On Monday 05 September 2005 17:04, Jim Van Meggelen wrote: > I had heard that Digium is not too far off from their replacement of the > TDM400, either. It's all vapourware, at least from an official > standpoint, but I'd still advise a short wait, because some of these > clouds will coalese . . .
I hadn't heard anything about a successor to the TDM for low-density POTS interface... aside from perhaps something to get rid of that god-forsaken TJ320 PCI interface. > Well, in retrospect it probably was a bit of a low blow, but I don't > know many people that trust those cards, and I *do* have to reboot my > system once per week. If those cards are as trouble-free as you are > suggesting, I'd say the PR folks had better get on it! Why do you have to reboot your system once a week? What's causing it? Have you taken it up with Digium? What rev of TDM card? I'm genuinely curious... I've *never* had those kinds of issues, and the rollover bug which plagued the FXO interfaces going "dead" every 28ish days has been squashed for a while. > Well, the thing is: knowing what the problem is (or where the fault > lies) does not make it tolerable. I have never heard that multiple > TDM400 cards are 100% guaranteed to work. For a mission-critical phone > system, does that not need to be considered? Funny story: I have an off-lease Dell system with a Sangoma S518 ADSL PCI card and an A101u. I got weird chirping issues on the T1 ports until I swapped out the A101u for a T100P. Yep, Sangoma's two cards were incompatible, but the marginal T100P had no such issues. Now granted the S518 is just an OEM'd Globespan design but still... I guess the point I'm trying to make is that you test and retest until you're confortable saying "yep, this will work." It's the same no matter what you use. > But if you want cheap, "good enough" gear, why not just buy a low-end > Dell? Save a lot of research and shopping around, that would. Because Dells are even weirder and (IMO) more of a crapshoot than the cheap vendors such as MSI and ECS. There have been many reports of hardware "sort of" working with Dell gear, especially the older stuff you'd find on dfsdirect.ca or the dozens of off-lease cheap Dells. > I'll grant you that I'm proposing twice the cost for a 10-25% > improvement in reliability. Still, I would never cheap out on a power > supply - especially in an analog-based PBX; quality RAM does make a > difference; and why cheap out on the MoBo? As for the Seagate drives, > silence is golden. I dunno, a cheapass power supply not capable of meeting its ratings will be piss-poor anywhere. The power requirements for the TDM card are grossly overstated but they're done that way to try and prevent people from stuffing a no-name $15 "400W" PSU in the system and wondering why it spontaneously reboots every 5th call. So long as the RAM meets its timings it's good in my books; that is, if it passes the first 10 minutes of memtest86's default test I consider it good. Silence? Where are you putting these? I've got RAID arrays in the server room louder than anything * will generate. :-) > Having spare parts on the shelf is reassuring, but having a system that > will go the distance is far more reassuring. Oh, totally, totally agreed. > Well, when it comes to custom-building PCs, everyone has their own ideas > about what is worth paying extra for. Yup. I wouldn't mind using AMD... it's cheaper, runs cooler and in theory should work exactly the same, but I've never gotten good echo cancellation out of them. I don't know if gcc's just having a time trying to write good code for it or there are nastier things (odd timings, etc., although that would be VERY hard to accept) but it's just never worked well for me. I've always had a few old P3 intel boards around so it's never been much of an issue for me. :-) -A.
