On Jan 25, 2007, at 5:38 PM, Leif Neland wrote:
A Grandstream GXW-4108 with 8FXO cost $400, almost the same as a TDM404B fully populated 4FXO card.
I'm currently testing a GXW-4108... my verdict is still out. I've had some problems, some minor, some major.
In the minor department, it does not always reboot when instructed to via the web interface. I think I've tracked it to the reboot button on a regular screen is ignored, but the reboot from the post update screen goes thru. This is likely a minor bug in the firmware.
Next into the minor-ish... the documentation isn't great. It it written assuming you know a lot more about this stuff than I did when I started. The more I've played and learned, when I go back and reread parts of the docs, they then make more sense to me.
Heading into the not so minor, but not really major... the logging sucks. It only supports a syslog server, which isn't a huge deal, but having a web interface to read the logs would have been nice. But, the logging doesn't seem to give much info (even in Debug mode), and seems to randomly stop working entirely. Sometimes it will start again when you power cycle the unit (not just a software reboot, but physically turn it off and back on), other times it needs to be defaulted to factory settings to get the logging going again, which is totally unacceptable.
Also in the not so minor category, there doesn't appear to be any easy way of backing up the config files. When it polls the tftp server on boot, it does look for a config file, but since there doesn't appear to be any way to save one out of the unit, and no documentation or otherwise (that I've found) to create one from scratch... it makes it very difficult to save settings and then easily restore them.
And then into the potentially major catagory... I've run into a problem that I *think* I've tracked to the unit doesn't recognize the dial-tone issued by my PSTN provider (Verizon). It works inbound and outbound just fine at my house, where it is connected to a LinkSys PAP that interfaces with Verizon's VoiceWing service. But when I move it to a real POTS line, it works inbound, but outbound single stage dialing stalls. This is a problem that I only just identified last night, and have been working on it today and as I said I *think* it may be that it isn't accepting the dial-tone. There is an option to ignore the dial-tone and not wait, but I haven't tested that yet (at 3am I gave up at the office I was connecting it to and brought it back to my house where it promptly started working again... I'm hoping to retest on POTS tonight or tomorrow).
All of the above are probably fixable via a firmware update. I'm currently running the latest that Grandstream has on their web site, but I have not yet contacted them to see if they have a newer "beta" version available that hasn't been publicly posted. My guess is, all the issues will be worked out in due time.
With the only show stopper appearing to be the dial-tone issue (or whatever is causing it to fail on the POTS lines), it may be a good buy if you can either verify that it works with your PSTN provider first, or have the ability to return it if it doesn't (in my case, I could probably return it to the dealer, but A: it has been over a month since I bought it, and B: I'm not done playing with it to see what might or might not be wrong, and since for me price is the single most important factor, I'm willing to keep at this one to see if I can get it all working correctly.)
-chris <www.mythtech.net> _______________________________________________ --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
