On 3/10/07, Gordon Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
I probably will be doing transcoding .... phone(ulaw)->PBX(gsm)->VTSP At least in some circumstances. 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'm guessing you don't have any sort of graphical UI? I was hoping to run freepbx in some way - probably have the mysql database stuff stored somewhere else..
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 :)
Have you ever burnt out a flash drive from voicemail usage alone?
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.
I don't think TDM is even a consideration - at least not right now. Do the boards you use have 2 PCI slots?? 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...
That'd be great thanks! Why would you not do that? security? resources? Single point of failure? Thanks a lot for all your advice - its nice to know that this sort of setup is working for people. Up till now I've only run asterisk on IBM eservers with redundant everything - which works well - but for most small-medium size clients it's definitely overkill and not very elegant.
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