Re: Asterisk Server

Jono wrote:
> Anyone care to help me spec a machine that I can rack mount & install
> Trixbox/Asterisk upon?
>
> Would prefer solid state memory over HD drive.....

If you do this, you need to think very carefully about the filesystem
and the number of writes you can make before it dies.


> Also need up to 12 channels of ISDN2e/BRI. Long story short, BT want
> over £3k to install a PRI.

Need to choose your ISDN cards carefully. That is going to be a whole
lot of interrupts.

I'm surprised that the price difference between the BRI cards and PRI
cards doesn't pay for the PRI installation.

Are you sure you can't get a PRI from somebody other than BT?

Tim

Jono wrote:
>
> OK. Are you suggesting that a hard drive would be more appropriate?
>

Depends. But you'd generally mount the flash disk read only, and then
run the system in a RAM disk.

Modern flash does last longer though.

>
> I bow to your greater knowledge :-). That's why I've asked here....

I know stacking ISDN2 cards causes trouble, but I don't really know the
full details.


>> I'm surprised that the price difference between the BRI cards and PRI
>> cards doesn't pay for the PRI installation.
>
> £3k? I hope not. Crikey!

Well, not that much, but some of it.

I've also noticed that per channel rental is now about the same on PRI
as it is on BRI. I'm fairly sure it used to be cheaper for PRI.


>
> There is no cable in the area & this is the Openreach Excess
> Construction Charge. They claim that they will have to deliver the PRI
> on fibre as the distance from the exchange is too great for copper.

Getting ISDN30 on fibre used to be a common trick to get BT to fibre up
a building. The you can get cheaper data circuits because the fibre is
already in the building.

I guess there must be a way to ask BT which makes them think about it.


Tim

Jono wrote:
> Tim explained :
>> Jono wrote:
>>>
>>> OK. Are you suggesting that a hard drive would be more appropriate?
>>>
>>
>> Depends. But you'd generally mount the flash disk read only, and then
>> run the system in a RAM disk.
>>
>> Modern flash does last longer though.
>>
>>>
>>> I bow to your greater knowledge :-). That's why I've asked here....
>>
>> I know stacking ISDN2 cards causes trouble, but I don't really know
>> the full details.
>
> If you could discover the full details, I may well be giving you a call
> tomorrow! Assuming you are the Tim I think you are. The need for more
> than 8 channels of ISDN2e may well become a burning issue :-)

More info here:

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/A...are+interrupts

The main point is to make sure the motherboard you choose is something
that doesn't share IRQs between PCI slots. In an ideal world you'd get
one where you can manually specify a fixed IRQ for each slot in the BIOS
but I don't think this is a very common thing any more. If you get
around the problem using a board with APIC (gives you more IRQs), do
some googling to see if anyone else is using the same board successfully
as I've heard of problems with certain APIC implementations.

cheers,
Paul.

p.s. yes Tim is the Tim you think he is ;)
--
Working Email:

paul-at-polog40-dot-co-dot-uk

In article <474c9e32$0$510$bed64819@news.gradwell.net>,
Tim <nutnews@kooky.org> wrote:
>Jono wrote:
>> Anyone care to help me spec a machine that I can rack mount & install
>> Trixbox/Asterisk upon?
>>
>> Would prefer solid state memory over HD drive.....
>
>If you do this, you need to think very carefully about the filesystem
>and the number of writes you can make before it dies.

There's been a lot of talk recently in various places - especially with
the interest in laptops coming with flash drives, etc. The upshot is
that the bigger the flash device you can afford, the better, as they
then have more "space" to do write wear levelling and so on.

I'm still "wary" though, and although I do use them for a live
filesystem for voicemail storage, I use good old ext2 rather than ext3
and mount it with a few options to try to keep writes down.

Gordon