The Suretec Blog

W. Michael Petullo has published a very detailed article for Red Hat Magazine about using the Asterisk RealTime LDAP^[?] Driver and Fedora Directory Server.

It's well written and a good read, but just so you know, OpenLDAP can easily be used and should have been the first choice as I'm sure our partners in crime Symas would point out too

But hey, it's a Red Hat Magazine so you can't blame them really...

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has emerged as a popular technology for modern voice communications. Many organizations have replaced their analog or proprietary digital telephone systems with VoIP-based solutions. This allows the consolidation of telephone services into an existing IP infrastructure. In addition, using IP to host voice services lets the organization leverage existing expertise–while retaining all of the network’s management advantages. Though not without its disadvantages, VoIP provides a compelling option to those looking for a telephone solution.

This article will present a simple VoIP solution using Asterisk, an open source private branch exchange (PBX) product. It will show you how to install Asterisk, configure it using its LDAP backend, and connect to it using the Ekiga software VoIP client and a Cisco 7900 Series VoIP telephone to make calls.

The first comment about the article is right though:

In general experienced users from the Asterisk community advise against purchasing Cisco phones for business deployment with Asterisk and recommend Polycom, Aastra or Snom instead. Cisco phones are very expensive, difficult to setup, technical documentation is not easily accessible for the end-user, their SIP firmware has some nasty surprises and as far as I know that cheap SmartNet contract is still quite difficult to get.

The LDIF Schema and normal LDAP schema are available in non-FDS format and are contributed to the Asterisk Project by Suretec and maintained by Suretec.

Thanks,

Gavin.

It's been an interesting week to say the least. First we see some very good discussion in the Symas My Old Flame post, then we discover Fedora Directory Server is less stable/desirable as a back end for Red Hat.

Let's put this into context, first Red Hat attack OpenLDAP, but yet they won't eat their own dog food:

We had been basing our application on fedora-ds, during the last year
we've seen great changes in this application and how its packaged. This has
made it less stable/desirable as a back end. All signs point to using
postgres on the back end as being both the easier choice and the more
reliable choice based on what we've seen.

Red Hat do a lot of great things, but why don't they do what they preach and collaborate with a proper LDAP^[?] Project and get real value out of that work and not waste time and money on a dead end project.

Suretec^®

For some reason an i386 upgrade via DVD is busted.

Work arounds seem to be upgrading by YUM either by pointing to the DVD or online repos.

See:

F8 - upgrading impossible and Fedora 8 installed. My report.


Hmmmm......Worth the effort??...??

UPDATE:

Yes it is. Very fast.

Writing this on F8 x86_64, whilst one of our laptops is being upgraded from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 via yum

Well, Fedora 8 was released on Friday. There a some great new features.

Suretec uses it on it's desktops and laptops, so all of us will be upgrading sometime this week.

A nice minireview has been done, as well as many other full reviews.

Looks good. Any gotchas I'll post here.

Gavin.