asterisk users - Jun 2006 - Easiest (best?) linux distribution for dedicated Asterisk box?

First off, I'm sorry for sending so many messages to the list-serv.
Hopefully this will be my last for a while!

I was going to use my WRT54G router as a small Asterisk box, but I
forgot that I had a spare eMachines computer (Intel Celeron 633 MHz,
20GB HD, 64mb RAM).  Will this machine work OK for a very simple
dedicated home Asterisk box?

Also, what is easiest linux distribution to use and install?  All I
want is a simple Asterisk box that I can telnet into and have
voicemail, music-on-hold (MP3), etc...

First, remove telnet from your vocabulary.  It should only be used over 
serial connections these days.  All other times, you should be using ssh.

Second, do you want the computer to be installed and running without any 
major software changes for a year or more?  Then use Centos or Ubuntu 
Dapper 6.06 or Debian Sarge 3.1.  Make sure you don't install the 
graphics as it can affect the latency of asterisk, especially on older 
hardware.

Third, I run asterisk on a PPro 200 at home, so your machine is beefy 
enough for sure.

And lastly, just give it a try, you'll learn a lot just making the effort.

Mike

John Klimek wrote:
> First off, I'm sorry for sending so many messages to the list-serv.
> Hopefully this will be my last for a while!
>
> I was going to use my WRT54G router as a small Asterisk box, but I
> forgot that I had a spare eMachines computer (Intel Celeron 633 MHz,
> 20GB HD, 64mb RAM).  Will this machine work OK for a very simple
> dedicated home Asterisk box?
>
> Also, what is easiest linux distribution to use and install?  All I
> want is a simple Asterisk box that I can telnet into and have
> voicemail, music-on-hold (MP3), etc...
> _______________________________________________
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While it's not the way I do it personally, I've been told the
absolutely easiest setup is Asterisk@Home. It is based on CentOS so
security updates should be coming down at a decent pace and I imagine
this could be set up to occur automatically. At that point, you pretty
much have a fire-and-forget Asterisk install with most of the bells
and whistles.

My personal choice is Slackware - combined with a 3rd party package
managing tool called Swaret you can set up a very slim, simple and
secure box in a very short amount of time and have do security patch
deployments automatically, much like CentOS/Redhat/etc. I'm personally
running Asterisk with FreePBX on an Apple PowerMac G3 266MHz using
Slackintosh, with great results so far.

Your system should be fine, though I'd probably dump some more RAM
into it if I were you - especially if you want to run A@H, which uses
a MySQL database and the Apache webserver, among other things.

On 6/13/06, John Klimek <jklimek@gmail.com> wrote:
> First off, I'm sorry for sending so many messages to the list-serv.
> Hopefully this will be my last for a while!
>
> I was going to use my WRT54G router as a small Asterisk box, but I
> forgot that I had a spare eMachines computer (Intel Celeron 633 MHz,
> 20GB HD, 64mb RAM).  Will this machine work OK for a very simple
> dedicated home Asterisk box?
>
> Also, what is easiest linux distribution to use and install?  All I
> want is a simple Asterisk box that I can telnet into and have
> voicemail, music-on-hold (MP3), etc...
> _______________________________________________
> --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com --
>
> Asterisk-Users mailing list
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>    http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>

On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 01:15:03PM -0700, shadowym
wrote:
> FreePBX or AAH(aka trixbox) requires 256MB of RAM minimum to run properly.
> Just sitting there doing nothing on my test system it is using 170MB.
How exactly do you meassure memory usage?

E.g: on my laptop:

$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers   cached
Mem:        483056     476320       6736          0    70820     169360
-/+ buffers/cache:     236140     246916
Swap:       976744       3048     973696

Technically you could say that it only has 6.7 MB free. But actually
some 220MB are used for buffers and caching by the kernel (because
unused memory is wasted memory).

BTW: where did you get the idea that Asterisk == FrePBX? Asterisk is not
known to require MySQL and Apace to run.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen      sip:tzafrir@local.xorcom.com
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