(Can you even get old hardware, electricity and bandwidth for testing for this price?) But the 256 MB server is a bargain at 1.5 cents per hour and 22 cents per gigabyte download and 8 cents per gigabyte upload. If you end up running a lot of calls through it, you’ll need a bigger VM. Create an instance of CentOS 5.5 on the 256 MB RAM/10 GB storage server.Here are the extra steps I had to take to build on RS Cloud.
I’m going on the assumption that you have built Asterisk and FreePBX before on a physical server. (And if you don’t care about having a conference bridge anyway, this whole matter is moot.)Īfter all that introduction, I’m glad to say that actually building Asterisk and FreePBX on the cloud server is straightforward and only requires a few adjustments from building on physical hardware. IAX2 no longer needs it, and while MeetMe does still need at least the dummy timer, there’s a new conference bridge application available that doesn’t need it–app_confbridge.
To further explain that: previously, you’d need a DAHDI hardware module or the DAHDI dummy driver to provide the timer for the IAX2 protocol and MeetMe. The good news is that with Asterisk 1.8 (actually, starting in 1.6.2), you don’t need DAHDI unless you have directly-attached telephony hardware, which you don’t, because your server is in the cloud. On other providers where the kernel headers and sources are available, you can compile DAHDI, but RS Cloud does not provide their Xen-optimized kernel source.
I’m not a software engineer and can’t effectively analyze Asterisk’s code to say whether it should or should not perform well in a cloud environment, but testing in this environment shows that it works fine, with one caveat: you can’t use the DAHDI kernel module. So when I thought about testing Asterisk 1.8, I set up a new instance there. Moreover, I started using RS CloudServers a little while ago just for some quick Linux testing, and liked them. (There are several others, such as Amazon EC2 and Linode.) But I am all about VoIP on the cheap, and the baseline RS CloudServer seems to be as inexpensive as you can get. First, note that I am not promoting this specific cloud provider. In this post I’ll share the few notes I have on installing Asterisk 1.8 on a Rackspace CloudServer.