[Freeswitch-users] Installing freeswitch on CentOS

[Bill W]

Hey Everyone,

I spoke with Karl, and for the sake of completing this thread I'm 
posting the results.

Ultimately the problem Karl found with OpenSUSE was the SQLite libraries 
leading to database corruption, and freeswitch misbehaving because of 
that.  He also was trying to do traffic shaping for his application and 
ran into problems with shaping not working right on multi-core x86_64 
kernels in SuSE.

I asked him about using odbc in the core to get around the sqlite bug 
but he didn't bother because he needed traffic shaping that worked.

So it's not so much that SuSE was a bad distro, but rather that it 
didn't work well with freeswitch and traffic shaping on multi-core 
x86_64.  He did mention that SuSE 11.1 is nice in general but to stay 
away from 11.2 because gcc segfaults on any significant build.

Hope this helps the community!
Bill



His response:
====================
The big thing you should learn from the investment of my time in the lab 
here is simply this, "listen to Brian".  From now on, I'm considering 
him the EF Hutton on #freeswitch.

(Editors Note: For you youngsters out there, EF Hutton's tagline was 
"When EF Hutton talks, people listen.")

When I added about 60 phones to the system, it essentially "blew up" 
whereby phones wouldn't register, the database would get corrupted, etc...

We worked around the problem by making the freeswitch "db" directory a 
ramdisk, but that only mitigated the problem, and didn't entirely fix it.

Oh yeah, and although mod_perl will compile in freeswitch, it will bomb 
out and segfault when attempting to run any mod_perl scripts in 
freeswitch.  The fix is to recompile perl from source.  Even then, I 
still had problems.

Other problems with the remaining Suse installations still are:

1.) When you answer, it will hang up.  No rhyme, reason, or otherwise.
2.) Occasionally (rarely) we have issues with audio not passing through 
correctly.  One way audio, or none at all.
3.) When you dial, it will take 10 seconds to go through enum lookups 
and the like before finally hitting the PSTN gateway.

Oh yeah, about RedHat...  Don't bother with it's sister CentOS either. 
I tested it here in the lab, and it was like getting in a time machine 
and going back to 2007.   Also, Centos is busted.  You'll find that 
Linux kernel will re-transmit IP packets from processes long since dead. 
  Suffice it to say, when it does this to RTP traffic it drives things 
bugnutz. (Ed. His test was to run 20mbit/sec through centos with a 
gigabit card overnight and it dropped 150 packets.  He did try different 
cards.)

Mandrake - recommend this to people you dislike.  If they're ignorant 
enough you'll find them thanking you for it.

Debian - almost awesome, but if failed miserably in the lab with packet 
shaping.  I mean, it thought it was working, but the overall quality was 
hit & miss.  Other than that, no complaints.  What was really attractive 
was it's got Cyrus 2.3 out of the box, so if you're using Cyrus and not 
using it for packet shaping you might consider Debian an option.  Be 
advised, since it flunked packet shaping we never bothered to 
compile/test freeswitch on it, so do your own research.

Ubuntu, make no mistake...
We tested Ubuntu pretty heavily here in the lab.
Even the packet shaping works (HTB & SFQ).
With Suse I has to custom-compile the kernel, and packet shaping ONLY 
worked with 2.6.28.8 - 2.6.28.10, the rest were buggy and the problems 
manifested themselves in ways that you'd think would be totally 
unrelated.  I should be more specific and state x86_64 multi-core. 
x86_64 single core seemed to do packet shaping (somewhat nicely) in 
2.6.18 on up.  Previous to that it was rather "interesting"...

Save yourself the headache and go with Ubuntu.

==================================




Brian West wrote:
> He's on the list Karl J. Vesterling
> 
> /b
> 
> On Jan 7, 2010, at 7:05 PM, Bill W. wrote:
> 
>> Wow, I haven't heard of these issues.  Obviously this concerns me.  Are
>> these documented anywhere so I can research this?  How do I get in touch
>> with KJV?
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Bill
>>
>>
>>
>> Brian West wrote:
>>> Good luck with that you'll have an ass load of problems.  The reason its stable is the backports and outdated packages.  Bleeding edge will only screw you over... just ask KJV... He was on OpenSuSE and had nothing but weird problems.
>>>
>>>
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