Can I have a main PBX, then proxy/sub PBXs?

Why can't you simply trunk the systems and control how they are accessed with a dial plan.

Perhaps a more detailed explanation of your goals would yield a better suggestion.

SER is a complex beast to setup.

Then my answer stands. Why not just install bare bones Asterisk on the machine with the PCI card?

Then IAX trunk to each machine.

It would be very easy to maintain and just a few lines of config.

Install the Centos Distro and then you can use Yum to install Asterisk, Zaptel and the PRI libraries you need for your card.

This will work like a champ.

Scenario two would be to grab a Cisco 3620 with a PRI/DSP card for about $600.00 on eBay and use it as the gateway.

I like both ideas, however the Asterisk bare bones will get you some good hard core experience with how Asterisk works, I think you are ready!

Looks like we might be going 100% sip. If that's the case, then I guess I won't be needing a gateway anymore? Can sip trunks be used on multiple PBXs?

Alright, I'll make notes about what you're told me and get on that then.
First thing is, how much horsepower would the proxy server need? I don't want to give it a ton of expensive resources if it doesn't really need it just to pass SIP traffic along.

For example, would a 1Ghz blade, 512MB be enough or something a bit more?

>With regard to the gateway, I got a good belly laugh that you got scared off of Cisco and >then went with the Lucent/Ascend box.

As I typed that, I thought 'Yeah, he'll believe that the TNT was a simpler solution" :).

The guy I was talking with made me nervous, making it sound like I was headed into a licensing nightmare if I used an eBay purchased cisco as a solution. I've maintained my cisco hardware for many years but at a very basic level. When it gets deep into the IOS, I'm at a loss. Like I said, I'm a general specialist. I've never been able to become a pro at any one thing, I simply have too many technologies going on simultaneously.

I've used Lucent gear for many years and thought that might be easier for me, and it actually was. I got help setting it up, along with the SIP when I bought it, the rest was just basic fine tuning changes here and there.

>They work well but they have many quirks and in my opinion and even steeper learning >curve than Cisco. At least with anything Cisco they are 4 billion examples on the web to >look at, remember your unique - just like everybody else so someone is bound to have >come close to what you are trying to do.

Once we got the beast going, it was perfect. The quality is carrier class, has everything under the sun, does VoIP and dial-up simultaneously. You're right about finding help with the cisco devices vs the Lucent. Mind you, there are quite a lot of folks using the TNT for big VoIP business. All of the guys I came across had thousands and thousands of ports across many states. I also found TNT info on voip-org I think it's called.

Anyhow, all history, going 100% SIP soon :).

I'll wait to hear back about the hardware needs of a proxy server and get to building.

Mike

>So, on to important things. How many concurrent calls and what CODEC so we can dimension >the front end server?

Right now, it's just a small office of 7 people, we have some 10 extensions or so and at most, some 3/5 calls simultaneously.

We are being asked about VoIP/Bundled services so want to look at offering such things. We used to be an ISP, lost our shirt, sold our user base and have been wanting to get into offering hosted applications and solutions rather than going for big numbers again.

We're getting a bandwidth upgrade and getting rid of our PRI for SIP trunks instead with a provider. Because of this, we'd like to leverage the resources we're going to have in this and offer VoIP based services bundled with application solutions. We're not looking to become a full bore provider, but to offer bundled services to various companies of say 2/5 people each.

So truth be told, I don't know what the usage will be other than the given we have now. It will ramp up as needed.

The idea is to build customized servers for individual needs. For example, some folks might want SugarCRM, others might want VTiger, etc etc. We would build the server based on the users needs for look and feel.

I'm not clear how DIDs work just yet either. The PRI provider we have currently gives us some 50 DIDs. I hoped there was some way of having our own but that's obviously not possible unless we had a private in house server. I was trying to figure out how we might be able to share a range of DIDs and one or two SIP providers.

Does this better explain what my objectives are?

Mike

>You know I went down the same path, we are a regional ISP and have repurposed all of >our dial up PRI's as Voip servers. I am doing exactly as you want to do any using Bare >Asterisk w/IAX2 to terminate the customers trunks.

