Hardware

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Hi,

I need to set up an asterisk system at work but I still have a few doubts:

What hardware (cpu, mb,…) should I buy to run a medium business company?
What version of linux should I install?
What analog card shoul I use (I need 4 channels at least)?

I hope you can help me.

Thanks in advance,
Luiz

2

Can you clarify how many extensions you will need and what other sorts of facilities. Do you need analogue lines or would SIP trunks be better? Do you need anything other than standard desk phones? Will there be remote users with soft phones?

3

I need around 60 extensions (10 desk phones + 50 soft phones local and remote).
Here I have 4 analog line (landline).

Thanks

4

To my mind you can’t really go far wrong with something like an HP Proliant server. It depends on model if you prefer rack mount of tower. In terms of Linux I would go for one of the popular full distros of Asterisk such as AsteriskNOW, FreePBX, or PBXinaFlash. They all include the base Linux O/S and come pretty much complete and ready to use without messing around installing/compiling packages.

For the analogue lines you can go wrong really with a Digium TDM400 card with 4xFXO ports.

5

If you don’t want a pre-packaged system, you should use CentOS 5, as that is the Linux distribution on which most of the development is done.

My impression is that the normal rules about GUIs apply. If you are doing simple things that fit within the conceptual model of the GUI, they can be easy and they can be used to de-skill moves and changes. However, if you want to do anything out of the ordinary, you cannot expect GUI users to know how to do them. Also, if you get into extensive debugging, they people who know how to debug do so in terms of raw Asterisk, not the GUIs, and they don’t necessarily have detailed knowledge of the boiler plate code used by the GUIs.

I would therefore suggest that, even if you intend to use a GUI, you start by trying to configure a simple system without one.