System information

Choose your language and make a keyboard selection.
*
If you’re in North America, you
will probably just select the defaults.
If you’ve previously formatted your hard drive, you will be asked to initialize the drive,
which will erase all data. Select Yes .
The installer will ask if you want to remove the existing partitioning scheme and create
a new one. Select Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout. If a
more appropriate option exists, select that instead. In the drive window, verify that the
correct disk drive is selected. (Pressing Tab
will cycle through the selections on the
screen.) Once the drive window is selected, you can scroll up and down (presuming
you have multiple drives) and select which hard drive you wish to install to. Toggle the
selections by pressing space bar
. Verify that the correct drive is selected, press Tab
until the OK button is highlighted, and press Enter .
A message confirming that you want to remove all Linux partitions and create the new
partition scheme will be presented. Select Yes
.
You will be asked to review the partitioning layout. Feel free to modify the partition
scheme if you prefer something different (see the following sidebar for some advice on
this); however, the default answer No
is fine for light production use where storage
requirements will be low.
†
Separating the /var Mount Point to Its Own Partition
On a system dedicated to Asterisk, the directory with the largest storage requirement
is /var. This is where Asterisk will store recordings, voicemails, log files, prompts, and
a myriad of constantly growing information. In normal operation, it is unlikely that
Asterisk will fill the hard disk. However, if you have extensive logging turned on or are
recording all calls, this could, in theory, occur. (This is likely to happen several months
after you’ve completed the install and to take your entire staff by surprise.)
If the drive the operating system is mounted on fills up, there is the potential for a kernel
panic. By separating /var from the rest of the hard drive, you significantly lower the risk
of a system failure.
Having a full volume is still a major problem; however, you will at
least be able to log into the system to rectify the situation.
* Bear in mind that Asterisk is developed using the US keyboard and language, and we’re not aware of any
testing having been done on anything other than US English.
† Due to the ever-increasing size of hard drives, capacity is becoming less of a problem. A system with a
1 terabyte drive can store somewhere in the range of 2 million minutes of telephony-quality recordings.
36 | Chapter 3: Installing Asterisk