Contents

1 Getting Started
1.1 Opening Firewall Ports
1.1.1 SIP
1.1.2 RTP
1.1.3 Additional EC2 NAT Notes

1.2 Sofia External IP Config
1.3 Updating Kernel Timer to 1000HZ

2 FAQ
2.1 Q: What distro should I use?
2.2 Q: Are there any public AMI images with FreeSWITCH
pre-installed?

2.3 Q: Can I run this as a production switch?

3 External Links
Getting Started
There is not much difference between running on Amazon Elastic Cloud than any other Linux server, but here
are a few things to keep in mind.
Opening Firewall Ports
SIP
ec2-authorize default -P udp -p 5060
RTP
ec2-authorize default -P udp -p 16384-32768
The RTP port range given should match your configuration in switch.conf.xml.
Additional EC2 NAT Notes
For SIP, setup a security group with the following ports enabled (easiest to do with Elasticfox):
udp 16384:32768
udp 4569
udp 5060
tcp 5060
udp 5080
tcp 5080
tcp 8000
udp 8000
Amazon_EC2
Contents 1
Make sure you make the security group, and apply it before you boot the instance. After this, the quick and
dirty install guide worked just fine for me. You'll just need to tweak the default dialplan to your needs.
You may also need to make some of the following changes, particularly the external sip and RTP IPs (for
which you will need to create an Elastic IP and attach it to your Instance.)
conf/vars.xml
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="bind_server_ip=<AWS EIP>"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="external_rtp_ip=<AWS EIP>"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="external_sip_ip=<AWS EIP>"/>
conf/sip_profiles/internal.xml
<param name="aggressive-nat-detection" value="true"/>
<param name="multiple-registrations" value="true"/>
<param name="ext-rtp-ip" value="$${external_rtp_ip}"/>
<param name="ext-sip-ip" value="$${external_sip_ip}"/>
<param name="NDLB-received-in-nat-reg-contact" value="true"/>
<param name="NDLB-force-rport" value="true"/>
<param name="NDLB-broken-auth-hash" value="true"/>
<param name="enable-timer" value="false"/>
<param name="auth-calls" value="true"/>
conf/sip_profiles/external.xml
<param name="aggressive-nat-detection" value="true"/>
<param name="ext-rtp-ip" value="$${external_rtp_ip}"/>
<param name="ext-sip-ip" value="$${external_sip_ip}"/>
<param name="NDLB-force-rport" value="true"/>
conf/autoload/switch.conf.xml
<param name="rtp-start-port" value="16384"/>
<param name="rtp-end-port" value="32768"/>
Sofia External IP Config
You shouldn't have to make any changes to the Sofia profile. The FreeSWITCH Auto NAT feature will take
care of this automatically. However, if you want to do this manually, edit the sip_profiles/internal.xml file and
replace auto-nat with the external IP address in the ext-rtp-ip and ext-sip-ip parameters.
Updating Kernel Timer to 1000HZ
If using Ubuntu on EC2 (and elsewhere) the kernel timer is by default set to 100HZ or 250HZ which will lead
to worse call-quality. You can use the following steps to change this setting and recompile the kernel. (These
were used on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04, but should work for newer versions too.)
#Shows the current kernel timer settings:
cat /boot/config-`uname -r` | grep HZ
#Add multiverse to your sources if it isn't already
Amazon_EC2
Additional EC2 NAT Notes 2
aptitude -y build-dep linux-image-$(uname -r)
aptitude -y install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev libelf-dev asciidoc binutils-dev kernel-package crash kexec-tools makedumpfile kernel-wedge git-core
cd /usr/src
# This is 700mb so it takes a while to download and set up
git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-lucid.git
cd ubuntu*
git checkout --track -b ec2 origin/ec2
fakeroot debian/rules clean
fakeroot debian/rules editconfigs
#Choose: yes for amd64 -> Processor type and features -> Timer frequency -> change to 1000HZ (change to something else first if neccessary) -> Exit -> Exit -> Yes (Save) -> repeat for i386
# this takes about 40min on a large instance
fakeroot debian/rules binary
#check an image deb file was created
cd ..
ls *.deb
#Install
dpkg -i linux-*.deb
#Reboot instance
cat /boot/config-`uname -r` | grep HZ
# If not changed, then edit (towards the end of) /boot/grub/menu.lst replacing the current kernel file with the new /boot/vmlinuz-* file, then reboot and test again
If you need more help then the #ubuntu-kernel IRC channel is the best place to ask, also read these pages: [1]
[2] [3] [4]
FAQ
Q: What distro should I use?
Its up to you! However, some recommend CentOS.
Q: Are there any public AMI images with FreeSWITCH pre-installed?
As of September 3, 2008, running
ec2-describe-images -x all | grep freeswitch
from the Amazon cloud command line utility yields:
IMAGE ami-999672f0 freeswitch-fedora-6-svn-rev-9178/image.manifest.xml 811137716590 available public x86_64 machine
IMAGE ami-1be30672 rbuilder-online/freeswitch-0.0.1-x86_11952.img.manifest.xml 099034111737 available public i386 machine
Amazon_EC2
Updating Kernel Timer to 1000HZ 3
IMAGE ami-dae306b3 rbuilder-online/freeswitch-0.0.1-x86_11963.img.manifest.xml 099034111737 available public i386 machine
NOTE: These are very old versions of FreeSWITCH. Your best bet will be to checkout the latest FS trunk
and build a fresh copy on your EC2 instance.
There's a more updated AMI available on EU region: foneAPI-generic-32bit-freeswitch-v1 (works very
good on High-CPU Medium Instance - c1.medium)
Q: Can I run this as a production switch?
A small instance is not recommended for running FreeSWITCH in production, however you should be happy
with a High CPU Medium instance.
Experiences:
From Cfurmori in May 2009: I wouldn't recommend running FreeSWITCH in production on Amazon
EC2. I purchased a 1 year instance of a small server setup and used a base CentOS 5.3 image 32-bit
x86. Built FreeSWITCH from the latest snapshot and it worked great for dev and testing purposes but
the call quality was pretty bad at times. I spent a fair amount of time tuning / testing / watching
resource utilizations running a 4 person conference and I would see an average of 0.5 to 1.0 second
audio delay. I tried with direct SIP phone registrations and through a SIP trunk provider, same results.
EC2 is a great dev/test platform but I would say your best to run a realtime voice application on a
physical server. You can virtualize voice systems but they need to be designed and engineered by
someone that knows what they are doing.

A mailing list user said in March 2010: "We run FreeSWITCH on AWS' EC2. A medium EC2
instance is happily supporting 100 Polycom users, conference bridges etc. Been running for over a
year. We also use FlowRoute as our PSTN->SIP Interface, and also Skype Business SIP. Our users
are scattered across the globe - so having the box sitting on AWS' network infrastructure is key to
avoiding issues with latency, jitter, packet loss (i.e. I don't think we could afford the connectivity
AWS gives us if we had to provision this in-house)."

External Links
Amazon EC2 subwiki - Getting started guide and links to documentation.
Amazon_EC2
Q: Are there any public AMI images with FreeSWITCH pre-installed? 4