CompactFlash FreePBX & Asterisk

[tomsyr]

What would the recommendation be for using CompactFlash? Some cards are very expensive, but the claim high data transfer rates.
In regards to how Asterisk and FreePBX works, is the write speed very important?
Thanks,
TomSyr

 

[cosmicwombat]

See if you can figure out

what Digium uses for their appliance. I'd imagine they made a good choice.

Problem with lower cost CF is the amount of times you can write to them.

 

[wardmundy]

Tom King is testing as we speak.

 

[thunderheart]

I'd really like to know ...

... how well the CF cards perform. I saw that someone was running a test here and await the result with great anticipation. Anybody have a handle on the number of writes a typical PIAF box makes per call?

Thunderheart

 

[darmock]

sigh i am typing this on a eee pc which is sd based. it also runs piaf just fine 8^) I have one of the t2502 runnin with a 16gb cf thru a cf to ide adapter runnng piaf 1.6 beta. I am stressing it and have not tweaked the logging just yet.

hopefully in a few weeks it will have simulated at least a year in a small pbx system. My goal is to see how long it takes to fail. My suspicions are that this type of system will be great for smaller soho's. larger requires beefier hardware.

similar testing on the sd cards with the eee pc's seems to indicate that it will take a few years to wear out the sd's i believe.

i must admit i bought the cheapest cf card i could find in case i do destructive testing

tom

 

[thunderheart]

Hey Tom

What CF to IDE adapter are you using? Any thoughts on which type is better?

Thunderheart

 

[jeremywillden]

I ran my home system (back before PiaF, using TB) for over a year on a CF card with no problems, with a lot of writes going on. I had over a dozen extensions, and was also running a VPN server (OpenVPN) and a web content filter (Dansguardian and Squid), and all calls were being recorded (and later moved with a cron job over to another computer so I wouldn't run out of space - only 4GB).

I didn't move any of the logs or other files elsewhere, I didn't take any steps to reduce the number of writes to the CF card, I simply counted on the wear-leveling algorithm that's built into the CF card to even out the writes.

When I moved over to PiaF, I got an Everex GreenPC and haven't switched over to the CF card yet (may or may not - the hard drive in that box is very low power). The adapter is one of the super-cheap ones off ebay, and the card is a "Transcend 45X" 4GB cheapie from newegg.com, which apparently doesn't quite support everything it should (I had to ignore a lot of "Driveready seekcomplete..." errors on the console every 5 minutes or so.

The trickiest part for me was migrating over to the CF adapter from the HD based installation I started with. Installing from scratch should be easy, though, and you won't have to learn how to modify the kernel boot parameters. If anyone needs them, I could post what I had to do, though it may not be necessary for you.

 

[mchapman]

Hi Jeremy,

I would like to take a look at those notes if you would like to post them.

Thanks,

Mike

 

[darmock]

What CF to IDE adapter are you using? Any thoughts on which type is better?

Thunderheart

Hmm I had a few no name ones laying around from an earlier project. I also picked up some from newegg as they are cheap

I have had good results so far with

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822998003

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186048

Of the 2 I prefer the later as it lets you play with different card types..


I also tried this one as it looked neat but no DMA so just did not perform correctly


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186002

Hope that helps

Tom

 

[tomsyr]

Asterisk realtime

Thanks for all the relpies on the CompactFlash question. Digging a little deeper, If I want to build a system with CompactFlash, how does the write speed affect the performance of a live system? I'm assuming that everything is happening real time, except for when calls are getting recorded, log files written, etc. - So is Asterisk capable of doing the real time processing, if their is enough memory availible without going to a swap file?
TomSyr

 

[bgriff]

Tom,

I have the non-DMA version you listed functioning in my pfSense box. Next time you build a pfSense box, try it!


Brian

 

[darmock]

Tom,

I have the non-DMA version you listed functioning in my pfSense box. Next time you build a pfSense box, try it!


