[VoIP] Cisco 3810, Linksys Router and Call Data Records

[John Novack]

Here's a variation on a theme:

My 3810 has been working for a couple of months now and I am very impressed.  The sound quality is much better than anything obtained with the "PC based" FXS and FXO boards.  Outbound and inbound signalling have been flawless and it sits nicely in the equipment rack under the polar relay test panel.

Once I got the 3810 running, there was absolutely no need to host any IO in the Asterisk processor.  Having found out about an alternative Asterisk platform from Mr. Jones, I figured it was time to get rid of the PC completely and conserve power.  The Linksys router (a WRTSL54GS) has just enough space to run a minimal version of Linux and Asterisk.  The best part about the WRTSL54GS is that it has a USB port which allows for the use of a flash memory to hold all the sound files and logs.  (With no moving parts!)  I believe the entire power requirement is a measly 5 watts.

To address several operating problems, I upgraded the Linux to the latest version they had for the router as well as Asterisk to 1.4.  Unfortunately, 1.4 just doesn't stream audio data as well as a larger processor so I eventually went back to 1.2 with better results.  (The operating problems eventually turned out to be related to other issues, since resolved, that had nothing to do with the Linux or Asterisk versions.)  As a basic switch, it works fine.  There is no voice mail to speak of and the lack of an internal Zaptel timer limits a few other functions that I don't use.

This all leads to one question:

There is absolutely no more room to install anything so I can't install a PHP server or any database software.  All the CDR viewers I find need PHP and MySQL installed on the server to work.  Does anyone know of something that would run on a Windows machine and simply read the shared CDR file that "lives" on the Asterisk box?

PDW