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stotaro at totarotechn...
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 5:57 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

All I can say is what has worked best for me over the years trying
many different boxen. IBM X Series and HP DL 3XXs, have heard that
Supermicro is "Super", just have not the pleasure yet.

Dells have given me problems, not always, but enough to be bitten
once, and twice shy...

Thanks,
Steve Totaro

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 6:38 PM, Al Baker <bwentdg at pipeline.com> wrote:

Quote:

Quote "I stick with 1.2.X and use server grade (not Dell) rackmount units. "

Would you share which "Server Grade" rack mounts you use ?
I have a project that could use quite a few and I am getting
"suggestions" to order DELL.

Thanks.

Steve Totaro wrote:

Quote:

I am a user and a consultant.

I stick with 1.2.X and use server grade (not Dell) rackmount units. I
offload everything except what is needed. Put the DB on a different
box, run fastagi, no GUI, vi to hand edit my confs. Very stable this
way. I try to recommend this to clients but often they find google
and do not listen to solid advice.

Anyways, as to the four FXO system, I would not think twice to steer
that customer to the 3Com V3000. It is when you start reaching into
higher trunks that you pay the big bucks, but a V3000 is on par price
wise with an Asterisk install on decent equipment and super easy to
configure. Rock solid too, VxWorks is nice.

Thanks,
Steve Totaro

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Mojo with Horan & Company, LLC
<mojo at horanappraisals.com> wrote:

Quote:

I'm just a user Smile

we do real estate appraisals, and I found the time
to roll my own (so to speak) pbx. We're on 1.4.4, TDM card with four
FXOs. Honestly, you'll find it's easy to toss some zaptel and asterisk
tarballs onto a system and compile them. You'll probably learn a lot
along the way, but I won't liken it to the deep end of a swimming pool
-- only halfway down!

Moj

Bill Andersen wrote:

Quote:

Thank you to everyone that replied to my post. I started to
reply to most of them, but it is getting a little out of hand.
Again, thank you. It actually makes me think the problem is not
so much with "Asterisk" as it is with implementation. (My Vendor)

Although this is a "users" list, I think it is more of a list
for Asterisk "resellers". I'd be interested in how many of you
are simply using Asterisk as your phone system and NOT selling
your services or an Asterisk based solution?

Anyone? Just a user?

That being said. As "just" a user of Asterisk, it is clear that
if I want to continue with Asterisk, it looks like I really need
to "learn" the ins-and-outs of Asterisk and ditch my pre-packaged
solution. Off to Amazon for to find TFOT (I want the hard copy Smile

Bill

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stotaro at totarotechn...
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:00 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

I would not consider a "Dell SC440 w/RAID 1" "Server Grade" you can
pick them up for $250 on sale.

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Steve Totaro
<stotaro at totarotechnologies.com> wrote:

Quote:

I'm just a user Smile

Quote:

stotaro at totarotechn...
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:14 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

If Jared Smith is following this thread, and I am sure he is or will,
WOW, what an opportunity to bring SwitchVox to the spotlight. (I
personally really like SwitchVox and had over a year before Digium
made the acquisition. I never had to reboot that box and it had ~40
extensions and a Digium T1 card.

Do a "try/buy" swap out and let it play out on the list. I think
Digium/SwitchVox will shine.

Just an idea but this thread is one of the hottest in a long while and
bringing up many questions about Asterisk and GUIs. I could not think
of a better place to sink or swim!

Thanks,
Steve Totaro

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 7:00 PM, Steve Totaro
<stotaro at totarotechnologies.com> wrote:

Quote:

I would not consider a "Dell SC440 w/RAID 1" "Server Grade" you can
pick them up for $250 on sale.

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Steve Totaro
<stotaro at totarotechnologies.com> wrote:

Quote:

I'm just a user Smile

Quote:

Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:18 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

Steve Totaro wrote:

Quote:

Anyways, as to the four FXO system, I would not think twice to steer
that customer to the 3Com V3000.

