Paul Skinner

Looking over my blog stats, most of you reach me via a Google search for FC7 and Asterisk. With that, this post will detail installing Asterisk on FC6-7 or any modern Linux distribution for that matter as nothing here is Fedora specific anyways.

Getting Asterisk compiled and installed is quite trivial, so I thought it would be wise to spend a few moments examining the hardware you intend to use with Asterisk. If you are using a PSTN interface card through ZapTel such as Digium TDM or something else, you need to be aware that these cards generate a tremendous number of interrupts during their operation and the target system must be able to handle these interrupts quickly.

I’ve deployed Asterisk at the office where it provides call queues, automatic attendant, voice-mail and telephony services for 30+ people. This particular setup runs on a Dell 2850 with 1GB of RAM at 3.0ghz with a Digium TDM2400 card to analog PSTN lines. This setup’s load average rarely peeks over 0.01 during the day and the only complaint is occasional echo on the PSTN lines. We will soon be ditching the PSTN lines in favour of SIP channels from Primus providing both a huge cost savings and improved call quality.

At home, I’ve run Asterisk on a PIII-800 with 256MB of RAM using SIP only (no PSTN hardware) and have never had a problem with load related glitching or call drops.

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I suppose that a site that discusses PHP and Linux affairs should probably have some sort of documentation or links to reasonable how-tos on the subject. However, the thought of detailing a PHP/Apache/MySQL installation doesn’t appeal to me much either, so I’ll take a different slice on this. Rather than regurgitating the same steps as every other PHP How-To, I’ll talk about some configuration choices based on the machine’s role.

Alright then, you want to install PHP on your PC or “server” type machine. I’d hazard that you’re either already running Linux or have the misfortune of running Windows. While PHP runs on just about on hardware and OS combo, the Unix flavours perform better and seem to be more stable, not to mention there is less voodoo involved in making it work right.

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Why the heck not? Its one less thing to worry about. I had installed the Wordpress that came with Fedora core 7 but have since had some trouble with the i2o disk controllers. I basically lost everything on a RAID-5 array. Nothing aside from the few posts I made were really at risk of being lost, everything was just backed up prior to the system shuffling anyways.

The cause of this bizarre failure still escapes me.

I’d been tinkering with some new 100mm fans that I picked up at the local automotive/everything surplus store. The plan was to stuff as any of these as possible throughout both my desktop PC case and the server. 5 fans at $2.49ea…. great deal. I started with my desktop PC; in there is an eVGA 8800 GTS that idled in the mid 60C and would peak into the 80’s under load. 2 intake fans were added to it as well as an intake fan directly over the video card mounted on the case door. This did a great job of bringing the idle temps down to the mid-50’s and does a great job dissipating the heat under load.

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My first ever Wordpress blog entry… goodbye cherry!

Starting off with a few notes and observations of Fedora Core 7 seems appropriate as it (used to, I moved to Wordpress.com) powers this site and some supporting elements for my home network.

Someone looking in might think I’m crazy, but my job and interests keep my stables quite full of computers. My wife and I each have our desktops, as well as one older HP NetServer 2U server as a firewall/ LAMP install and finally a PIII-800 with about 200GB of disk space that serves as my file dumpster and SAMBA NT domain controller.

Eco-concerns being what they are, it makes sense on a few fronts to combine the best of left over parts and build something to replace the HP and the PIII clone.

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Following the theme of my previous post on Fedora Core 7, I really wanted to touch on my experience with OpenPBX.

Just for a bit of background, we’ve opted out of traditional telephone in favour of a SIP based VoIP, provided by a Montreal area re-seller named BabyTel. I had figured out and configured BabyTel to run under Asterisk 1.2 on my HP NetServ machine where it was happily doing its job answering the phone and taking messages etc… However, with all this swapping and upgrading, the HP NetServ is being retired.

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Having recently replaced my desktop PC with an Intel E6600 based rig, I’m finally getting around to trying out all the new toys. Yes, I have been hiding under a rock, having only ever heard about LightScribe, this is really my first exposure to this feature.

As part of the upgrade kit, I had requested a new DVD burner. The order wasn’t very specific but my contact at Elco system did his best call to fill the order. A Samsung Model SH-S182 was selected.

I opted against the bundled Samsung Nero software and went with my Nero version. Using the Cover Page designer I was able to Copy and Paste some FC7 logos and a screen shot of the Gnome desktop to the layout and “print” to the label side of the LightScribe discs. Yeah, you need special LightScribe discs too.

The process took 17 minutes to complete but the resulting label is really pretty neat. This particular label was somewhat complex which is presumably why it took so long to process.

Label Close-Up

Features like this are great for me… my Sharpies are constantly being stolen or lost leading to my evil stack of unlabeled media. I guess I’m a slave to LightScribe media now!

Its gonna take some getting used to, but I can really see this being useful. Way to go HP!