1.6 ghz dual core processor, that comes with 512 meg of ram, I’m ugrading that to 2 gig on all of these boxes. (I currently have 5) Even at 512meg though I’ve been using one as my primary workstation for the past month. The case is designed to hold a laptop style sata hard drive, and comes with either a 60 gig, or 80 gig depending upon when you buy it. The ones I’ve replaced have gone mostly to 200 gig or higher capacity, after all the price for such a drive and the added memory is about a $100 hit these days.

The PBX has been somewhat back burnered while I study up on things. It has been on (except for an event after a power outage a couple of weeks back. (Moving it to a stand along UPS after I update the system today. memory and ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ to get current kernel and hardware updates.) Remember as well that Internally I will be using purely digital traffic so unless I have to transcode on the box for some reason (hooking up a 56k pcm call to a 16k adpcm for example) I don’t expect that this box will ever be heavily loaded in my environment.

I recommend taking a look at the system requirements for Asterisk in various environments to see what your needs would be, but something like the V.50 should cover a load of up to 10 lines digitally without too much trouble. The board does have a pci slot on it, however the case does not really support adding a board, so if you are thinking of adding a digium board with fxs and fxo ports, you might want to look at a different case. At that point you may find it just as easy to look at the N101 which comes with a faster processor, more memory, and Ubuntu pre-installed. (at which point you should only need a monitor on the system long enough to tell it not to look for a monitor in the future, change to no gui mode, install the asterisk services, and make sure sshd is set up so you can log in across your network.

Two things will impact how ‘hot’ the box gets. In my experience these boxes run cool enough that I would not be concerned about leaving them running long term. The two things that impact the heat in these things are system load, and their environment. If you wrap one of these up in a blanket, or store it in an insulated cooler without providing air flow, they will get hot, and probably will have problems. For system load, I would be more concerned about the hard drive than the system itself. It is mounted in the top of the case, but air-flow through the case is generally side to side. There are vents in the top, and you could mount a fan to draw air through there if you are concerned, but for most people the basic install should not pose a significant issue. Don’t pile a lot of papers and stuff on it, but again if you have a place where you are going to set it up near where phone and cable enter the house, you probably have a good idea of how to make sure that heat should not be an issue going forwards.

The box does not have ‘feet’ on it by default. 4 stick on feet come in the box, and you can apply them to either side, or the ‘bottom’ depending upon how you want to configure it. If you are going to set it up on a mounting board at the phone dmark, or cable entrance, I would mount the feet to the ‘bottom’ that then gets placed against the board, with the case fan evacuating to the top, and mounted with straps, or a shelf bracket folded to hold the box against the board. That leaves the ports on the left side, and the ‘front’ on the right side, which you should leave both ‘clear’ so you can access the optical drive if need be, and plug in devices as necessary.

There are also serial and parallel interface on the box, so if you wanted to set up a vt-100 terminal to monitor messages, or add a printer to dump syslog messages to, both should be reasonably easy to set up. (Nice for being able to point out that you have hard copy of user ‘x’ placing 75 calls to some stranger over the past week, if it comes up. Also useful for seeing if your security policies are set up properly, which can be important on a system receiving SIP calls and piping them out the land line for outgoing international calls.