Interesting Smile

When I (the tech guy) leave this office, they just
*could* be asking me what to do when it breaks? lol Smile

stotaro at totarotechn...
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:27 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

Call your dealer as I am sure you would have a support contract.

Haven't really seen one "break" yet though. VxWorks is what runs
satellites and junk Wink

Thanks,
Steve Totaro

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 7:18 PM, Mojo with Horan & Company, LLC
<mojo at horanappraisals.com> wrote:

Quote:

Steve Totaro wrote:

Quote:

Anyways, as to the four FXO system, I would not think twice to steer
that customer to the 3Com V3000.

Interesting Smile

When I (the tech guy) leave this office, they just
*could* be asking me what to do when it breaks? lol Smile

Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:32 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

He could mean SIP or IAX
Al Baker wrote:

Quote:

Quote"

This code is pre-Asterisk 1.0... It processes quite a few calls daily, I
have about 1,800 DID numbers pointed at it, "

Are you SURE on that figure. Since you cold have at MOST 4 T1's coming into that box, 1,800 DIDs pointing to it sems like
one hell of a congestion problem and a Dialplan thicker than War and Peace

RE Kushner List Account wrote:

Quote:

Drew Gibson wrote:

Quote:

The box has been up since we upgraded the UPS, time before was for the
disk failure in Feb 2007.

Asterisk has now been up for 5 hours, 44 minutes (yes, by Murphy's Law,
I'm troubleshooting a problem but"restart when convenient" does not
impact real uptime) but yesterday it had been up for 63+ days (last
restart was for queue config changes)

This is stock code on stock OS on stock hardware. We don't tweak it,
poke at it, fiddle with it, update it unless necessary. We do OS and
Asterisk updates on planned maintenance days infrequently)

KISS and don't fsck with it!

I have an Asterisk box running CVS-HEAD-08/21/04 with a T400P that
currently has 17 weeks, 11 hours, 27 minutes, 51 seconds of uptime on a
server that hasn't been rebooted in nearly a year.

This code is pre-Asterisk 1.0... It processes quite a few calls daily, I
have about 1,800 DID numbers pointed at it, there are several thousand
wrong number calls a day besides the traffic I send through it.

-Ron

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lists at minotaur.cc
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:58 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

Quote:

Are you SURE on that figure. Since you cold have at MOST 4 T1's coming into
that box, 1,800 DIDs pointing to it sems like
one hell of a congestion problem and a Dialplan thicker than War and Peace

We have a box with 5,000 DDIs coming into 2 PRIs. The number of DDIs isn't particularly important - it's the number of concurrent calls that affect things, and on these numbers it's surprising if they get more than a couple of calls a day.

Dialplan's pretty simple too - DDIs are in minimum 100 number blocks and get pushed out to remote asterisk servers, so for each remote server, it's only 1 line:
exten => [number]XXX,1,Dial(IAX2/someserver/${EXTEN})

Regards,

Chris
--
C.M. Bagnall, Director, Minotaur I.T. Limited
For full contact details visit http://www.minotaur.it
This email is made from 100% recycled electrons

howard at leadmon.net
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 7:08 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

Sure some others on here may disagree, but I am also over on the trixbox
forums, and have often seen talk about the 2.6.9 kernel having interrupt
issues, and such that cause asterisk issues. One reason I think they moved
forward into the CentOS 5.x stuff, so they got the 2.6.18 kernel, which I am
told works much better, and doesn't have the issues the old kernel did.

So not sure what all is causing your issues, but guess it's possible some of
them could be kernel related. Threads like this over there talk about 2.6.9
kernel issues:

http://www.trixbox.org/forums/trixbox-forums/open-discussion/2-3-0-3
I am guessing this would apply to a general Asterisk install as well, my
apologies in advance if I am wrong on that one. Anyway I hadn't seen anyone
talk about issues with the 2.6.9 kernel, but with all the chatter on the other
forum, I figured it was at least worth a mention. Overall the CentOS stuff
seems great, and a fairly decent base to run Asterisk from. Also CentOS 4.x is
up to 4.6 I believe, so sure lots of updates and fixes over the older 4.4
release...

