[Mac-telephony-list] LinuxPPC & * or OpenPBX?

[Tom Rymes via List]

On Dec 22, 2006, at 11:07 AM, Thoth via List wrote:

> While in many ways I agree with Tom here, I think it's important to  
> realize
> the distinction between his opinion, Amanda's, Ben's, and my own.   
> Ben's post
> reminded me of why most of the machines I own have an apple symbol  
> on them.
> Amanda has valid points, but so does Tom here in stressing the  
> importance of
> stability and dedicated machines.  The difference is what you  
> expect out of
> your setup.  Heck, while Tom's talking about things that make me  
> want a farm
> of thirty servers, we've also got someone complaining about the two  
> dollars a
> month an 8600 might take up in electricity.  Wide and varying it  
> would seem
> our subscribers are.  In regards to Tom, you have to realize that  
> some people
> do not need 60 SIP calls going on, they may merely want a fancy  
> answering
> machine.

Very well put. My opinions are only in reference to business users.  
Home PBX and SOHO setups can surely share a server with file sharing,  
firewall, web server, etc. In fact, we only have two main servers  
here: PBX & mail/file/print/hylafax/web/whatever else. In a few weeks  
as I upgrade both of these machines, I will also add a backup PBX  
server so that I can swap the PRI circuit and be back up and running  
very quickly in the unlikely (I hope) event that our main PBX box  
gets severely broken. Swap the PRI circuit, change the tftpserver  
entry in the DHCP server, reboot the phones and away we go!

> In regards to Amanda and Ben, you people are making Linux out to be
> much scarier than it is.  Linux is quite simply not strictly for  
> the land of
> uber l33t *nix geeks anymore.   So you want GUI's for configuring
> apache/bind/postfix/mysql/firewall/etc it can all be found in:
>
> http://www.webmin.com/

Also true. Linux isn't as scary as it's made out to be; if you feel  
comfortable at all in the MacOS terminal, using ls, cd, cp, mv, rm,  
and the like, you won't feel out of place in a linux system. I would  
recommend that anyone who has no linux experience drop the money for  
parallels and install CentOS just for a little fun and learning.  
Ideally, you would be able to stick with MacOS for everything, but  
it's always good to have another tool in your bag.

> flora around you.  I promise it's not that bad, I'd say it's even  
> easier to
> setup than OS X + ast/opbx atm.

I also agree. It's currently (and hopefully not for long!) easier to  
setup Asterisk/OPBX on linux than it is on MacOS.

BTW, I don't advocate a server farm except for much larger  
businesses. Two servers should do for most people: One PBX server and  
one for everything else.

Tom