About to get started

[Work2Play]

Hey guys,

I came across this site a few weeks ago and got pretty excited.  I used to have an extension of my office PBX in my house - and that was my main phone in my home office; but I don't have that any longer.  I refuse to pay what normal land-lines cost - and I've been working with Cisco VOIP phone systems long enough now that I just can't go back to traditional analog!  I want the features of a large system but only use under 200 minutes/month so a SIP trunk is the way to go with pay-as-you-go.

So I've been looking at Asterisk for a bit and wanting to get started - but don't want a dedicated computer running - I set out in search of something very small and power efficient that could run as an appliance in my house and run my PBX.  PlugPBX seemed like the anwer!

Well - my SheevaPlug is due to arrive any time today (from FedEx); I grabbed a couple 8GB Class 10 SD Cards (different brands) yesterday; and I have my SPA3102 sitting in front of me to integrate my existing cordless phones and maybe tie my Ooma line in until I port it over... I couldn't stand the waiting, so I created a VM on my desktop and set up AsteriskNow with FreePBX so I could start learning and playing - and I have a semi-working voip.ms DID and outbound calling going too now - just using a SIP softphone on my windows box.  I still need to figure out the hardware to use - I'm looking a lot at the Aastra products (originally I wanted to buy some Cisco phones off ebay but it seems like getting them to work with SIP is quite the hassle!).

I'm great with windows and I have a lot of experience maintaining PBX's - not a whole lot with setting up new service and I know nothing about Linux so thats where this will be challenging me.

Before I jump into this, I just want to confirm - is the version of PlugPBX that's available for download now the most stable version or should I expect to do more of the manual build?  It appeared to be in Beta so I just wanted to see if that's the smart place to start or if it's still a real work in progress.

Any other pointers?

Thanks!  And to the site admin - Thanks for all your hard work - once this is up and running I'll owe you more than one pint!

[twinclouds]

If you have time, I would suggest to install Debian, Asterisk and FreePBX one by one.  It is not that difficult.  Moreover, even though a lot of work have been done but these are still experimental.  You cannot really expect an turn key system.
For Debian, I would use what described in http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html.
There are a few good threads on this board describes how to install FreeBPX and Asterisk, such as: http://forums.plugpbx.org/index.php/topic,102.0.html.  The topics in Dockstar are also applicable to Sheevaplug (http://forums.plugpbx.org/index.php/topic,109.0.html and http://forums.plugpbx.org/index.php/topic,110.0.html are my favorites.)  You might also want to upgrade to Asterisk 1.8 for gtalk integration.  I have wrote some thing for Dockstar (http://forums.plugpbx.org/index.php/topic,247.0.html) but the procedure should be the same for Sheevaplug.

[PlugPBX Admin]

So like TwinClouds has said you have two basic choices.

You can take our last released working image, flash to a decent SD card and boot and go. It works and works well, the only reason to build a newer Asterisk 1.8 system is if you need some bleeding edge feature, or plan to do google voice integration cleanly. It'll work with SIP and IAX provider accounts like voip.ms no problem.

You can easily upgrade FreePBX from the web interface to the latest and greatest 2.8.x release from our released image and its running a year old stable build of Asterisk 1.6 so I see no reason not to call our beta image "turn key".  The only real work is to just flash a suitable version of uboot onto your sheeva plug and configure it for SD booting, but again we have that documented here, its documented on the sheeva-debian site Twin linked too and I provide a walk thru on our yourtube video(s) of the process.

Many peers and friends of my own have walked into this new realm without any prior background, by just flashing and using the beta image. I say beta just like google does

BUT the nice thing is that its easy to work with Sheeva, so you can roll your own too. The magic of SD cards is that you can experiment, backup and save good setups, then do destructive testing and upgrades, roll your own system and tinker. Installing debian is very easy if you want to go that route. If you have more then one SD card, you can try many things

Happy hacking!

[Work2Play]

Thx Guys,

I got my plug at 8:15PM last night from FedEx - put the kids to bed, finished some work, and started playing with it about 11:30PM.  When I went to bed at 2:00AM it was upgraded to FreePBX 2.8 and got it to register with my SIP provider (didn't have rules set up right yet)... called it a night.  About 1.5-2 hours into today I now have inbound and outbound calls working to a sip softphone with Voip.MS - so all in all, I must say it's pretty sweet!

I did get a name-brand card for my production one and another off-brand (still class 10) card for testing so I can do as you suggest.  When I get this thing "into production" I'll probably buy another complete sheeva just for screwing around.  I don't have enough time on this to say if it's reliable or not yet - time will tell... if it's stable I won't start from the ground up - but if I have to I will (thanks for the links twinclouds!).  It may be good experience either way.  I notice a little more lag on certain operations than I'd see on my desktop VM but that's very much to be expected.  At rest my CPU is asleep and memory utilization is at 25%.