---
Howard

Quote:

CentOS release 4.4 (Final)
Kernel 2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp (SMP)
Asterisk 1.4.16.2
Dell SC440 w/RAID 1
Digium TE120P

The GUI is a commercially available product, to remain un-named at this
point.

No Trolling... I'm not wanting to "knock" Asterisk. I just want to get
feedback from others actually using it in a production environment. I
don't know that we have lost any customers over "missed" calls (BUSY signals
during reboots), BUT I have lost some street cred from my Bosses! They
think
I'm an IT Guru... They keep asking why the heck I can't you make that phone
system work reliably now that it is "computer based" LOL Sad

Thanks for the comments

Bill

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pdhales at optusnet.co...
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 7:15 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

Our office PABX is a via low heat pc, with an ISDN10 and 15 IP handsets.

It gets regularly used and abused by us linux idiots in the office, and
runs like a charm. We test software on it, write silly dialplans and
generally treat it badly.

It could not be described as 'server grade' by any reasonable person.

PaulH
On Wed, 2008-03-19 at 11:43 -0500, Bill Andersen wrote:

Quote:

This is not a troll. I've used my real email because I want this
taken seriously. I'm not trying to make anyone mad, I just want
some real discussion on this issue. Please bare with me...

I'm a USER of Asterisk. We purchased 3 commercially available
"Asterisk Based" PBXs a little over a year ago. (I won't mention
which one at this point - I don't want to bad mouth them - yet!)
Two of the systems are very small (5 SIP lines/6 Polycom phones).
The third is on a PRI with 30 Polycom phones.

My smaller sites work pretty good. I've only had to restart
Asterisk every month or so. However, my 30 station system
is a continuous headache. I average a restart at least once a
week. Sometimes a couple of times in the week. I'm always being
called to "fix" something that just stopped working.

I DON'T WANT TO GET INTO A "Well, don't just complain, tell us
your setup and we can help you get it working". This list HAS
helped me figure out some of the issues. THANK YOU! But the
purpose of this post is more of a fact finding mission.

1) Was choosing Asterisk for our company the wrong decision...

a) IF... I expect a phone system to just work. Once it is
configured, a phone system should just work with
very little attention. My previous system was a
Comdial with external voice mail on a DOS based PC.
I LITERALLY WENT OVER 4 YEARS WITHOUT HAVING TO REMOVE
POWER TO THE COMDIAL CONTROL OR RE-BOOT THE VOICE MAIL PC.

b) IF... I really only need a phone system that allows an operator
to answer each call and transfer them to the appropriate
person. I need voice mail, but very little auto attendant
features (mostly after hours). All the bells and whistles
that Asterisk offers are cool, but don't bring that much to
the table for our purpose.

c) IF... Stability is more of an issue than high end features?

2) Are there any users out there that really DO have an Asterisk
system that just works like clockwork? I'm saying, once setup,
run for a year (or more) without any issues?

3) If SO, Should I simply consider a different vendor?

4) If NOT, and if my expectations are that a system SHOULD just
run and run without any problems. Is Asterisk simply not my
solution. Is Asterisk not REALLY ready for production. Because
in my mind (as a user of phone services), "dealing" with the
phone system, even on a MONTHLY basis, means that the system
is NOT really production ready... Before we installed an
Asterisk based PBX, I spent maybe 4 hours per YEAR with phone
issues (setting up a new station?). Since we moved to an
Asterisk based PBX, I spend 4 hours (or more) every WEEK!

Am I expecting too much?

