Took the plunge today to update my asterisk server. I’ve been using asterisk for about 5 years now and am pretty adept and manipulating its cryptic configuration files but I wanted to move to more of an appliance. I decided to give Elastix a try.
These days I virtualise all my boxes on a VMware Server environment. I got Elastix installed with no problems but then I wanted to get VMware Tools installed. This gives you better network drivers and make sure your clock stays in sync.
Since this requires you to compile some kernel modules you need to have the kernel-devel package installed so you can compile against your current kernel. This would normally be a simple matter of
yum install kernel-devel
However this seemed to do nothing. After a fair bit of investigation I worked out that Elastix ship there own kernel and modules for some asterisk specific hardware like zaptel and rhino. To make sure you don’t use the CentOS kernel they disable that package from that repository.
If you don’t particularly need the Elastix kernel (I don’t since this system will be pure VoIP) you can renable the CentOS modules by editing /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and commenting out ball the lines that look like
exclude=kernel*
Update: So it seems that this means that I won’t get the ztdummy module. This module uses the USB chipset to provide timing for some asterisk related things like the multi user conference module. I don’t really use this at the moment it’s not a big deal but I may have to roll my own kernel RPMs later down the track.