I’ve been playing around with various voip technologies, including Trixbox Trixbox CE is the sucessor to Asterisk @ Home run by Fonality, who’s CEO, Chris Lyman is a long-time friend since the Virtualis days in the 90’s. I’ve also been working a LOT with Amazon’s web services, especially EC2, S3, SQS and SimpleDB.
One cool thing I found is that it is trivial to get Trixbox running on EC2. Here’s what you do:
1) download the latest vmware version of Trixbox CE from: http://www.trixbox.org/downloads
2) boot up in the player
3) install the EC2 tools
4) bundle the volume
After a couple of hours you should have a fully functioning AMI you can then boot-up on EC2 with Trixbox CE ready to rock.
Don’t forget to use EC2 to open up the appropriate ports.
I’m considering making a paid AMI for those people who want to play with it without taking the time to create their own - and to play around with Amazon FPS to boot.
7 comments ↓
Interesting. When you say, “boot up in the player”, do you mean that there is an EC2 with vmware player?
Mark — I see that sentence could be confusing. No, there’s no vmware player for ec2 AMI’s that I am aware of.
An intriguing concept though, I wonder how hard they would be convert? They are both pretty much file systems with some meta-data.
What I meant above is that you need to run the vmware verson of trixbox ce on your local machine using the vmware player or vmware workstation.
Once that’s running, it’s simply a matter of installing the vmware tools and running ec2-bundle-vol, ec2-upload-bundle and then ec2-register.
After waiting hours for the upload (my upload speed is sloooow), I can use elasticfox to run the AMI, and it boots right up.
P.S: the root password for the image is “trixbox”. i had trouble finding that on the trixbox site.
[...] I’ve decided to go ahead and release the Trixbox CE AMI I created on EC2, as described in this post. [...]
Here is another tutorial for getting started with the Amazon AMI - http://www.searchblox.com/tutorial/sb_amazon_demo/sb_amazon_demo.htm
tss - great tutorial, the process is exactly the same for the Trixbox ec2 AMI, except you’ll use the “ec2image/image-trixbox1.intelliforge.net-manifest.xml” as the AMI you want run.
Dear Nick,
Thanks for your post it is very good to know that it i s possible to run trixbox in our EC2 instance. But can you please tell me that:
what should i do to have a IP-PBX running in my ec2 instance, i want interactions with S3 and SimpleDB with that IP-PBX i.e., asterisk or any other thing.
Can you give me some focus on this then it will be very helpful for me.
Thanks in advance.
Auro - there isn’t anything specific to a PBX that needs or natively uses S3 / SimpleDB. You could write your own modules …
I use S3 to store pre-recorded voice files (or did, until the 8 hour outage last week), and SimpleDB could be used instead of MySQL for some things (I’ve been playing around with keeping the call logs there …) .
Your best bet would be to get Asterisk (or FreeSwitch) running, and then just start setting things up … eventually they become to come clear.
Do you have a specific use for S3 / SDB in mind?
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