Quickstart

This document details the steps needed to get your x164 switch started.

Preface

The x164 softswitch is based on yate. The softswitch can be installed on the servers of the x164 customer or is hosted by x164 in the datacenter.

We recommend to install the softswitch as a OpenVZ virtual machine. OpenVZ offers near-bare-metal performance. The advantage of virtualization are: Easy backups, easy migration to different hardware in case of failures or hardware upgrades. x164 provides a OpenVZ template for download which is a ready-configured softswitch.

Softswitch installation

Installing a Linux distribution

Use of Debian Squeeze is recommended for its stability, but you can use other Linux distributions as you wish. You can look for the proper option for your machine here. Installation guides are also available for the different supported architectures here.

This website offers a screenshot based tutorial that explains how to make a bare-bones installation without a graphical desktop environment. We suggest to create a separate partition /vz to store the virtual machines, as for example in the following scheme.

Disk partitioning

The recommended partition scheme is the following:

Partition	Size	File system	Comments
/boot	500 MB	ext2
swap	~	swap	Size should be the same as RAM
/	20 GB	ext4
/vz	remaining disk space	ext4	OpenVZ virtual machines will be installed in this partition

It is encouraged that you follow the order shown in the table when partitioning.

Updating and upgrading

After completing the installation you should run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This ensures you have the latest version of the installed packages.

SSH

If you want to work on your server remotely from a remote client, it is recommended to use a Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. First you need to install an implementation of SSH like OpenSSH. Type the following command:

apt-get install openssh-server

Now you can open the terminal on your client and type the following to log in the host machine:

ssh [hostname]@[ipAdress]

It will ask you for the hostname's password. From now on you can continue working from your client machine. To log out simply type

logout

For further information on the OpenSSH project, please refer to their website.

Midnight Commander

We recommend using a visual file manager like Midnight Commander (mc) to make working with the command line easier. To install it in your server enter this command:

apt-get install mc

You can find more information about mc in [1]

Webmin installation

It is recommended that you use Webmin to easily configure your softswitch. First you need to run the following command to avoid dependency issues

apt-get install perl libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl apt-show-versions python

Then you can download webmin

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.590_all.deb

and install it

dpkg --install webmin_1.590_all.deb

OpenVZ Installation

Installation for Debian systems is detailed in the OpenVZ website. You can also find the instructions for other operating systems here.

Start OpenVZ

/etc/init.d/vz start

Softswitch template installation

To download the softswitch template just run the following command:

wget http://www.x164.com/index.php/download-and-install

and create and start the softswitch container.

vzctl create [CTID] --ostemplate nameOfTemplate 
vzctl start [CTID] 

Here you can find some of the basic operations needed to work with your container.