Ok, I admit it, the topic sounds ultra geeky and nurdy – but I can’t help it, there is something about booting up your computer from a USB pen drive, having all your nicely wrapped tools in there and having fun with it.

In this case, my pen drive is actually the driving force behind an extremely powerful call recording system, based on the Asterisk Open Source PBX system. Essentially, the Cruzer boots up a CentOS 5.1 system, fully equipped with an Asterisk + Zaptel + LibPRI + FreePBX. The system is configured to utilize up to 12 E1 circuits, with auto sensing scripts that will automatically configure your system upon first boot-up. Once the system had booted up, it will start identifying your hardware hard drives, and will start cataloging to these hard drives all the recordings according to the pre-determined logic.

I currently use a MySQL database on the Pen Drive to store catalog information only, which is working nicely – but I need to figure out a better way to store more information – 2GB of MySQL storage may be enough for a short while, but serving a large contact center won’t be much of a good idea – I think.

The Pen Drive was created using tools from www.pendrivelinux.com, which contains wonderful information about how to create your own custom Linux based Pen Drive – Excellent!