Freeswitch 1.0.6 on eSata Sheevaplug

[tonyp]

Hi PlugPBX forum, I'm new here so may not be familiar with everything going on here.

I would just like to summarise my current situation vis-a-vis my Freeswitch setup. Plus a little history to how I got here.

I initially set up Freeswitch 1.0.4 on a Debianised Buffalo Linkstation with the Marvell Orion prcessor. I bought a few SIP phones and subscribed to Iptel and Sipgate for external services.

Earlier this year I replaced the Buffalo boxes with Sheevaplugs running Debian Squeeze, kernel 2.6.32.7. Just for the record, I have two standard white Sheevaplugs running my internal DHCP/DNS servers, an eSata Sheevaplug running SNMP and MRTG for network monitoring, and more importantly for this forum, an esata sheevaplug running Freeswitch 1.0.6 (though I think I may have updated to 1.0.7 development more recently as performing 'freeswitch -version' returns 1.0.head!). I did have minor compilation issues for Freeswitch source relating to the GCC/Armel/Kirkwood implementation but nothing that a moderate knowledge of 'C' couldn't fix. Connected to the 'plug' is a 1 TB disk containing all the code. The binaries seem to be located on the SD card. Connected to my sheevaplug through my net are two Cisco SPA921 handsets, a Linksys PAPT adaptor, an unlocked D-Link VTA adaptor, a crummy Zyxel W2000 WiFi handset an SNOM 320 handset plus most of my PC's have X-Lite on board. Externally I still subscribe to Iptel and Sipgate though as my ADSL link is only 1MB/256k, quality is a bit hit and miss. There is relatively little teletraffic on my net so internally it all works quite well.

I have tried setting up freePBX or FusionPBX with little success - in fact one of them wiped my carefully hand-crafted XML files - and I shall be watching this forum for assistance in that direction.

Have fun

[PlugPBX Admin]

I have yet to play with FreeSwitch myself. I've been waiting for FreePBX 3.0 to mature and stabilize with both FreeSwitch and Asterisk before tinkering.

Just a general poll to everyone here, does FreeSwitch address alot of the shortcomings and PITA aspects of Asterisk?

[twinclouds]

I tried to install FreeSwitch once.  The suggestion was to use OpenWRT as the OS but I have difficulty to set it up.  As a results, I never tried it again.
I have very little difficulty to set up Asterisk/FreePBX on Dockstar.  The only reason I want to try OpenWRT/FreeSwitch was to see if it can reduce memory usage.  I gave up because I feel that support of Debian for Dockstar is much better than OpenWRT.  Asterisk/FreePBX need almost all of the RAM available (128M) and a little swap space.  It really don't have any major issues and I very happy about it.  
All of my experience was on Dockstar.  Never tried Sheevaplug.

[PlugPBX Admin]

I ran a debian system, Samba, rsyncd, ssh, postfix, netatalk(apple file services), munin, MySQL, Apache, Lighttthp, and Asterisk 1.4 and FreePBX on a Buffalo NAS with 128 meg ram - it can be done (with some swap usage) - you can configure those various services to use much smaller memory footprints (google it up)

Lighttp is much smaller footprint and can be used in place of apache with freepbx.

If you really get efficient, while its alot of work, building things with compile time memory usage flags and ....building with ulibc libraries can really shrink things down - as that and busybox are common ways to build thinks like linux router firmware....but its alot more work.

The sheevaplug appealed to me because im lazy, and i could build a easy to use and add/hack/extend system for users without all that extra work I just suggested above - all the advantages of an embedded low power platform, with tons of ram/flash so I could be a lazy pig and build it desktop server style

[tonyp]

Thanks for the feedback.

I have never tried Asterisk even though I believe a version is in the standard Debian repositaries.

As my variable data and code sources (but not the logs at present)  are on the disk drive, I havn't been too worried about the code size. I am using an 8GB SDHC card for kernel, Debian and all the other esential stuff including the Freeswitch .XML live configuration files. I have not tried to make my plugs do multiple tasks such as media serving as my philosophy is that devices are cheap enough to do one task well.

I am worried about the longevity of SDHC cards with all those writes but I guess putting everything on to a hard disk drive and booting from there will detract from the convenience of a plug.

Forgive me for asking but I am wondering about STUN as I havn't seemed to need to worry about that even though my Freeswitch 'plug is behind a firewall with NAT to the service providers.

Another point I am wondering about is the (I forget the protocol name at the mo) direct extension to extension communication protocol over an intanet and how it may be used in relation to call setup.

Are there any simple free teletraffic measuring tools for SIP protocol (erlang's, call blocking and so on)? It would be useful to know should my system take over from my analogue trunk!

Have fun, Tony

[PlugPBX Admin]

Tonyp, we've starting using 'flashybrd' to all but eliminate wear on SD media (search the Dev forum here for more details).

The rest you speak of is pretty generic SIP stuff you can google anywhere. Any of my friends use PlugPBX without an forwarded ports with most common SIP VOIP providers without issue as the providers are pretty good at managing their setup to work with a customers NAT network at home.

There are tons of packages and systems that can sniff, monitor and analyze traffic including loading. Even Wirehshark has extensive call reporting and voip/rtp analysis tools available.