I have been using Asterisk for over a year now, since September 05 using Asterisk at home (which is now Trixbox). The one advantage of using Asterisk is it is really the only true IP telephony server that uses IAX2 protocol, which is a godsend to avoid firewall/NAT issues. Unfortunately STUN is just not applicable in many situations. Currently for my small business we have Digium cards connected to the PSTN. Since September the server has only gone down once, due to a power failure in the building. Other than that I have never found a system so complicated, yet so simple to use, as well as so very very stable. Would I recommend over a commercial PBX, by all means. Especially for smaller businesses where money is tight, there really is no better alternative. Overall, asterisk works out to be an even more complete solution than even the Cisco CM with Unity. Right now the VOIP server is a dual 500Mhz with 768MB RAM. Using SNMP I have collected months of statistics and never has the server been even close to being underpowered. This while the server is managing multiple connections via PSTN as well as strict IP to IP communications. Now the one drawback is this. The greatest feature of Asterisk as I said is the IAX2 protocol. Sadly as of now there really are no decent IAX2 compatible phones, at least for the US market. Those that are available come from some really shady companies in China. On the other hand if the requirement does not specify any Internet communication then SIP works just fine, and any SIP compatible phone will work. We have a mix of Cisco 7910s and 7940s. One of which I have at home connected via VPN. Depending upon several factors, you really need to take a good examination of whether to use Trixbox (which is essentially AAH 3.0) or build asterisk within Fedora, Suse, or another distro. One advantage of using Trixbox is the distro is essentially wipe of all unnecessary junk, leaving that which can or will be used. More so you do have a rather high level of confidence that the system will be up and running with little to no complications. Essentially the components have been pre-tested for you. If going the other route using Fedora (recommend) or Suse (not recommended) please factor in that once it is up and running you really need to give it a good workout. My first Asterisk was built on both Fedora, with a test on Suse. The one thing that got me to move to Asterisk was it seemingly could build Zaptel support with my Wildcard, where as the Fedora and Suse were very problematic. My recommondation for build is this. Skip Linux software raid all together and build using hardware hot swappable RAID. For the number of users you have 9GB is way more than enough, at least to begin with. Most likely if this is a new server, the lowest you can get anyways is 36GB which is more than enough. Once installed and configured, image the drive with something like Acronis, and burn it to DVD. Afterward using numerous utilities (AMP has its included) you can back up the conf and mail files to whatever schedule you wish. In the event of a disaster recovery, restore the image and copy over the config files and you will be back up in less than 20 minutes (our own disaster tests took 10 minutes to recover from complete system failure). This method allows you to skip haveing to build the Zaptel support for the cards. Lastly, as for issues...I can not think of anything, other than that which I created! Seriously, the only problem I ever had was doing yum I was not paying attention and did not notice that the kernal was upgraded. Well this required a rebuild of Zaptel. Truthfully this was my own *&$# fault for being lazy and not paying attention. Luckily this was on a test machine. From what I have read so far Trixbox has removed this issue (this actually happened to quite a few users, with a big surpise when they rebooted their servers). Other than that I have yet to encounter one single issue or problem. Suffice to say this has caused me to be a very big proponent of Asterisk. Over this time I have had more problems with Samba and Apache2 Can't think of anything else to say. I will be more than happy to answer any questions. Sean Waite -----Original Message----- From: Jeffrey Lehman <jeff at digitalguy.net> To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 11:59:00 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] Share your experience with Asterisk > I'm planning on setting up a small phone system (~5 phones) using > Asterisk for an organization and I'd like to hear what others who have > used Asterisk think of it. What do you like about Asterisk and what > issues have you had? Would you recommend using Asterisk over a > commercial PBX system and why? > > If the system is implemented, we would start off using the Digium cards > to interface with two analog phone lines, so I'm curious to see if > anyone has any experience with Asterisk and those cards and any issues > along those lines. > > I've put together a proposal for this organization and am just lacking > any previous experience, so responses would be used to put into the > proposal. > > Feel free to respond on or off list whichever you're most comfortable with. > > Thanks > Jeff Lehman > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list