Help specking out hardware and phones

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I am looking at building a small asterisk System for my department. I am the IT director at a public school system and I am looking for a better way for my staff to communicate in 7 different schools. As of now I am looking at 12 desk phones and 4 wifi phones. I am looking for a little guidance as I am a newbie to Asterisk. I am still specking out the hardware and wanted to make sure this would handle what I am planning to do. I am looking at a 1 u box for asterisk: P4 3.0ghz, 1 gig of ram, 2 80 gig hds mirrored, dual 100/1000 nics. I am looking at linksys 942 desk phones and linsys WIP300 wifi phones. The only restriction I have since we are a public school is we can only order hardware from a few approved venders. So if none of the venders carry something I want, I can’t get it. That is the only reason I am looking at the linksys phones, they are main stream and my venders carry them. We will only have one POTS line as 90 percent of the calls will never leave the internal network. However because of limited space in my racks I wanted to have an external FXO device. Does anyone know of a compatible one? I was looking at the Dlink DIV140, again because it is available from my approved venders.

I want to buy a second server and place it in another building as a fail over server. Is this supported? The routers in my school will handle the VPN fail over to the secondary server site. Beyond this is their anything else I need?

I was planning on using Asterisk Now because of ease of installation. Are their any advantages to using regular Asterisk on Fedora Core?

2

For server hardware, take a look at voip-info.org/tiki-index.php … mensioning

For failover considerations, see voip-info.org/wiki/view/Aste … +Solutions
(Your architecture may be fine, but consider shared storage for voice mail.)

Hope this helps.

3

Bumping this back up, just to warn people about the DIV-140… I purchased one to test… So far, what I’ve learned about it is…

To make a outbound call to the PSTN, you have to call the DIV-140, like it was another SIP phone, it then picks takes the POTS line off the hook, and you dial to the PSTN in real time.

I have not been able to pass it calls like I’ve done with the old Sipura SPA-3000 box… which was just like anything else (ie: exten => _NXXXXXX,1,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN}@192.168.1.11:5060|20|r) )

This is one of those times in my life where someone would say “You’re a moron, try this”…

I purchased this for a similar reason, it was available from an approved vendor. If only Digium cards were available from somewhere like CDW.