Open-Source PBX Battle Brewing (comment)

PhoneBoy · #1 (**permalink**) January 25th, 2005, 06:10 PM

Please comment on this article here:

sk3-483 · #2 (**permalink**) January 30th, 2005, 08:06 PM

I think I'm fairly typical of a small Asterisk user....and SIPXchange does nothing for me.

I need incomming POTS lines, and a selection of hardware to bring them in. I likeusing SIP phones on my LAN but trunking to ITSPs over IAX2.

I like running remote instances of Asterisk on very limited hardware for very small home offices.

Lastly, I likethe dymaic community that surrounds Asterisk. There rae people with no experience at all, and people running CLECs all supporting the Asterisk effort.

It's amazing.

Michael

PhoneBoy · #3 (**permalink**) January 31st, 2005, 07:42 AM

When I integrate PSTN lines, I'm doing it with SPA-3000s, which makes it all SIP, meaning I could do it with sipX.

Asterisk definately has a community around it, but there's nothing saying that sipX couldn't have a similar community over time.

bgolly · #4 (**permalink**) February 1st, 2005, 02:24 AM

I'm coming at this from a different perspective. I've been using sipx for a couple of months with SPA-3000 gateways and SPA ATAs with analog phones as well as a couple of Xpressas and a Grandstream. Sipx is easy to install and pretty user friendly. The new docs make it much easier to configure. Its a nice small business PBX with a few quirks but it gets better with each release.

I'm just starting to use Asterisk, just installed it and I'm setting up some phones this week. I've heard of people using both together leveraging the best of both and I'd like to hear any experiences.

PhoneBoy · #5 (**permalink**) February 1st, 2005, 08:10 AM

SIP is not Asterisk's stronger point from what I understand. It makes sense to use Asterisk for the stuff that doesn't speak SIP and use sipX for the stuff that does.

I need to get sipX loaded up on a box and see how well it works. The fact it requires Fedora Core 2 is somewhat annoying though, seeing as how I'm a Gentoo kind of guy.

bgolly · #6 (**permalink**) February 1st, 2005, 03:53 PM

I understand that sipX has been tested and some are running it on Gentoo. I can only comment on FC2. I will say that I feel your pain with FC2. It was much easier installing sipX than getting a stable FC2 running on my Dell server hardware.

mberlant · #7 (**permalink**) February 3rd, 2005, 01:36 AM

Pardon a newbie-esque question here, but must the installation be FC2? Is there something about FC3, for example, that would make installation treacherous with this release?

kitonne · #8 (**permalink**) February 4th, 2005, 11:12 PM

I'm running * on a P200 with 80MB of RAM; from what I read, SIPProxy wants a P4 at a minimum.... I have an issue with that; I see nothing wrong with management over a telnet connection using vt100 terminal emulation

I have a friend who is running * and Linux out of a 128MB CF card, with IDE to CF adapter; somehow I doubt SipServer would fit in the same footprint....

mberlant · #9 (**permalink**) February 5th, 2005, 02:28 PM

I am not even far enough along the installation path to find out if my P3-600 is macho enough for the job. I am still at the stage where I can't get either Java SDK (supposedly a pre-requisite) or sipXpabx to install on the system. Only after successfully installing will I get to learn if I have enough horsepower to support as many as 20 registrations and 2 or 3 simultaneous calls. My guess is that the P4 is only necessary for handling serious traffic levels.

bgolly · #10 (**permalink**) February 9th, 2005, 07:26 PM

I now have both sipX and Asterisk running on separate boxes as well as both on one new Dell SC420 with a 2.8GHz P4 and 512MB memory. I use FC2.

The two pbx's are very different. sipX is a sip only pbx with a nice web based configurator that makes a nice enterprise pbx providing you use one of the supported phones.
Asterisk is a powerful, do anything switch. I don't know if there is a comparable configurator for Asterisk, I intend to look at some of the GUIs and see what I can find. I did all my setup with the .conf files.

For performance, the systems work differently. A sip call with Asterisk has two media streams, one between each device and the pbx. With sipX, the pbx serves as a sip server setting up the call but the media streams flow between the devices, not the pbx. The biggest processor load with sipX is running the configuration web server so sipX scales well to large numbers of calls.

As to FC3, I know people are doing it but I haven't tried. j2sdk installed easily for me with FC2 following Sun's instructions. Hope this helps some.