[svlug] Asterisk

[Walt Reed]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 08:31:29PM -0700, James Sparenberg said:
>    General Question for the group is.  Has anyone here done an
> installation.  I'm looking at doing it on Debian Sarge With all of the
> bells and whistles a PBX can deploy most likely.  Anyone out there had
> specific Hardware Gotchas?  Recommendations for online Tutorials. (Since
> books aren't really out yet.)  Any news info or tips at all would be
> appreciated.  My budget constraints for a 20 person shop have been along
> the lines of "Right but reasonable".    Does anyone have any info on
> what long term shortfalls tended to be (Not enough CPU memory
> shortage ......anything)

Most important thing: Don't be cheap on the telco hardware. If you
need analog ports, one of the most reliable ways with Asterisk is the
Adit 600 channel bank and a T1 card (Digiums or Sangoma's). At the 20
person level, you are probably too small for PRI, so you are going to be
stuck with POTS lines. BRI support for US BRI lines is pretty bad and
very expensive at the moment. A channel bank with the proper modules can
support both POTS lines and phones. There have been many, many reports
of flakey behavior with the Digium 4-port TDM cards. For some they work
great - others have no end to problems. I would avoid those for business
use.

Use good SIP phones, like polycoms or cisco (note there are license
issues with cisco that are being discussed on the * mailing list at the
moment. Bottom line is that they are WAY expensive, but great phones,
and cisco makes it a pain in the ass to get legit software / support.)
Don't use generic cheap stuff like Grandstreams (which are only good
enough for use in the basement or garage IMHO...)

Fax support is flakey. Don't bother. Just get a good quality fax modem /
fax machine and use a dedicated POTS line for it. Maybe someday it will
work reliably with *, but not today. Also, don't expect a data modem to
work well for the same reasons.

Other than that, it's pretty straight forward.