IT Infusion Inc.

I’m putting an Asterisk server in co-location and I’m trying to decide whether I should go with FreeBSD 7.0 or Debian Linux as the OS (sorry – I’m not a CentOS guy – just personal preference). My current Asterisk box is running Debian Etch and has been very stable. However, I would really prefer to run FreeBSD on a box that is going to be in co-lo several hundred kilometers away.

Does anybody have any experience with running Asterisk under FreeBSD? I’ve Googled around a bit and there isn’t a lot out there. Kind of funny because it appears that Asterisk in the FreeBSD ports collection stays pretty current. I don’t need to worry about PCI cards as all the voice trunks will be SIP. Any problems getting g729 running under FreeBSD?

Please Note: This is up for historical purposes and is getting pretty dated. I’ve since upgraded to Asterisk 1.4.13 w/ FreePBX and, while it is a similar install, I think that it’s probably actually easier. I didn’t use it, but this guide for installing version 1.4 on Etch is probably a good place to start…

Some changes in my business have meant that I finally have a business case for running my business (and home) phone lines through the open source Asterisk PBX. For those who aren’t familiar, Asterisk is a very powerful VOIP (Voice Over IP) enterprise phone system that runs on Linux and Unix servers. It provides all the features of proprietary PBX phone systems at a mere fraction of the cost. The software itself is free and it runs on commodity server hardware. The savings are really quite significant.

I installed a fresh Debian Etch stable server and then went to work on compiling Asterisk. Why not just install the Debian packages? Well, even the unstable packages aren’t that current and Asterisk changes fairly frequently. Compiling is the best way to stay current. A lot of Debian folks don’t want to stray too far from “apt-get” but it really isn’t that hard to compile Asterisk once you’ve done it a few times!
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Back Up Linux And Windows Systems With BackupPC

A detailed Howto has been posted on Howto Forge which describes how to setup BackupPC on Debian Etch. Looking over the tutorial, it looks like it should apply to Ubuntu with little to no modification. Lots of pictures and detail should help you get your home or small office backup solution up and running in no time.