Searching for clarity. (longish)

[belsamber]

Hi everyone, I've been interested in Asterisk for a while now, and been doing a lot of reading over the last few days. There are just a couple of points I'd like to clarify.

My goal is to basically have personal message boxes in our flat, along with an automated attendent... So 1 PSTN line coming in to the house, when it is dialed you get "Push 1 to speak to X, Push 2 to speak to Y" etc. then if they aren't there it goes to a personal mailbox. I may add a VoIP service later, but thats what I want for the moment. 1 PSTN line, 4 extensions.

It seems like the cheapest way to do this properly would be an SPA3000, an SPA2000, and a softphone or similar on the server which will be in my room. This has the added advantage of being able to work on my Mac. The plan is to get the 3000 first so that I can get myself sorted a bit, then pull in the 2000 later.

The other option is the TDM400 route but this seems more expensive and I would need to get a cheap PC to put it in. What is the advantage of this? Is it just easier to configure?

The other question I have is processor usage... It seems some people say it is pretty intensive, other say it isn't... With the SPA's most of the work is done by the box itself rather than the computer right? I have a dual 1.2GHz G4, so for my simple situation, it should handle the "traffic" (or lack of it) just fine while I am using the computer to surf the net etc. right?

Thanks for reading this far. If you have any other suggestions, comments or just want to tell me I'm stupid and should have searched (I did) I would be interested.

[mberlant]

The SPA-3000 is an excellent access device for Asterisk. In addition to providing an FXS port and an FXO port, it has failover functionality for when power or Asterisk fail.

Although most people run Asterisk on Linux servers, many people also run on MAC. Whichever OS you choose, be sure to run Asterisk on a dedicated machine. Asterisk and other applications, especially graphic applications, tend to both be sluggish on any shared machine.

For what it's worth, you don't need a fat machine to make Asterisk work well. My own Asterisk works wonderfully well on a Pentium MMX 200 (Yes, Pentium I) with 96MB RAM and 3GB HDD. It has about 20 services and 25 extensions and routinely handles 3 or 4 simultaneous conversations.

About the only platform that won't work for you is a Linksys WRT54GS router, because the WRT doesn't have the horsepower to perform IVR, voice mail or CODEC transcoding functions (you'll get horrendous "stuttering" if you try).

[belsamber]

Just thought I'd give a bit of an update, as I searched and couldn't find any mention of this being done before: I'm in my "try * for as little money as possible" stage at the moment until I start at my new job, so I ended up installing A@H through VirtualPC... And it works just perfectly. I set up an extension for each of my two computers (including the one running asterisk in VPC) and SIP softphones on each, then signed up with a local provider (sipserve.co.nz.) And all is happy and well. You wouldn't want to leave asterisk running permanently in the background because it uses about 50% of both my processors, but for temporary testing, its a good way to get your feet wet.

Meanwhile, I'm loving this software. Kudo's to the Asterisk and Asterisk@Home teams!