As you have noticed I had a long drop in posts… work keeps me so busy that I have no desire to do anything else.
Last 2-3 week were particularly intense, I was implementing company wide VoIP based on Asterisk and Linksys phones. Still stuff left to polish… Now BT thinks I’m a telcoms engineer
I have downloaded Foresight Linux 2 with a hope to see some really cool and up to date Linux distribution.
Yes, it has GNOME 2.22 which just came out ( was it yesterday ? ) and yes, this is cool. But if you are matured computer user, you have your favourite tools. Naming a few for me: gkrellm and unison(this one is new for me). Now, gkrellm is longer on the marked than most of the current cool distributions, Unison is not a toddler as well. They are both missing from Foresight Linux … not only standard installation but also the software repository … c’mon!
I have also learned that Foresight is based on rPath as well as Asterisk Now…
I am worried that I will have to ditch it , like I have done with Asterisk Now, rPath and conary is not really production mature! - at least for me.
Recently I have decided to try out well regarded Asterisk Now distribution. I’ve used 1.0.1 version. I was thinking that it will be well integrated, user friendly Linux distribution for getting your PBX up.
Initially I was happy with what I have found. It’s Asterisk part was just working. Then I have actually started to customize it, so it would fit in to my systems. This is where I started to notice that it ain’t what I expected.
First what I have found annoying what that Asterisk web interface was not working too good with Firefox 3 and Konqueror. It was alright with Firefox 2. Oh and it was blood slow.
Then the whole backend, I have learned that it’s using rPath as a base system. I could not find any documentation on rPath websites which would be useful for Sys Admins. How do I use it? After a while I have found a link on Asterisk web interface which took me to some RAA interface…. which I couldn’t logon to with my Admin credentials … had do go down the shell and dig out defaults from some file in /etc/raa.
Now was time to get dhcp and tftp to work. Dhcp was installed in form of udhcpd , which I have configured and …. it wasn’t working. First, no integration between firewall management and service management. Second, even when configured properly, it was refusing to give out IPs. TFTP , I have used search facility in the RAA interface, but clicking on a ‘+’ button did nothing to install it. How do I install software in rPath ?
At that point I was no longer happy about Astreisk Now and I’ve decided to install some real world Linux. I can live with Asterisk not having pretty interface by default, but I can’t live without a working system underneath it.
Loads of stuff, happens now.
I have setup an Asterisk installation on my server, it is still work in progress and so far, I love it! Why I didn’t checked it out earlier?
So far, I have a few SIP users, and a few PSTN gateways in different countries. Started by reading the free ebook available from Asterisk Website. Setup was really simple, had a few bumps, but day on day it gets more interesting, adding more automation, k3wl. This knowledge will be useful at work, where we are going to setup a proper PBX.
VPN, I have done an OpenVPN installation on my own private network, it works like a charm. Unfortunately at work I had to go with a solution more integrated into MS Windows. I really wanted to have IPSec/L2TP … but the complexity of server setup just killed it. When I was switching from IPSec/L2TP to PPTP it was soooo much easier and cleaner to get PPTP up and running.
I think that IPSec/L2TP will have to wait and eventually it will be rolled out. I really don’t want to use PPTP for full access to my networks. To be honest, when I came across OpenVPN first time, it also was too much for me and I left it and used SSH tunnels instead. So I think I have to mature with IPSec/L2TP and try to make it work later.
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