Hi, I’m considering replacing our aging intertel phone system with an Asterisk PBX. we have a single t1 pri, with approximately 50 phone users. I’ll be using a te110p card to handle calls to and from the outside world.
I think I have everything I need for a successful installation (the phones, a server, and a card) but i had a question before diving into the deep.
with the te110p card, are incoming calls from the t1 to this interface automatically routed to numbers in extensions.conf? if not, how does incoming call routing work?
I also noticed a post regarding server power requirements. the server I’ve spec’d out is a HP dual opteron 2.8, with 8gb memory and 1.5 tb drive space. is this sufficient for 50 simultaneous calls?
I’m quite eager to get going on an asterisk “beta test” here at my office, as Intertel is looking to fleece us for $36,000 in upgrades to a proprietary rental phone system that occupies an extra 1 rack of space, and cant even keep the correct time.
From what I’ve read about the hardware I think you’ll be okay. I’m not sure what good 8GB of ram will do for you but if you’ve got it why change?
As far as the TE110P card goes you’ve got to define it in your zapata.conf and in the definition you tell it what your incoming context is. Based on that you handle incoming calls via that context in extensions.conf. I’m not using any of the T1 based cards yet but the setup for them looks the same as the TDM cards and I’ve got one of those. It’s really quite easy.
If you don’t have it already, search around the forums and find the Asterisk: The Future of Telephony book that someone has linked in their signature. It’s proven to be a huge help in learning about Asterisk.
Also, I’m with you in the PBX upgrade stuff. We just did a quote for a client that will save them half of what they were quoted to replace their dying Toshiba system. Incredible what some of the phone guys charge.
here are the important factors:
CPU speed - the faster the better. for 50 users, you could easily get by with a dual-proc machine - our dell’s only spike into the 30% CPU usage arena, and that is for one proc only.
Memory - it helps to have more, but we’ve never had any memory related issues. one of our servers ran for three months with only 1 GB and it was fine. I would say between 2 and 4 would be enough without breaking the bank.
Disk space - unless you are storing recorded calls or doing something else on the box, you really only need a few GB of disk. There are multiple installs of asterisk that run off of compact flash cards or USB keydrives. Eventually, I would like to do the same with our boxes and run them all off of flash based memory. 1.5TB is WAY overkill - if you want anything, run a mirrored SCSI array so you have some data redundancy, but you only would need two 36GB drives for that.
Hope this helps - we have 8 total servers running, all dell 2850’s, all with 4GB of RAM, all with RAID 5 arrays. They all have quad-span T1 cards, and running 1.2, we have pretty much zero issues.
I can answer more specifics if you need, just let me know.
