Asterisk@Home

CentOS isn't the focus of this chapter and it doesn't really have too much bearing on our use of Asterisk@Home other than knowing basically how to use and update it. We will focus on the setup and maintenance of Asterisk@Home and the features it provides for us. It would be beneficial if we spent time getting to know CentOS if we decide to use Asterisk@Home.

Preparation and Installation

Asterisk@Home recommends a minimum of a 300Mhz processor and 128 MB of RAM; however, CentOS will complain at boot if there is less than 256 MB. The amount of RAM required has a direct correspondence with how heavily used the system will be. As Asterisk@Home is Asterisk with a few other services added, we can pretty much scale it similarly. We do have to consider extra resources for the additional services we have running such as the web server and the MySQL server.

Asterisk@Home comes in two flavors: a source package that we can install on a CentOS system, and an ISO image that can be burned and installed as a full OS. The ISO installs a modified CentOS system automatically and sets up the necessary Asterisk@Home services.

We can obtain the ISO from http://sourceforge.net/projects/asteriskathome/.

After downloading and burning the image to disk, reboot the target machine with the Asterisk@Home CD in the drive, and wait for the prompt, which should look like the following:

boot: _

If at this point we hit Enter, the installer will start up and begin to install CentOS with Asterisk@Home on the first primary hard disk. It's very important to ensure that this disk is the disk we want to use and that no important data is held there as all data will be lost. From this point onwards installation is entirely automatic, and we can leave it for a few minutes while it prepares the machine, installs the OS and the necessary programs for Asterisk@Home—including Asterisk, MySQL, Apache, and so on. It's a good time to gather the documents we need to configure Asterisk, such as our lists of extensions and our service provider account details. We'll need the same information as in previous chapters where we set up Asterisk manually; now, however, we don't need to worry so much about Asterisk's configuration syntax as we have a friendly GUI-based setup system that takes care of most things.

Installation of Asterisk@Home is extremely simple and as long as all of our hardware has Linux support, there should be little issue getting the system installed.

We can configure advanced options and modify the kernel boot parameters if necessary by hitting one of the keys F1-F5 at the boot prompt (this usually isn't necessary). F5 is of particular note as this runs the CD as a rescue disk, which we can use to repair a machine that refuses to boot.

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