How many of you would setup asterisk@home in a production environment?
Small/medium business?
I would appreciate your comments.
William
We use Asterisk@Home as an easy install for our PBX interconnections.
Each of our sites has legacy PBXs linked by PRI to our local Asterisk boxes, and all of those trunk together.
We have this in full production with 4 digit dialing between all our sites and have been very happy with it.
One Asterisk Machine, five offices, 2 States, 4 Counties, 67 Staff members. No one team member is further away than a 3 digit dial to anyone in the company, even when they work from home.
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Ditto. Works great. Might consider it a lazy way out…but in like 45 minutes, completely functional Asterisk server with all the bells and whistles ready to go with a simple single press of an ENTER key. The ability to not have to worry about the OS installation is worth it, I know i’ve saved at least a hundred hours of tedious install steps thanks to @home. Whats great about the ease of install, if I get @home buggered up to a point that i know its going to take at least an hour or more of my time, I just rebuild the entire server. Its that easy to do that it makes it a viable option.
4 servers, 4 countries across 2 different oceans, 4 digit, 100+users.
All too easy.
IMHO you are better off building and configuring Asterisk yourself. The ease of installing and using A@H are both an advantage and a liability. In my experience most people who use A@H do not learn enough about what is going on underneath the hood, not a good thing should the brown stuff hit the fan.
I do tend to agree with that…but I tend to believe that the users who NEED @Home to do more, crack open the top and figure out how to make it work. I’ve done it the hardway (OS install, component by component configs)have you ever timed how long it takes to do a standard install from start to finish? Takes for freaking ever!! hehe @home…45 minutes start to finish…and the voicemail works, and it only took 1 key press to make it all happen. (Gawd…just to save the tediousness of a MySQL installation makes it worth it!). The less time spent on installing, means the more time available on PBX configuration, and the more P.S. dollars in my pocket. Because thats what its about…getting the the system handle phones…not getting another install of Linux working…
Dont be afraid of @home… they did a great job on it. I can’t even begin to imagine how many test installs they went through checking the automated install proceedure…but it sure has saved me a lot of work.
We have done quite a few installs using AAH, including a 45+ extension call center. IMO, you will spend less time using AAH and locking it down, fixing the minor issues then a Asterisk install from scratch.