has 2 Ethernet ports has a
processor with only 64MB of cache ram. The ones I'm using have 128KB
cache.
Failing that I suppose I would settle for running the routing/firewalling on
linux. I've just found the linux networking tools very awkward up until now
- perhaps someone know of a linux distribution - or tool - that makes
routing/firewall/NAT as painless as on openbsd? Maybe I just need to sit
down for a day and learn the tool properly ;)
Drop me an email and I'll send you a simple shell script to setup a basic
firewall, do nat, etc.
I'd probably not recomend running the router/firewall on the same box as
asterisk though...
Gordon
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