One note - I tried a newer uboot before I saw that you included the recommended version - that caused a checksum error on boot - i'm not sure if that's normal or something that can be worked through.  I just rolled back to the included one and it booted right up.

I'll keep you posted as I move forward - at this point I'm about ready to order a nice SIP deskphone since that's what got me into all this.

[PlugPBX Admin]

Yes I'd like to push the newest uboot, and newer linux kernels get along well. That combination is a year old but seems to work okay.

One note is that the serial console via USB goes to crap once the linux kernel gets running, the newer sheeva's had some tweak that broke it, but again, a newer kernel gets around that. You can update it with an apt-get BUT it'll break the dhadi kernel module that provides some audio mixing for asterisk (conference room feature as an example) but otherwise wont be a big deal. Just something to note, otherwise if the SD cards behave it'll run and run and run and run. Uptime of 8+ months is not uncommon from people I know with it on UPS.

Be sure to BACKUP the SD card once its working perfectly, do a clean shutdown, set the write-protect tab and image that card, when done flip the write protect back off and boot 'er up.

I've got three sheeva plugs in my house, once is the PBX, one is a generic server and the third I monkey with (also a backup device)... Happy hacking!

[Work2Play]

I did notice that the console goes to complete crap during boot - but decided as long as ssh works, I don't care much.  I want the conference features so for now I'm not going to screw with it - as long as it looks "dialed-in" I need to get a good sip desk phone then  I'll see what else I can do later.  Being able to take baby steps is letting me ease into this.

Greg - great work!

[Work2Play]

So two observations:
1.  I do see my cpu spike to 100% pretty often; I don't have any time on calls yet to judge system performance yet though.
2.  I want FreePBX 2.9 to get the new endpoint manager.

I did the upgrades but I need to figure out how to get TFTP working on this thing... maybe once the kids go to bed I'll start googling...

[Work2Play]

ok, so I killeed the pbx!  luckily I took a backup before I screwed with it and I'm back in order.

One weird thing I noticed - if I have more than one extension signed in at once - it doesn't know what to do or where to ring so I get a busy signal.  With my Cisco system I had at work, I had my extension assigned to like 8 different phones - and they all just rang simultaneously.

Should I be able to get similar functionality here?

[PlugPBX Admin]

CUCM works different then asterisk in this respect.

on a CUCM PBX, you can assign multiple devices to a single DN entry (yes, I know CUCM very well).

On Asterisk you can create a ring group and map that to multiple devices. I have several phones in my house, all under a ring group. When incoming calls arrive, they hit the ring group, which then rings all the phones in the house together (but are separate extensions).

Bonus points, setup all the house phones to share the same mailbox so the MWI (message waiting indicator) are synced. All this I did to make the system "wife friendly"

You can also map several phones to a single root phone using the "follow me" features of FreePBX. \

The Asterisk registrar will NOT allow multiple entities to be represented in parallel, I think its last registered.

[PlugPBX Admin]

Apt-get install  <package name>

apt-cache search tftp (search for a tftp server)

Its that easy

[PlugPBX Admin]

You should not be getting spikes at all. Without further information we can't assist further.

[Work2Play]

Cool - thx!  That should let me get the TFTP off my windows box.

Today's task will be getting the SPA3102 working for now (hopefully not a long term thing but to tie in the house phone and put the existing cordless system on the pbx).  Unfortunately the kids don't cooperate - they don't nap at the same times - so it'll be another task for after they go to bed.

I kinda suspected ring-groups were probably the solution when I saw them in there and noticed I couldn't sign the same extension in multiple times reliably.  I'll create separate extensions later and test out that feature.

Question - I showed this setup to a buddy today who works at a pretty small office... how many users can this little plug reliably support?  And what might be the next step-up hardware wise without going with a full-blown server?  I really like the appliance concept.

Thx for all the help!  This has been pretty fun.

[PlugPBX Admin]

How many? It depends.

Lots

[Work2Play]

Initial test will be 5 or so users; but for the test to pass it has to be rock solid.

What details might I need to provide for the 100% cpu spikes?  They're brief and don't seem to hurt anything - just curious how to troubleshoot.

Also made no progress on SPA3102 - when I dial the number the SPA answers then gives a dial-tone back.  I haven't done much googling on the issue - too tired last night and tonight.

[PlugPBX Admin]

I own and use an SPA3102, it works just dandy.

run 'top' and watch it, see what 'spikes' to 100%

Press 's' and set the rate to '1' (one second refresh).