Genera information, please halp me!

Hi to everybody,
i’m writing my thesis for the university and i’m interested to know your opinion about the difficluty of the installation of asterisk, is it difficoult?
after the installation, in the testing phase did you had any problems?
please write your opinion in a deep way so i can write an intresting thesis.
Thank you.

Usually asterisk is installed in 3 minutes:

make
make install
make samples

Asterisk is ready for running VoIP services. Just configure extensions and dialplan.

Did someone had problems in the testing phase? which are the defects of asterisk?

Asterisk has one defect - it is too powerful and rich of features.
Because of that it takes time to know even 50% of asterisk.
One usually knows very quick how to connect phones and make calls, but never uses call center fuctionality or AGI interface to integrate with CRM and ERP systems. The future of asterisk is in still in future, it is just a dawn :smiling_imp:

Thank you!
Other problems? come on answer me!

Yes, also there is one great problem…
When you start to know asterisk you fall in love with this star. My girlfriend hates asterisk, my pitbull hates asterisk, my parents hate asterisk, and I sometimes hate asterisk.
But you know, u can hate and love simultaniously…
So, asterisk itself is a problem.
Was I clear?
:laughing:

that’s nice! ok in this way i will never take my degree!

Laura,

What is the precise focus you intend to give to your work?

There is one vast area to explore that concerns reliability and availability, that gives margin to compare PC-based VoIP systems with traditional PBX for enterprises.

Asterisk has one big problem looking from the reliability prism: it uses conventional PC hardware to work. That means that you have all the advantages (flexibility, low cost etc.) and all the disadvantages (generic hardware, not tailor-made to PBX operation; problems linked to the aditional software needed, especially the operating system etc.).

To make asterisk systems more reliable, there are some options that you can explore, like clustering, monitoring etc.

Hope this helps.

It is all about the mean time between failure of your hardware (IE a Sun V20z will outlast a Emachine).

Laura, I think you will be hard pressed to find problems with Asterisk. The biggest problem I see is that people with no *nix background hear about Asterisk on Slashdot (or some other site) and decide they want to set it up on their box. After deciding it will be to hard to set it up from scratch they decide to setup Asterisk@Home. They want the whole thing working in 10 minutes without ever spending the time to RTFM. One problem with setting up Asterisk is not the software or hardware, it is the impatience of the newbies, but the same could be said about alot of things.

On a different note I could give you a laundry list of problems I have encountered installing and administering CallManger,Unity, and IPCC.

Thank you to everybody.
I’m waiting for every opinion you want to write!
I know my question is generic but i’m not very competent!
Bye

I have seen many many projects and many many reliability reports… I have studied a lot of systems and one thing I have learned: flexibility and operating systems are reliability worst enemies…

The simpler the system, the better the reliability. Simple things are easier to predict, are less complicated to build, and simpler to debug.

Even with a hardware with lots and lots of testing hours like a V20z, the sole fact that there is such a complicated program like Solaris or Linux between Asterisk and the machine makes it very complicated to be analyzed for reliability. Remembering that security is also an issue for reliability, I can’t get a Solaris working for 6 months without security patches. And last time I saw one of those machines running without patches and Solaris 9, I found 3 different root kits installed.

Don’t underestimate the complications added by complex software systems… I have once made a fault tree of a Linux server. Doesn’t look that nice, I can assure you: there are way too many possible faults that could render the system unusable.

Thank you poli, I think wrote an intresting problem, i’ll take notes on this aspect in my thesis!

What level is that thesis? (Under)grad? (Post)grad? Masters? Doctorate?

That is really a very interesting topic, which I particularly like, but I think it could well a (under)graduation thesis…

My thesis is for university, sorry but i didn’t understood what do you mean with your definitions in every case i’d like to write an interestig thesis that explain the VoIP technology and why you should choice asterisk, an open source technology, or cisco!
To justify this choice i want to write all the advantages and also disadvanages of these two technologies!
Bye Bye