// Digium's Pound Key Version 1.2.1 Reviewed
//
// by natas
//
// http://www.oldskoolphreak.com

10/02/06

After testing out Trixbox I found out that Digium had started releasing
its own Linux distribution through rPath, a company who specializes in
customized Linux distributions for particular applications. I decided to
give the distro a try and see what I thought of it. So I ended up
downloading the Pound Key 1.2.1 ISO which contains packages from the 1.4
beta branch.

Installation was a breeze. I basically just clicked next a few times,
because there really weren't many necessary changes or customizations to
make. The distro only includes Apache, Asterisk, development tools,
editors, networking tools, MySQL, ODBC, and supposedly PostgreSQL. Though
the installation process by default uses a GUI, there is no GUI installed
with the system. The installation only required about 950 MB of space on my
hard drive, which is considerably minimal nowadays. 

Once my installation was completed I reboot and started wandering around
the system seeing what I could find. The first thing I started check for
were config files and was a little bit confused because I couldn't actually
find PostgreSQL's config files. I definitely chose PostgreSQL to be
installed during the installation and I even went back and installed
everything again, but still the PostgreSQL server was nowhere to be found.
The "psql" command line client was installed, but no server. Maybe I'm a
complete noob but I could not find an instance of the server or its
necessary config files anywhere.

Since I couldn't get a PostgreSQL server going I moved on to MySQL. I
opened up the my.cnf config file and noticed that it was almost bare! I've
never seen such a short MySQL config file, so this was obviously customized
for this distribution. Also it should be noted that MySQL wasn't started
after booting up the machine. The only services that were started for me
were sshd, postfix, and zaptel. This makes me feel that Pound Key provides
a good starting point for a fairly secure operating system for Asterisk.
It's no hardened Linux distro, but it does a good job of keeping
unnecessary software and services off your server. 

At this point I started to feel that Pound Key is essentially the complete
opposite of Trixbox. Trixbox had so many extra packages, services, and
GUI's that I didn't want, along with extra long config files, yet Pound Key
is very minimal. Possibly too minimal though since my PostgreSQL server was
never actually installed!

I realized that I had no idea how to add extra packages or update existing
packages after a while. Since rPath seems to use a modified version of Red
Hat I started looking around for yum or up2date but they weren't there.
Well it turns out that rPath uses something called conary for its package
management. I took a look at the brief help output and then the man file
and was a little bit confused. Maybe its because I'm so used to yum,
up2date, and emerge, but I don't really like conary at this point. Maybe I
haven't given it enough of a chance yet, since I barely understand it, but
I'm not really that impressed with it. If all you want to do is update your
system them "conary updateall" seems to be simple enough. However, I was
trying to install nmap by doing "conary emerge nmap" and ran into some
dependency problems that I didn't know how to get past.

Since this is a distribution based around Asterisk I started playing around
with Asterisk next. Everything seemed great and there really wasn't much to
worry about with Asterisk. All the config files and folders were where I
expected them to be and everything ran smoothly using static config files.
I didn't have the time to go through the process of setting up ARA (the
Asterisk Realtime Architecture) with MySQL or anything like that, but I
didn't see any reason why it wouldn't go smoothly with this distro.

After a few hours of use I found myself thinking that a rather minimal
installation of Red Hat Enterprise or Cent OS would be as good of a choice
for a dedicated Asterisk PBX. I would personally prefer the package
management programs included on those distributions instead of conary.

Pound Key is still in the very early stages from Digium, so they have a lot
of time to improve upon their distro. I've heard that in the future the
upcoming Asterisk GUI from Digium will be included, so that will be an
awesome addition if it's as nice as I hear it is. Also it's important to
remember that no ones forcing you to use this distribution of Linux to run
Asterisk, so once again it all comes down to personal preference of what
you're comfortable with and what will work for your business. 

I feel like Pound Key provides a simple, yet solid, foundation to begin
with for a computer dedicated to running Asterisk.