Known Element Enterprises Corporate Blog

I am in the process of uploading an updated version of my website. I re organized the home page a bit and added a page on an Asterisk user group I am forming. I will write more about that in another post.

Tonight I have began working on an asterisk deployment. I will be posting my adventures to this blog over the course of the project. They will serve as a public record of worked performed and hopefully will help others who want to deploy asterisk in a mission critical/high availabilty/high quality enviroment.

Here is the details on my hardware setup:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz (No hyperthreading or SMP)
RHEL 4.0 (client choice not mine with a 2.6.16.6 kernel highly optimized (see below for more)
1 gig of RAM
1 gig of Swap
2 PCI Express Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet cards (seeing as how this server will be deployed in a data center with a 100MB link might as well be able to handle all the bandwidth) The links will be configured in a high availabilty configuration. Aggregating them doesn’t make sense when you can’t keep the pipe full.

The first stage of the project is to slim down the operating system. I am in the process of removing X/Gnome/KDE. This should save a good amount
of RAM and CPU. There is probably a lot more I could remove. Printing support for example. I will do this as time allows and I come across things that I feel like removing. The simple/impatient way is just to disable the service(s) from starting. This may prove to be a better approach in the long run as it allows the service to be turned back on quickly.

The other part I am working on tonight is customizing/optimizing the kernel as much as possible. Generally a major performance gain is seen by simply recompiling the kernel for your architecture/system. I am also optimizing the I/O scheduler (going with the deadline I/O scheduler). Also the network congestion control has been changed from the default to use Westwood+. Doing this on my laptop greatly improved my wireless network performance.
After I did that I no longer have dropped connections which I was getting multiple times a day. The exact number appeared to be based on my network usage.

I have also removed all non essential hardware support. This includes:

USB/firewire
AGP video card (I don’t plan to run X on the box because of the overhead)
SCSI (its a serial ATA hard drive)
Network cards other then the one in there
Power management

Pretty much all that is included in the kernel is just support for hardware that is actually on the machine. I intend to primarily only access it remotely so there is no need for keyboard/mouse/video/sound card support.

The end goal is a single purpose server that can easily be administered remotely and doesn’t get in the way of what we are trying to do. Namely deliver high quality/high availability voice over IP solutions at a low cost.

Started reading through asterisk book. It is a very good resource and I am very glad it exists. I read a lot of it online and was very glad my client decided to purchase it. It has an entire chapter devoted to VoIP protocols and codecs. Something I am very interested in learning about. Also what hardware is required for what codecs and user load.

Anyway the kernel is recompiling now and I need to read the asterisk book (in paticular the chapter on codecs). I will post more soon!

Hi there lovely,
I was searchinbg the net few days ago. I am new to this thing.
and saw your profile. I decided to email you cause I found you attractive. aI might come down to your city in few weeks.
Let me know if we can meet each aother in bperson.
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bReply to my personal email at johet@lookyouniceboy.info

Notice the spelling of girl. gibrl. Makes me think of Gerbil’s.
The domain is hihgly amusing as well lookyouniceboy.info. I love these spammers.

I have been doing research on Asterisk this afternoon. Its a very interesting subject and has a dedicated community surrounding it. I have found a number of useful resources and I thought I would share them here.

1. The asterisk homepage. A good source for downloads and basic documentation.
2. The asterisk docs site. A very cool page with lots and lots of documentation on asterisk. Its a community site/project and that is something that appeals to me. The headlines feature is really nifty to.
3. VoIP Info. The name says it all. Its a wiki site for VoIP information. All types of good stuff.
4. Asterisk video podcats. Videos of setting up asterisk.

.

Lots of good stuff. If I find more I will update this post.

I would like to know how I got associated with:

http://www.manaspeaker.com/139/

I went to the main site. http://www.manaspeaker.com/ It appears to be some sort of advertiser aggregator/blog. Not sure. Very strange indeed. I need to keep better track of where I and my projects are showing up I guess.

I made it to the top of Technorati a blog search engine. Proof

My wife just posted to an open source project mailing list. She has been using Gramps (genology software) and there was a lot of people complaining about input or something of that nature. One of the maintainers said they need specific proposals and not vague hand waving. My wife posted a very concsie yet detailed idea of how to accomplish the goal. I must say it was really cool. I think I might even cook her dinner tonight.

I have my first early adopter of OSER. Well at least the first one I know about. It is an extremly large organization which is currently on Microsoft Exchange. I will keep you posted on the progress of the testing.

I have released version 1.0 Tech Preview 1 on Sourceforge. I am trying to find the delicate balance between release early release often and having something that will hold peoples attention and not be rejected as to early. This first version is intended for early adopters. It has most of the final product/release features and is somewhat stable but is lacking polish.

Tech preview 2 will have the polish and some additional features (namely a subset of Active Directory support). It will have single sign on and everything will be driven from LDAP. I plan to release it around March 30th. Originally I had planned for the 15th but I don’t think thats realistic.

Tech preview 3/beta 1 will be out April 15th. This won’t have any new features and will be intended for wider range testing. By then most of the bugs should be fixed and the system relatively stable. Any issues identified here will most likely be due to hardware support issues in Morphix.

So I am looking at a May 1st 1.0 launch. Things are really shaping up for me. With a corporate sponsor and a clear understanding of what I need to do and when it needs to be done by a 1.0 release will be a very big thing.

I am very pleased to announce the first corporate sponsor of the OSER platform. T1Shopper is sponsoring the VOIP related development tasks of our product.
The first phase is basic functionality/proof of concept:

• SIP (software phone) support. *
• Voicemail
• E-mail alerts of voicemail with the message attached

Also various things such as:

• Load balancing of Asterisk
• Geographic detection and routing of Asterisk clients
• Basic menu driven IVR

will be sponsored after the proof of concept stage is complete. In addition I want to investigate:

• Asterisk text to speech
• Asterisk speech to text

I am not sure if they are willing to sponsor those things however. But they are sponsoring the learning curve and basic setup. Also providing a server to use. A very nice one I might add. So I am very pleased about this development. I will definetly be sharing more as I continue in the development.

Supported Phones

• Linphone
• GnomeMeeting
• Zoep