Hi fellows, I am the newbiest newbie in the Asterisk world, but i need to know how to install, configure, run, use and maintain asterisk in a just a couple of months, i have used it a few times and i think i understand the basic concepts of networking, I am computer sciences student so i got programming and math/logic knowledge as well
So here it is my start…
I am downloading Fedora`s latest version (i gotta install it and configure it, but that’s another issue i gotta work on)
(i heard it is the best server OS to run asterisk on, please let me know if I am wrong)
…and I am buying a brand new computer to make it my asterisk server, what do u guys recommend?
For a testing\soho “server” any desktop will work fine (512MB RAM with a 80GB HD) for up to about 5 or so simultaneous calls.
I would HIGHLY suggest you try out the new AsteriskNOW Beta 1.5.
If your heart is set on building it for yourself use CentOS as the OS. CentOS is a clone of Redhat Enterprise Linux and is a lot more hardened and proven as a server base than Fedora. Fedora is a bleeding edge platform that Redhat uses to test for future releases of RHEL.
I would also suggest you get the book linked below.
For a production system I would highly recommend a good quality server with a good power supply and good power feed. I would use something like a Proliant DL360 and put this through a power smoothing UPS. In “Asterisk The Future of Telephony” it stresses that the quality of the underlying hardware can affect voice quality on all extensions.
[quote=“leemason”]That’s not as simple a question as it sounds. It really depends on a number of factors.
For example:
Are you performing transcoding (i.e. G.729 to G.711)?
Are you playing messages (and if so what format do the messages take)?
How many interface cards is the server having to handle (i.e. ISDN, analogue) as they all generate hardware interrupts.
How may SIP extensions do you have?
Is there any protocol translation (i.e. SIP to H.323).
Also depends which model of DL360 or other server you go for.
Lee[/quote]
yeah you are right, i asked because a saw this chart:
[i]
Table 2-1. System requirement guidelines Purpose
Number of channels
Minimum recommended
Hobby system
No more than 5
400-MHz x86, 256 MB RAM
SOHOa system
5 to 10
1-GHz x86, 512 MB RAM
Small business system
Up to 15
3-GHz x86, 1 GB RAM
Medium to large system
More than 15
Dual CPUs, possibly also multiple servers in a distributed architecture[/i]
on the o´really book, so out of curiosity i wanted to know an estimated number of calls that that machine could handle…
I honestly only know the meaning of 2 of your 5 factors, but i will know them all soon, but for now, i still would like to know an estimated number… 300 calls? more or less? 500? more?
This is a very hard thing to answer.
You need to say what you want to do , as an office system is very different to a high capacity conference server.
But as an example I run conference servers with upto 250 concurrent calls on 2.64G dells and office systems with 100+ extensions on the same.
Why the difference, well in a office system people are looking at voicemail and CDR records etc where as you can get higher volumes on other single use systems as thats all they are doing.
ah ok i see, well, yes you are right, i should have said this before, I am looking an office system, for 200-calls at the same time, incoming and outgoing.
the calls may or may not be recorded (haven’t decided yet)
I guess if you are careful about codecs and only have G.711 for everything (inc. playing of messages) then you might get 200 concurrent calls out of a DL360 (457922-421). This is dual 3Ghz processor with 12MB L2 cache and 4GB memory, and Smartarray controller. Spread the I/O across 4 disks. A second server will make things easier as you will be able to spread different functions across the different servers. If you do this I might suggest running voicemail and playing all messages on one server with the other just handling SIP extensions (or something like that).
