What distro do you use?

[kchung]

So, with great interest in my CentOS post, what distro do you'all use with VICIDIAL?

[Op3r]

centos, easy to configure, easy to administer, easy for my life

[mflorell]

Slackware of course

It's a single CD, very fast install that makes installing everything from source easy. And none of the customized bin-utils or other junk filling your system like some other distros.

[leoman70]

Fedora Core 5

[xmerlin]

i prefer fedora and cent-os, not sure why, just what iv used before, i have got to admit though that the easy installation of these distro's is a huge bonus as far as im cconcerned

[mcargile]

I like Gentoo. Barebones installs, optimized code, very striaght forword package management system, and tons of available options. If I find myself with time to burn I might even write an ebuild to install VICIDIAL.

[mxtreme311]

I've found the 64-bit release of Debian 4.0 (Etch) to be the easiest to install without sacrificing performance.

[codehaxor]

Centos and Debian 64 bit distro's are great, will be trying out Slack 12. I think slack is still the best for running vici, only users who cant or dont know how to make vici run under slack say that other distro's are better xD

[mcargile]

Centos is actually one of the OS we strongly discourage using. This has to do with the patches they include in their kernel. They added patches to improve the responsiveness of Desktop environments which negatively impacts the scheduling of realtime processes such as asterisk. This is especially bad on systems that use TDM cards rather than VoIP as their interrupts can not get processed in a timely fassion. The only solution we have found is to download a vanilla kernel from kernel.org and install it instead.

[codehaxor]

I had compared 2 singler server setups with Centos 5.1 64 bit and Debian Etch 4.0 64 bit, both kernels are not modified, here are the specs:

Core2Duo 1.86 GHZ
2 GB DDR 800
150 SATA HDD
2 LAN CARDS (1 local, 1 live ip)
G729
ALL_FORCE on recordings
Remote FTP server for uploading
Manual Dial
ztdummy used as timing source
The same voice provider

Agent Workstations:
Core2Duo 1.86 GHZ
1 GB RAM
128 PCIEXPRESS ATI video card
Fedora core 9 x64 Operating System
GNNET USB HEADSET
X-lite 3.0 for linux installed



Each box had 10 agents, tested for 3 days of 12 hour calling.


Installation:

Debian: WOrked like a charm, no errors on perl modules.
CentOS: Had to do some force build on the Bundle::CPAN and had some net::server install problems as well.


Logging in:

CentOS: the "You are the only one in this conference" voice prompt was slightly choppy.

Debian: Smooth and sound


zttest -v:

CentOS: 96.9933% average
Debian : 99.97431% average

call quality (10 agents calling at the same time):

CenOS:

Agents complain they get a slight echo even if the call is in progress.
A random agent was logged out
Slight choppyness when monitoring agents in call
When the server was rebooted the quality went smooth


Debian:

Only 1 agent complained that the customer on the other end could not hear her voice but she accidentally lowered the microphone volume of x-lite when she was in a call
No agents were logged out
No incidents of echo, smooth call quality all the way


* This was done out of the box installs for both servers, no kernels were modified during the process. Will do a comparison with slamd 64

[mflorell]

Thanks for the examples. This is pretty much our experience with stock CentOS as well, which is why we do not recommend it for production VICIDIAL use.

[gardo]

CentOS is a great Linux distribution. The only issue with them is their stock kernel which is actually built for the Desktop. This is actually ironic since RedHat and CentOS have positioned their distributions as "server" distributions. As Mcargile has pointed out this impacts systems using TDM cards more than VoIP users. Workaround for this one is to recompile the kernel with the following options:

CONFIG_IOSCHED_NOOP=y
CONFIG_IOSCHED_AS=y
CONFIG_IOSCHED_DEADLINE=y
CONFIG_IOSCHED_CFQ=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_DEADLINE=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_IOSCHED="deadline"
CONFIG_POSIX_MQUEUE=y
CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y

As a side note, we have been using CentOS for more than 2 years now with VoIP and so far so good.

Centos is actually one of the OS we strongly discourage using. This has to do with the patches they include in their kernel. They added patches to improve the responsiveness of Desktop environments which negatively impacts the scheduling of realtime processes such as asterisk. This is especially bad on systems that use TDM cards rather than VoIP as their interrupts can not get processed in a timely fassion. The only solution we have found is to download a vanilla kernel from kernel.org and install it instead.

[ciacho]

I use Slackware @ server and Centos @ workstations.

[okli]

Between Slack and Debian we found Debian (ETCH netinstall AMD64) to be way easier to install and maintain.
Can't compare performance, but this page gives some idea:
http://www.eflo.net/VICIDIALwiki/tiki-i ... I%3ADebian

[eijal]

Slackware seems to be one of the best, but the problem is the dificult to compile the kernel modules.

I wish to use slackware in my 64 bits servers, but the kernel compilation doesn't work.

May be some of you guys can help us with some references like books, links and so on

thanks