Paul Skinner

Someone get a mop!

Digging through the FC8 available package list, what do I see but a long list of Asterisk components and features! This is fantastic news for both Asterisk and the Fedora Project. This will vastly simplify things for anyone interested in giving Asterisk a try as it’s no more than a few clicks away requiring no compiling and related complexities.

Was all this in FC7 and I didn’t notice??!

I couldn’t wait. I jumped ahead and installed some of the basic Asterisk packages:

• Asterisk
• Asterisk-voicemail
• Asterisk-conference
• Asterisk-voicemail-plain
• Asterisk-curl

This is my first taste of Asterisk 1.4 so I’m going to keep this really simple. I’m going to setup this Asterisk install as a SIP peer to my existing 1.2 installation. For the most part, default installation files will be used on the FC8 side of things.

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I’m going to cheap out and review FC8 in a VM as I don’t have a partition to dedicate to a full-on hardware installation (I’ll pay for this choice a bit later) at the moment.

FC8 was downloaded directly from the fedoraproject.org site in ISO DVD format.

The first part of this post discusses some pains in getting Virtual PC to play nice with FC8… scroll ahead if you don’t care about installing under Virtual PC…

A previously installed copy of Microsoft Virtual 2007 will be used to host the FC8 install. The VM will be allocated 512MB of RAM and a 32GB virtual drive. The host OS is Windows XP on an Intel E6600 with 3GB of RAM.

Right off the bat, the graphical installation seems to be out of the question. Once beyond the bootloader, the generic framebuffer doesn’t seem to be handled well by Virtual PC 2007 but I’m sure this is fine on real hardware (in hindsight, this probably isn’t true, if you specify the kernel parameters described below during the installer’s kernel boot, the graphical install should work just fine).

The text installer software is the ever familiar Anaconda installer, where the 32GB virtual disk was partitioned and formatted using defaults most of the way along. The “Office and Productivity”, “Software Development” and “Web Server” collections were selected for installation.

The installer chugged through and completed in fairly short order.

The VM was rebooted and then things got interesting.

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The never-ending quest to put a bullet in the Microsoft Exchange server has just chambered another live-round in the form something called Zimbra. To be fair, the Exchange server I manage is very stable, and runs great. I just loath the price of licenses and dread the obscure solutions to seemingly easy tasks.

I don’t know where this product has been hiding, but it caught my eye last week as a result of a Stumble! click. It seems Yahoo! has spent some coin and bought out Zimbra but is continuing to offer the code and binaries under a variety of licensing models. This is all good news for IT departments and service providers everywhere!

There are a number of How-To documents on the Internet that describe implementing various services to support an Exchange’esque environment. I’ve tried it, it works, but it’s ugly and a devil to maintain. Zimbra provides all the necessary technologies in one suite and centralizes the configuration in a uniform interface. The clever folks at Zimbra did it RIGHT. Both the authentication and directory Services are user configurable and 3rd party supported. This means that Zimbra can leverage your existing directory systems such as Active Directory or any other LDAP server for that matter.

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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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