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Asterisk Brethren,
This has been a fantasy morphed into reality; albeit not quite how I had it planned. Learning how to re-master KNOPPIX into my own customization WAS a challenge but very educational. Once I learned the process of re-mastering, installing Asterisk was a whole new challenge, but 47 hours, 32 pots of caffeine and a slice of Papa John’s later, whoa-la’.
I have 2 versions, one on a full KNOPPIX CD distro ~700M (works fine, not great, but ok) and one compiled onto a Damn Small Linux distro ~50M (this is untested, having some issues). This project if far from refinement but does work as planned. I can boot the large CD and Asterisk comes up and runs as a demon. I pre-configured sip.conf, extensions.conf. iax.conf and voicemail.conf (no zaptel cards stuff yet) for basic operation to support 10 sip extensions and iax trunking into a PSTN gateway.
I solved the issue of writing new configurations, voicemail and logging onto to the read-only medium so NVRAM will hold and maintain any configuration changes (the swelling from head-butting the monitor are subsiding nicely).
The ultimate solution I’m attempting to create is an Asterisk soft switch that is hardened onto an un-corruptible image so a quick re-boot will restore the server to a pre-defined condition (kind of like firmware for a dedicated hardware platform, router, switch, etc…). I would like to move to a single USB device, like FLONIX KNOPPIX or DSL USB NOPPIX. Also a USB memory stick will allow re-mastering new software releases and upgrades without needing to burn a CDR every time. This would allow servers to be built without the need for a hard drive, floppy or CDROM, reducing the overall cost of the server.
Please understand and forgive me, but I’m not quite ready to generally release the images just yet. I’m feeling pretty good about what has been accomplished so far but I want to wait and release a product that can be used with ease and satisfaction and not disappointment for having downloaded and burned a piece of crap imaged that wasted your time.
I’m really divulging this work to let you all know what’s coming but primarily, I’m looking for a few interested experts for refinement and problem solving. The biggest road block to a stable product is working with the Debian distro and compiling the latest Asterisk package onto the smaller DSL. The smaller the distro, the smaller the RAM and storage are needed, the cheaper the product and so on. Right now I’m in dependency hell L with Debian and can’t seem to compile the latest CVS tree into the distribution.
If there are any interested parties that would like to jump in, please contact me by e-mail directly.
Thanks for your time.
JR
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