Bill

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tzafrir.cohen at xorco...
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 7:39 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 08:08:18PM -0400, Howard Leadmon wrote:

Quote:

Sure some others on here may disagree, but I am also over on the trixbox
forums, and have often seen talk about the 2.6.9 kernel having interrupt
issues, and such that cause asterisk issues. One reason I think they moved
forward into the CentOS 5.x stuff, so they got the 2.6.18 kernel, which I am
told works much better, and doesn't have the issues the old kernel did.

So not sure what all is causing your issues, but guess it's possible some of
them could be kernel related. Threads like this over there talk about 2.6.9
kernel issues:

http://www.trixbox.org/forums/trixbox-forums/open-discussion/2-3-0-3

I am guessing this would apply to a general Asterisk install as well, my
apologies in advance if I am wrong on that one. Anyway I hadn't seen anyone
talk about issues with the 2.6.9 kernel, but with all the chatter on the other
forum, I figured it was at least worth a mention. Overall the CentOS stuff
seems great, and a fairly decent base to run Asterisk from. Also CentOS 4.x is
up to 4.6 I believe, so sure lots of updates and fixes over the older 4.4
release...

Note that Trixbox (<= 2.2) uses kernel from CentOS 4.3 . Generally it
seems that CentOS-based distributions tend to pick some initial kernel
and stick with it, even though CentOS provides newer ones with bug
fixes.

--
Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755 jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406 mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
http://www.xorcom.com iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir

pdhales at optusnet.co...
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 7:56 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

I think some people here (like myself) started off as Asterisk users,
then moved on to helping other people with their Asterisk systems.

Which makes sense - once your Asterisk box is running well, why not
share how nice your work is/was?

PaulH

On Wed, 2008-03-19 at 16:38 -0500, Bill Andersen wrote:

Quote:

aklists at mixdown.ca
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 10:02 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

On March 19, 2008 07:00:20 pm Steve Totaro wrote:

Quote:

I would not consider a "Dell SC440 w/RAID 1" "Server Grade" you can
pick them up for $250 on sale.

Why not? Is the price not high enough, or is there some technical reason? I
ask because your only explanation as to why it's not server grade appears to
be the price.

I've got no idea what a SC440 is, can't be arsed to look it up, but your post
seems to indicate that expensive must mean good quality.

-A.

aklists at mixdown.ca
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 10:15 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

On March 19, 2008 05:05:05 pm Bill Andersen wrote:

Quote:

CentOS release 4.4 (Final)
Kernel 2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp (SMP)
Asterisk 1.4.16.2
Dell SC440 w/RAID 1
Digium TE120P

The GUI is a commercially available product, to remain un-named at this
point.

Ok, and what specifically are the types of problems you are encountering?
choppy audio, dropped calls, "stuck" calls, kernel panics, asterisk
crashes...?

-A

abalashov at evaristes...
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 10:51 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

Paul Hales wrote:

Quote:

I would second that. In fact, it seems very likely that almost everyone
on the list is an Asterisk user, and many users do consulting in this
area as well.

I both provide Asterisk-related services and use Asterisk myself. I
imagine this is a category to which much of the list belongs.

--
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
Mobile : (+1) (706) 338-8599

jsmith at digium.com
Guest

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 11:48 pm Post subject: [asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

On Wed, 2008-03-19 at 19:14 -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:

Quote:

If Jared Smith is following this thread, and I am sure he is or will,
WOW, what an opportunity to bring SwitchVox to the spotlight.

You'd better believe I'm following the thread. Smile

Even though I've
been at a trade show all day and I'm dead tired, I can't seem to go to
sleep without catching up on a few of the mailing lists and forums.

Quote:

(I personally really like SwitchVox and had over a year before Digium
made the acquisition. I never had to reboot that box and it had ~40
extensions and a Digium T1 card.

Do a "try/buy" swap out and let it play out on the list. I think
Digium/SwitchVox will shine.

Thanks for the glowing endorsement... Speaking for myself, I'm still
amazed at what the Switchvox team has done, and I'm excited to see what
new things we can create now that they're a part of Digium.

--
Jared Smith
Community Relations Manager
Digium, Inc.

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