Hello,
Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists wrote:
On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:28:46 -0300, Jorge Merlino <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We have had some issues with irq losses with more than three cards in the same PCI bus. What exactly did you tuned to make it work fine with 5 cards?
Get yourself an old PowerMac from the junk yard or a second hand store, ie a PM 9500 (ca.1997), install LinuxPPC, ie Yellow Dog Linux, aka YDL (= Red Hat for PPC) and you can use 5 or 6 Zaptel cards without any problems. Macs don't have interrupt issues.
The PM 9000 series and the PM 8600 all have PCI. Be careful though not to buy a PM 8100. The PM 8100 had the same case, so it looks just like any 9xxx, but it didn't have PCI.
Depending on where you are, you can expect to pay anywhere between 0 and 200 bucks for a PM 9xxx. For more info on those vintage Macs see http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/index.html
Benjamin is right. I follow his advice and our small PBX now runs much better under a Powermac.
For example, I was not able to reliably send nor receive faxes using Sipuras-Asterisk-FXO using cheap intel/amd hardware. Now with a powermac and the exact same configuration I can.
I was not able to establish a modem data connection. Now its possible (slow but it works).
Someone said a few days ago that faxing is not possible with IAXy. I did not try, but maybe its not IAXy fault, maybe is the hardware where Asterisk is running. I'll bet that I can send/receive faxes with the IAXy under a PPC or quality hardware.
IMHO, many of the problems some people are experiencing with echo/faxes, are due to the variable quality of PC hardware, chipsets, pci bus, mobo, etc. There are too many variables -hardware wise- to take into account. To say that a pentium III is sufficient to run a small asterisk pbx its not enough. Its not the processor the only factor to have a good telephony experience.
My next experiment will be to try spandsp. Under intel I could receive faxes with variable success (one of four faxes came out bad). I'm sure that now under PPC it will be much better. To make this post -dev related: I have to remove some code from spandsp to make it work under PPC. I will try to make it compile cleanly with ifdefs and submit the changes to Steve Underwood when I have time.
Just my 2c.
-- Nicolas Gudino House Internet S.R.L. Buenos Aires - Argentina _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-dev To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-dev
