If I’m starting a completely new project, which way would you recommend I go? If the O-III is better or easier to set-up, I’m willing to buy the requisite system to make it work ($300 is a small price to pay for a production system if it’s indeed a better system).

Thanks for any feedback!

[WM: The major difference in PBX in a Flash and the Orgasmatron and Atomic Flash builds is that the latter two are preconfigured for immediate use. PBX in a Flash provides all the building blocks but leaves it up to you to do the configuring and to add the components you need. If you’re new to the VoIP World, one of the preconfigured builds is probably the easiest way to get started.]

[WM: One is Bleeding Edge and the other is for production. Not sure a merger would be too smart, but the underlying product mix is virtually identical except for the OS.]

The link in the paragraph "Four Steps to Complete the Install" is incorrect — it points to nerdvittles.com and I think it was supposed to point to http://pbxinaflash.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67 instead.

Also, prior versions of PiaF erased the hard drive to perform a clean install. Does this version still require that? If so, are there instructions available for upgraders from prior versions?

Thanks (as always) for your team’s excellent work on PiaF!

[WM: We’ll fix the link. And, yes PIAF 1.4 still erases the hard disk first. Update-fixes and update-source bring prior versions current.]

I thought about installing PiaF, then installing Samba on top of that, so that way I would have the best of both worlds. Is that a viable option with PiaF? From the way I understand it once PiaF is installed, the OS itself (CentOS) would never be updated, only the Asterisk related files itself. Could an additional drive be mounted after PiaF is installed for the samba-shared data?

And no, unfortunately it is not a SATA drive, its an older PATA ATA-133 drive.

Thanks for the hard work on this project, you’re taking Asterisk to where it should have been all along!

Jeremy

[WM: Thanks for the kind words. Samba is included in our distribution. setup-samba and you’re done. Adding another drive is a piece of cake with CentOS. PATA drives work fine with the standard PIAF install. Yum update and update-source both are available to keep Asterisk AND CentOS up to date. Good luck!]

[WM: This article covers what’s new. Unlike other aggregations, versions 1.2 and beyond of PBX in a Flash all have a facility to bring themselves current with update-source and update-fixes.]

[WM: So long as you are going to dedicate the server to PIAF, using the ISO with the old file server should be fine if it has at least 512MB of RAM. The other option if it has a SATA drive is the Atomic Flash.]