Fernando, Placing AstLinux at the edge of your network acting as your Firewall (Router, VPN, DNS, etc.) plus PBX is a great solution. This is what I do in my personal installations. An extra benefit is to give Asterisk a public IPv4 address without NAT at the server end, which simplifies the configuration for remote SIP client access, particularly if the public IPv4 is dynamic.
Clearly our Firewall tab is not pfsense, but AstLinux should be able to do the core firewall features pfsense provides. If any are missing be sure to let us know here. As far as an Atom board being overkill for AstLinux, a few random thoughts: 1) Here in the US, DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems are now offering 100 Mbps down, that data rate alone will max-out an Alix or net5501 box. 2) A 1.8GHz Dual Core Atom board can route 1 Gbps between interfaces with over 50% CPU left over for Asterisk and other services. 3) My testing has demonstrated that a multi-core CPU is particularly helpful in embedded applications like AstLinux, things runs more smoothly when processes are spread across 4x CPUs (including hyper-threading), particularly noticed for latency sensitive applications like VoIP. 4) When given the extra CPU power of the Atom, as Michael Knill noted, CODEC transcoding is now more practical, Zabbix proxy services, many VPN sessions, etc. either run better or were not practical on slower hardware. 5) Price, by virtue of economies of scale, the Atom boards give you a lot for the money, just as an example the Jetway NF9HQL-525 (board only) is about $190 US, while the net5501-70 (board only) is $254 US. The 1.8GHz Intel dual-core Atom will execute about 3-4x faster than the 500 Mhz AMD single-core Geode, the NF9HQL-525 4x NIC's are 1Gb PCIe while the net5501 4x NIC's are 100 Mb PCI. To be fair, for the record I am comparing a newly released board with a board 5 years old. 6) Power consumption, provided the Atom board is designed for networking use (ex. not video playback), they are sill quite efficient, as low as 15 Watts idle vs. 9 Watts idle for the net5501. IMHO, combining your pfsense with your PBX via a single AstLinux box on a Jetway Atom board is a more practical project then trying to run VMware on the same board. Lonnie On Nov 13, 2012, at 11:24 PM, Michael Knill wrote: > For a firewall maybe. To give you flexibility on what you can do then no. > My ALIX box uses 30% CPU with 40ms delay when I transcode from ILBC to G.711. > Yes I could use G.729 and not transcode but ILBC is better and I want this > flexibility. > > Regards > Michael Knill > > > > > On 14/11/2012, at 4:02 PM, Fernando F. wrote: > >> Team.... >> >> So my project with the Jetway NF9HQL-525 Dual Core Atom failed. I was hoping >> to run ESXi 5.1 and every time I try to boot ast-linux it kernel panic so I >> decided to just fully load astlinux to CF and go that route... >> >> I am seeking recommendations from the list... >> >> Is this board over kill for just Ast-Linux? >> Should I attempt to replace my pfsense box with astlinux? >> >> Any recommendations or thoughts? >> >> Fernando Fuentes >> DIGITALVOIPNET.COM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov _______________________________________________ Astlinux-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/astlinux-users Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [email protected].
