Hey all, I’ve been reading on this and a few other forums about the wonders of asterisk and I’m going to give it a try. I have most of a computer all ready to go I just need a motherboard (have CPU, case, power supply, drives etc).
I currently have one POTS line which I’m going to transfer to a VOIP (looking like voicepulse currently) and then add on 2 more VOIP lines. will I need any other hardware besides a computer with a network card?
(do I need a modem or some other type of card?)
I have an athlon XP 1700 CPU which needs a socket A (socket 462)
I’ve only found a handful of boards for this these days, but was wondering if I should be looking for an all in one board (with onboard video and LAN) or if I should get a board and then buy cards for the LAN and video.
is there a list of known working parts with asterisk (motherboards, Network cards, video cards etc.)?
sorry for the long psot and all these questions, I just really want to get the ball rolling on this and I don’t want to order hardware and then find out I can’t find linux drivers for it, or worse, it just work with asterisk.
given that you’re likely to be using your Asterisk box headless, video shouldn’t be a problem if using on-board.
the NIC might be a different matter though, lots of people like the ever-popular Realtek chipsets that seem to feature in on-board setups, but i’ve also heard a fair amount of complaints and tend to stick with Intel PRO stuff or 3Com.
the wiki at voip-info.org/ has a page where people have recorded their experiences … search for “asterisk hardware”.
2 of the boards I’m looking at have the realtek onboard NIC, is asterisk pickey at all about what type of chipset your board has (via, sis, nvidia, etc.) ?
Asterisk doesn’t seem to be picky about much. there’s always something to tweak to get the most out of your hardware/kernel combination, but for a VoIP only setup, i would think the NIC and pure grunt is more important than the chipset. depending on what it’s going to do of course … a few VoIP channels … my 400Mhz Mac G3 handles that with ease.
The biggest concern with VOIP setups is transcoding IMO. This is done in software with asterisk and is a CPU hog… keep things friendly and try to do as little transcoding as possible…
I need a card to connect to the PSTN? thats the only part of this I’m nto sure about si how to set that up.
are all cards created equil? how do they work?
also can somoene recommend some decent SIP phones, I’m looking for one that handles 4 lines (I’ve seen a lot of 1 and 2 line phones, but not many that do 4)
what do peopel do for fault tolerance? (as in, do they set up a RAID for these?)
I was thinking of building 2 identical computers and once I get everything set up, creating a ghost image of my hard drive and loading that onto anotehr identical computer, this way if my main goes down, I just plug in my “backup” computer and I’m not down for too long
sorry for what may be some dumb questions, I’m just a complete beginner with this.