Before attempting it, I'd want to have some knowledge of how many stations are implemented in AstLinux systems.
A high, low and average value.
You need to establish the amount of work saved vs. the amount of development effort expended. In your opinion, what is the threshold at which your effort pays off? 10, 50, 100 stations?
FWIW, I set up the secondary http server, which is all that is required for my Avaya phones. Drop in the config files via SCP and the occasional firmware update and there's not much more that I need except a text editor.
That said, I've only a handful of phones.
Tom
On 10/22/06, Gary G. Hendershot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
I have not found the phone provisioning in FreePBX/TrixBox to be all that
great ... Its better than nothing which is what we have in Astlinux right
now, but it aint all that slick either ... I seem to recall that they did a
pretty nice job of supporting Cisco phones out of the gate but that was it
... But at least they have a mechanism to permit the administrator to push
config files up to the server and to edit text config files ... That is
significant and is kind of what I hope we can get to with Astlinux ...
Now these guys do phone provisioning well ...
There is an Asterisk implementation done by an outfit called Selintra in
Britain that is called Sail ... It is designed to run on the SME v7.x Linux
distribution ... These guys have gone all out when it comes to phone
provisioning ... They have a very slick template system that a smarter than
average Admin can edit to add his/her phone brands into but it comes with
templates for many of the most popular built in ... This is about the
slickest job of handling phone provisioning I have seen in an Asterisk
package ... Far superior to what FreePBX does now ...
But alas, Selintra/Sail requires a pretty much conventional Linux server to
run on ... I think it requires PERL, Apache and MySQL very similar to
FreePBX ... So there is no way to get it to run on appliance type hardware
... The minimum system requirements are just way beyond what you are going
to find in your typical small form factor no moving parts type system ...
What do we need in Astlinux ...
If we had a provisioning system in Astlinux that was as slick as what is in
Selintra/Sail, that would be a dream come true IMHO ... But I would be quite
happy with something much simpler and easier to implement/maintain if that
turned out to be the direction the developers decided to go ... I would be
very pleased if they used the FreePBX model and just gave us a reliable way
to upload our config files to the proper locations on the server and easily
navigate to and edit the text based config files ... The templating system
is slick, but would require someone to devote a lot of effort to keeping it
up to date and current ... I am not sure that manpower is available to this
project ...
I hope that anyone taking up the challenge to work on phone provisioning in
Astlinux will give a hard look at what TrixBox and Selintra/Sail are doing
... While neither of these system would easily transfer directly to
Astlinux due to dependencies, they are addressing the problem in very
creative ways ...
G.Hendershot
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of canuck15
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 12:17 PM
To: 'Discussion of AstLinux - Asterisk on Compact Flash'
Subject: Re: [Astlinux-users] Phone provisioning
Got any better suggestions? Until I find something else that is better (and
free) I am stuck with FreePBX. It does everything I could ever possibly
want it to do.
If someone thinks it is not flexible enough to support most if not all
custom configurations they probably don't know how to use it properly.
Configuring from scratch may be good for personal satisfaction, ego or
whatever but not very practical for a lot of people, businesses, and
applications.
I am not disagreeing that the requirement for MySQL, Perl, and Apache are
overkill for many installations. It does work quite well for more
complicated setups and again, there is nothing else out there that is free
and even comes close to it's sophistication and ease of use.
-----Original Message-----
From: IPC Solutions [mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 3:09 PM
To: Discussion of AstLinux - Asterisk on Compact Flash
Subject: Re: [Astlinux-users] Phone provisioning
Thanks FreePBX for forcing me to learn how to configure Asterisk from
scratch.
HORRIBLE is the word.
Totally agree.
Michael Knill
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Kristian
Kielhofner
Sent: Friday, 20 October 2006 6:25 AM
To: Discussion of AstLinux - Asterisk on Compact Flash
Subject: Re: [Astlinux-users] Phone provisioning
Paul Davidson wrote:
>
> I agree- plists would be a nice match. My concern, especially in the
> case of something like astlinux, but in general, is the use of scripts
> to 'bring older configs up to date'. I don't wanna- I want the
> system to use what's there, let me make arbitrary changes directly to
> the configuration files, and still be able to deal with it. I know,
> it's a picky, lofty goal- perhaps even impossible. But I look at it
> as- I can represent the same dialplan 10 different ways or more, and
> Asterisk interprets it correctly, every time- so why can't a
> configuration
tool?
> I see it as a perfect fit for astlinux, as it's use is more aimed at
> small environments, with beginning administrators, or no administrator
> at all. Someone who installs asterisk in an environment like that
> needs a simple interface, but may grow into more advanced
> development- and the last thing I would recommend to them is to lock
> themselves in to a particular configuration tool, or style.
>
> I will keep my eye on it, and I'll also burn some brain power as to
> how I might get my evil, er, stated goals accomplished. At some
> point, I may put together a collection of some of the more bizarre
> Asterisk configs, so I can feed them into a parser and see what jumps out.
>
> -pbd
>
pbd,
I like your style. FreePBX (or whatever they are calling that GUI)
has some major problems that keep it out of AstLinux:
1) HUGE software dependencies. Why do you need MySQL, perl, etc, etc for a
simple web interface?
2) Inflexibility. They also force a given style of configuration on you.
If you are not able to accomplish your Asterisk goals within that framework,
too bad. You're out of luck and you're back to editing config files by
hand. Unfortunately, now you are editing HORRIBLE config files that are so
abstracted you're better off starting from scratch...
I really like how you are approaching this. Let me know if you need
anything, anything at all.
--
Kristian Kielhofner
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