Asterisk setup minimum

The quest to find the smallest Asterisk hardware

Not that its recommended, but just how small a system can you run Asterisk on?

A summary from postings on the Asterisk mailing list::

Hints and tips

• Having Pentium MMX instruction set in the CPU helps a lot.

Winner, so far

Smallest system mentioned sucessfully running Asterisk was:

MikroTik RouterBOARD 411 (MIPSBE@266mhz w/o FPU, 32MB RAM)
Using IAX to connect to another Asterisk system.
Only allows two a-law/u-law IAX connections before quality degrades.

Tried by Jesus Bermudez to check if these router boards can be used as small PBXs

Other small configurations mentioned:

• an original Pentium 100 Mhz, 32 MB RAM

Greg Boehnlein uses:

• P-133, 16 megs of ram, 3 PCI slots, 3.2 gig hard drive
• Voicemail Services
• 1 FXO Card for PSTN Connectivity
• IAX2 Termination to;
  • Asterisk Server at Work
  • NuFone for Second Home line and 1-800 DID Service
• Debian 3.0 w/ nothing running except Asterisk, Klogd, Syslogd and SSH
• Supports up to three concurrent SIP sessions before quality degrades

Someone else uses:

• Notebook has a 144Mhz Pentium, 80MB RAM and a 2GB disk

Another person uses:

• Pentium 1, 166mhz, 32meg ram, 1 gig HD
• 1 FXO port
• Voicepulse for inbound DID and outbound LD services (using IAX2)
• Running MOH and Meetme conference service
• 4 SIP phones running g711

Yet Another person has:

• Pentium II 233/64 RAM/2.1 HDD.
• It runs 2 BRI ISDN (4 Lines) + a lot of SIP devices.

Not the smallest Proc, but the smallest case by user Obelisk 🙂

• VIA Epia TC 1 GHz
• IBM Microdrive 1 Gig
• Linux from Scratch
• 512 MB Ram

in a 18 x 18 x 6 cm case w. external 60 Watt Laptop Power Supply

Asterisk on an X-box

See also

• Asterisk embedded systems: Even smaller solutions
• Asterisk Slimming: How to strip down Asterisk

• Asterisk | Hardware