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