asterisk users - Dec 2005 - What is the best Dell Machine for Asterisk?

hi all,

What is the best Asterisk-compliant for Dell machine is recommended? I 
will have roughly 400 users in a production office. thanks!!

The best Dell for a production environment Asterisk server is no Dell
at all. They make some great workstations, but I've had many problems
with their servers(as have many others on this list) when trying to
use them in production for Asterisk. Take a look at the Digium
compatibility list:
http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=compatibility

You will notice that there are several Dells on there as well. The
best solution is to build your own server with an Asus or SuperMicro
Motherboard in it or buy a SuperMicro system from one of the many
vendors that assemble systems with SuperMicro boards in them(just do a
google search for "supermicro servers").

Hope that helps,

MATT---

On 12/16/05, Hiu Yen Onn <yohiu@shinyang.com.my>
wrote:
> hi all,
>
> What is the best Asterisk-compliant for Dell machine is recommended? I
> will have roughly 400 users in a production office. thanks!!
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I am looking at the 830 systems now. I have heard good reports from other
users and the price point for a loaded system is still dirt cheap. Any
comments on this particular model?
-Kerry
 

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Kristian
Kielhofner
Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2005 3:27 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] What is the best Dell Machine for Asterisk?

Kerry Garrison wrote:
> The SC430 will experience unusable call quality with a TDM400P due to 
> IRQ Sharing problems. If you have some magic to get around this, 
> please share because everyone I know that has tried using an SC430 has 
> given up and switched to other platforms.
> -Kerry
>  
All recent Dell systems support APIC.  However, most kernels (at least from
RedHat, probably others) do not enable APIC on single processor machines.
If this is the case, try rebuilding the kernel to support APIC on
uniprocessor machines.  This should resolve any IRQ sharing problems.


--
Kristian Kielhofner
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Are you using raid for performance or redundancy?  Software raid is nice 
except when the drive that fails is the one with your boot partition on it. 
I guess you could always tftp boot the kernel or something.

Craig

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Louis-David Mitterrand"
<vindex+lists-asterisk-users@apartia.org>
To: <asterisk-users@lists.digium.com>
Sent: Monday, January 02, 2006 1:17 AM
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Re: What is the best Dell Machine for Asterisk?

> On Wed, Dec 28, 2005 at 04:02:00PM -0800, William Boehlke wrote:
>>
>> The 830s are nice but limited because they do RAID on a card and have
but
>> one suitable PCI slot. So you can have an interface card or RAID, but
not
>> both.
>
> Linux software raid is, in our experience, much better than any hardware
> raid solution. We admin 20+ machines all booting on soft raid 1 or 5
> partitions up to 2 TB.
>
> -- 
> A good friend will help you move, a true friend will help you move a
> body.
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On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 11:25:02AM +0800, Craig Guy
wrote:
> Are you using raid for performance or redundancy?  Software raid is 
> nice except when the drive that fails is the one with your boot 
> partition on it. I guess you could always tftp boot the kernel or 
> something.
On our raid1 machines the entire root partition / is raid1. On raid5 
setups we have a small raid1 /boot which is mounted on raid5 root /

So in any case you have redundancy as you always boot on raid1.

-- 
"I get to go to lots of overseas places, like Canada." -- Britney
Spears

Kerry Garrison wrote:
> The SC430 will experience unusable call quality with a TDM400P due to
> IRQ Sharing problems. If you have some magic to get around this,
> please share because everyone I know that has tried using an SC430
> has given up and switched to other platforms. -Kerry  
> 
I experience call quality issues (clicks/stutters) with my SC430 as well. 

I am booting with:

kernel	/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11.11 root=/dev/md0 ro acpi=off noapic

server1:~# cat /proc/interrupts
           CPU0
  0: 1922293175          XT-PIC  timer
  2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
  4: 1921907054          XT-PIC  wcte11xp
 10:    3553554          XT-PIC  libata
 11:   22924955          XT-PIC  eth0
 14:         12          XT-PIC  ide0
NMI:          0
LOC: 1922424210
ERR:          0
MIS:          0


server1:/usr/src/zaptel# ./zttest -v
--- Results after 200 passes ---
Best: 100.000000 -- Worst: 99.987793 (hit this number 9 times out of 200 the
rest were all 100%)


I am about to switch platforms if I can't figure this out. I've been
playing
around with so many settings over the last 3 months that I feel I've tried
everything.


Thanks,
Geoff