Has anyone tried to run Asterisk or other services on the Alix, Raspberry, or Beagle platforms on their HSMM networks? With so many cheap low power platforms out there, we may have a flood of possibilities.  Also, is there a standardized format for making services such as IRC, and filesharing available? I was thinking it would be nice to have formatted editable PDFs ready to be filled out for documenting disasters. If anyone can point me toward the right documentation, I would love to check it out.

Well, I tried editing my post and it didn't update it, and when I pressed back, I lost what I wrote. With that said........

I have been able to install Asterisk to both an HSMM-MESH node and have it up in running right now (not from node-to-node yet) and also on the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi method is a lot more user friendly than editing configuration files on the HSMM-MESH node. Also, I have installed an email server to the Raspberry Pi as well.

My first finding: Asterisk on the Raspberry Pi works.   However, by using the Raspberry Pi with Asterisk + FreePBX, my calls are currently getting dropped after 10 minutes of operation. I am looking into this issue and have a solution that I will be trying out later today. When I am dialing an extension number, it does take a couple seconds to process and connect. The delay between when the person speaks and the other phone outputting the audio is about 0.5 seconds. Also, with this setup, the Raspberry Pi at max is only using at max ~60% of it's processing power. I have noticed that the WebGUI shows the Raspberry Pi idling most of the time, but that's not a problem.  I would much prefer taking the Pi out of the picture, but if you would like a webGUI interface, than that is the way to go.

As for an e-mail server, it is easy to setup on the Raspberry Pi and works just fine. I used SquirrelMail. When you access the e-mail server, it will appear to not be doing anything when you click on any link, but if you wait, it takes you to that page and functions just fine.  Typical delay is about a second.

I had a friend setup their computer as a TeamSpeak server (Computer-to-Computer VoIP), and that works perfectly fine over the HSMM-MESH network. You might want to check into that too.

Anything else that you would like to know about?

It looks like it's more work than what it's worth at this point in time.  I have not done it yet, but from first looks and thinking about it, trying to interface a newer build of openwrt with an older build seems like it can create problems.

My unofficial opinion would be to wait until a newer version of HSMM-MESH is released that runs off of the Backfire or (if we can get there) Attitude Adjustment release.  I'm not saying that it cannot be done, it just looks like it's still in the development stages.

Just saw this on the Raspberry Pi site:

...the good folks at Elastix, the open-source unified communications outfit, have developed a new version of Elastix 32 bits, called μElastix, and ported it to the Raspberry Pi.

Yes, it is possible. I have done it. I found it to be a little slow in loading pages. Ultimately, I wanted something that was 100% self-contained. So that's why I went with Asterisk on the node. I also have a web config page setup on the HSMM-MESH node so I can go in and change asterisk settings on the fly without having to ssh into the node.

That is correct. I wanted only VoIP service that could be configured by SSHing into the node or through a simple webpage I have setup on my HSMM-MESH node. Due to the limited memory on the WRT54GS' we cannot have a full range of apps that a raspberry pi could have.

As for page lagging from the RPi? I feel like it's something internal with the RPi. Sometimes it would display other times it would timeout. From my experience, it seemed to stem from Apache and PHP.