Polycom Mass Deployment

This Document:

Linux Installation/Setup
Network Installation/Setup
DCHP Setup
FTP Setup

Notes:
This page is geared towards a Debian Sarge installation running Asterisk. It will still be relavant to other Linux distros, but there are references to Debian specific software packages.

Linux Installation/Setup

First, one must install Debian Sarge on to their server. Extensive installation documentation can be found at http://www.us.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/. Some things to note are:

When installing, boot the installer with linux26 if possible, which will install the latest 2.6.8 kernel. One reason to boot with linux, is that 2.6.8 doesn’t support megaraid, which is used in the Dell 2850. Booting with linux will install the latest 2.4.27 kernel.
For the purpose of robustness, and error handling, break down your hard disk into separate partitions for major parts of the filesystem. A typical Debian server hard drive (73GB scsi) can be broken down like this:
- /: 2GB
- /boot: 100MB
- /usr: 10GB
- /tmp: 5GB
- /home: 10GB
- /var: 30GB
- swap: 4GB

(I rounded in case it doesn’t add up correctly)

When the installer prompts what type of system to build, or what packages to install, choose none, so that we can do it manually after our first login.

When the installer prompts for a root password, make sure that it is very secure. Tips for secure passwords can by doing a web search for these key words: linux secure password. The same applies for the first user account.

After the installer is finished, and you are booted into Linux, we need to get some packages, specifically: sudo, asterisk, apache, dhcp3-server, ntp-server, and ftpd. I also compliment that with the following packages: vim, sendmail (replaces exim), tcpdump, lynx, and wget.

Asterisk configuration will not be discussed in this document, there’s no need to rewrite other people