On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Olivier Krief wrote: > 2006/3/31, Armin Schindler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > Yes, this is possible of course with the Eicon Diva Server PRI (T1) card. > > This card provides a CAPI interface where you can connect Asterisk(with > > chan-capi) and any other CAPI based application like Hylafax. > > > > You can e.g. configure chan-capi to use 20 channels and the remaining > > channels configured in Hylafax. > > When you use a Eicon Diva Server with DSPs on board, you don't need to > > worry > > about CPU power, because fax-receive is done on the DIVA card. > > So you don't need to 'bridge' something here, it just works. > > > > Armin > > > Armin, > > Do you mean you could dynamically share E1/T1 channels between Asterisk and > Hylafax applications ?
Yes, CAPI provides all available controllers (ports) and its channels to every application at the same time. > For example, for each incoming call to a given fax number, Capi driver would > trigger Hylafax software to process incoming fax and at the same time, > Asterisk software would be smart enough to use other channels for outgoing > calls ? Yes, via the CAPI interface you don't reference a real b-channel, this is done by the driver of the ISDN card which provides the CAPI interface. Using CAPI, the applications can (and have to) decide which calls they want to get signaled or which are ignored when they are meant for another service. E.g. the following example is not possible with CAPI: You have one number (and the same BC) for two services assigned. If you are using one application, which can switch to another server by some rule, then it is okay. But two applications must be configured to serve the own numbers/services only. Another thing is, the application does not know about busy channels. This means if you have a 23 channel line and 10 lines are busy with hylafax at the moment, then chan-capi (or another application) can use 13 channels only, of course. So if you have configured chan-capi with e.g. 15 channels to use, chan-capi will just return 'busy : no circuit/channel available'. But this is all configuration stuff and when configured correctly, it works very good. There are even more capabilities. For example Eicon is doing a lot. Their Diva Server cards do provide a RTP interface via CAPI (new chan-capi will support this). Which means coding and anti-jitterbuffer is done on the ISDN card, chan-capi just 'pushes' the RTP packets onto the card... With rcapid and a patched version of the libcapi.so, you can even have the ISDN hardware on one server and the applications on other servers connected via CAPIoverTCP (bintec protocol in that case). I use this because my faxing application (just the capifaxrecvd) runs on my local maschine instead of the ISDN/Asterisk/Gateway server. > If this understanding is correct, what is the downside ? > Why don't everybody use chan-capi ? CAPI comes originally from the Windows world, but is a common ISDN API standard www.capi.org. So if there would be CAPI drivers for all of these ISDN cards, you can use CAPI (chan-capi). So the missing part is the card-driver. Currently I know of three CAPI based hardware: 1) Eicon Diva Server (all cards including analog ports) with full CAPI 2.0 and VoIP/T.38 extensions. 2) AVM (basic CAPI 2.0) 3) mISDN driver for passive cards (hscx/hfc/...) and on BSD with i4b! Armin (www.chan-capi.org ;-) _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
