[Asterisk-Dev] X100P question

[Nicolas Gudino]

Hello,

Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:28:46 -0300, Jorge Merlino <jorge at teledata.com.uy> 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