Brian

Perhaps a poor choice of words. I found that the non DMA interface running asterisk- 1.4/1.6 did not perform adequately for the tasks required. It was usable (barely) under 1.4, but 1.6 had some problems and was unusable in my specific test setup under load. I was using centos 5.1 as the base install as opposed to the 5.0 which comes with the released version of PIAF 1.0 and 1.1 (Advantage of being a developer), but I don't think that made any difference. I also got some weird R/W errors with this CF adapter, (in the T2502) that went away when I used any other CF > IDE adapter. Thus my recommendation.


Tom

 

[mtennant]

Beware fake CF cards if you are buying on eBay.

http://reviews.ebay.ie/FAKE-SanDisk-Extreme-Compact-Flash-Cards-Exposed_W0QQugidZ10000000001456526

 

[powerontech]

I still have my doubts how long a CF would last. Every little write requires a whole block write because that's how Flash writes. MySQL and log files are constantly writing a few bits at a time so it's being worked pretty hard.

I would look for a spec of at least 1Mil writes (getting fairly common) static wear leveling (only on more expensive CF right now) and large enough unused capacity so static wear leveling has plenty of spare free blocks to move stuff around on.

On Asterisk I would turn off debug and verbose in logger.conf.

 

[w1ve]

Sd & Piaf...

I just purchased an SD-to-IDE adapter. I'm going to try it with Class-6 SDHC memory (20Mb/s read, 6Mb/s write). I'll post here as to how it works out.

 

[chuckjuhl]

CF card-based system

I have tried CF cards (from 40x 4gb cheapies to 233x 16gb models). In operation, the cards seem to handle running TB or PIAF fine in as far as call recording, voicemail and calls in general for a light load (2-3 calls).

However, the web-based GUI takes quite a while to load and run, with occassional time outs requiring browser refreshes. The read/write speeds of the 40x CF cards are really, really slow. I imagine that these slower CF cards would have a difficult time with multiple simultaneous calls. Also, there has been a lot of news lately about flash drive and solid-state drive failures and reliability issues.

Given that 2.5" 40gb SATA and IDE drives are available at lower prices than 233x and 266x CF cards (about $30 http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ST940814AS-R&cat=HDD ), and 2.5" drives have fairly low power consumption, I've been sticking with 2.5" SATA drives in the smaller iTX/VIA C7 boxes I build and deploy to smaller offices (less than 10 users). even these smaller iTX boxes will support 2 SATA 2.5" drives for RAID 1.

Another alternative is the old CF microdrives, which have much higher read/write speeds than flash memory based CF cards. Computer geeks has Seagate 5gb CF Microdrives for about $10 http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ST650211CF-R&cat=HDD

 

[Q99]

Back in the day when a BBS was king...

When running RBBS (or if you were a sysop that had $'s, you bought PCBoard), I setup a RAM-drive to use. At the time it was a 386DX33 and 2400 baud modem (eventually upgraded to 9600!). Then, every morning during the maintenance phase, it would copy the data from the RAM-drive to the hard drive.

My thought was up to 24 hours of data loss was an acceptable risk at the time (power loss caused by external factors). Regular upgrades and restarts just required me to save the data from the RAm drive to the HDD before shutdown.

In order to stretch the lifespan of the CF card, wouldn't a similiar setup work? Perhaps using a RAM drive for the primary storage, then scripting something to dump a copy of the RAM drive to the CF card at a preset interval?

Just thinking out loud... 300, 1200, 2400 baud, Yee-Haw!

 

[powerontech]

2.5" Hybrid drives are finally widely available. I think they may be a good option if and when CentOS supports them.

 

[maumar]

pbxiaf flash drive release

i would be very interested on the flash drive version of PBXIAF

to be honest, the first time i read about this project Ithought that *flash* into pbxiaf was relative to availibility of an install on a compact-flash

i think that it should be something like devil-linux, it should work on tmpfs e should save config /etc data with something like save-config

someone here is on this project at the moment?
maurizio

 

[maumar]

i am trying to get live-cd of pbxinaflash, starting from this wiki:
https://projects.centos.org/trac/livecd/wiki

after created the iso image, it can be flashed on a cf:
Transfering a LiveCD image to a Flash drive

what i miss now is a kickstart file suited for pbxinaflah