I don't want to get into the ISP business anymore but we have so much resource that we figure we should leverage it in some better manner. I'll be looking into the things you've mentioned as soon as I get some breathing space.

>You have to think about how you are going to provision and billing right off the top. There >is also regulatory compliance such as CALEA to think about.

I've not looked into licensing since we're not interested in doing anything large scale. Right now, we're just doing a small private office 'virtual office' setup which is why we've ended up playing with this stuff. It's simply too cool not to use with some of the hosted things we offer.

>How would you respond to w >wiretap writ with civil and criminal penalties for >non-compliance?

I keep a LOT of loggings and I would comply. Does that keep me safer? :)

>Not sure what type of upstream bandwidth you have but you need to think about a carrier >class redundant connect, BGP is a must. I can't imagine not using a high availability firewall >IDS product. We choose Juniper/Netscreen.

We're looking at several megabit for bandwidth, not quite sure how much yet, we're still pricing and finding out what they can bring to our location. We'll be using a not too heavy compression on the PBX, I think I've been told that the 23K or so is pretty good. BGP is not a problem with our upstream and hey, we just upgraded from a watchguard to a Juniper :). I was going to go with the SSG-20 but it's too puny and won't last us very long so now am looking at an SSG-140 instead.
Why would you recommend IDS? I've been toying with an open source package called OSSIM which has an incredible amount of features. I can send the netscreen logs to that as well if I recall. I've not had much time to get to learning it yet, it's on my list.

>You also should have a minimum of two servers for customers to register to. You can >quickly reroute DID's in the event of server issues.

I have a ton of blade servers left over, most are 850Mhz/512MB but for low usage applications, they seem to work just fine. I had installed a trixbox on one a while back to test and all seemed to work perfectly. Now, do you mean this in terms of redundancy, having a backup machine for each customer or some dual authentication method instead? If it's an option, I also have RADIUS handy.

>I am also fairly sure you can't resell a standard SIP connection. We have wholesale >termination from Broadvox and Level 3.

Can you provide a little more information about this? What I mean by using a proxy is that since we're doing something fairly small, we might be able to have main numbers for each customer for incoming calls and shared outgoing calls.

>One a somewhat lighter note you can manually configure FOP to make a really cool NOC >status display. Folks think that you are locked into the FreePBX default layout, nothing is >farther from the truth. FOP is highly customizable and can display an activity icon per call >instead of per trunk as it is configured by default.

I've not played with any of these things yet. You mean in as far as custom looks?

Mike

PS: I'm not looking at selling phone services as such, just reselling SIP trunks and offering the connectivity from our PBXs as part of a bundle of services.

Mike

Yes, US based.

The idea is that the customer is going to contract for the SIP trunks with our own provider. From there, we would host the trunks on our PBX or possibly, build a PBX for their office/building use.

We don't want to get into the VoIP business but we do want to use the cool PBX and applications together in creative ways. We're pretty much in the app hosting business for the most part. We kept a few of our hosted customers, have been working on our own online apps but now feel it would be good to bundle some of the tools we've been using as our own solutions.

Kind of weird really. Many ISPs came out of the woodwork from the BBS days (including us), while come turned cook to ISP, and still others, just kind of fell into it. We used to be an ISP, that doesn't want to be an ISP, but wants to offer limited, ASP type services :).

Mike

You had some thoughts you wanted to share?

What I'd like to do is not to be a phone company, but to offer the phone services interface. In other words, they get their sip trunks from other providers, we host them on our pbx servers along with custom bundled applications/hosting.

I would be interested in colo at some point but can't do it initially.

Do you think it's best to use a multi tenant solution or smaller customized servers?

Mike

Yes, I've got quite a few blades now as I am consolidating some of them onto vmware.

You're right about individual servers vs one multi tenant server. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to get creative but those are good points also.

I've been looking at both sugarcrm and vtiger. Are there any other apps out there which offer a bit less than all out crm's do, but tie the communications together, such as trixbox?

Mike

Did you get my PM?